As a kitchen-appliance junkie, Bill Troop has fallen for more high-tech toys than Inspector Gadget. You name it, he’s owned it: a French food processor, a German coffee maker, an American vegetable peeler, a Japanese sesame-seed grinder.
So what are the cutting edge tools in Troop’s current collection? A set of mortars and pestles, a hand grater, a boning knife and a pair of goggles for chopping onions.
“We’ve been seeing manufacturers desperate to come up with new things that don’t work,” says Troop, a typeface designer in Amagansett, N.Y. “The machines are tiresome to set up, prep and clean.”
Home cooks, unplug your appliances. The coolest culinary statement these days is the low-tech kitchen. Some of its, components are items even your grandma’s mama would recognize: the hand-cranked food mill, the mezzaluna (a half-moon-shaped knife) and the tomato press. Inspired by the exploding cult of haute cuisine, nostalgia for simpler times and the chefs they see on television cooking shows, intrepid home chefs are chopping, grinding, slicing and dicing by hand.
“The best cooks don’t have kitchens full of electronics,” says Judith Moore, a Hampton, Va., computer programmer who loves to cook “If you don’t know how to cook, a $500 pot isn’t going to help.”
Low-tech gastronomes are revolutionizing the kitchen-appliance market. According to surveys by the National Housewares Manufacturers Association in Rosemont, sales of non-electric kitchen tools soared to $7.25 billion in 1998, up from $2.6 billion in 1994. We’re not just talking spatulas and whisks. Fante’s, a Philadelphia kitchen-supply store, reports that sales of professional-quality knives jumped 50 percent from 1999 to 2000. Last year, Fante’s sold close to 200 of its $30 chitarra, a wooden box strung with wire to hand-cut pasta. Two years ago, they sold about a dozen.
All this authenticity doesn’t come without tradeoffs. The mandoline, for example, is the de rigueur implement of the moment, and it can julienne vegetables into perfect matchsticks in a way that would probably be impossible on a food processor. The catch: Fingertips can be a casualty.
“You can’t use one unless you’re all there,” says Brooks Ogden, a New York travel agent. She should know: As the owner of six different mandolines, she has cut all of her fingers while slicing. One mandoline was so imposing, she left it behind in a previous apartment. “I was afraid of it,” she says.
While there are still plenty of high-techies who can’t live without the modern conveniences, sales figures for many of those conveniences are mixed at best. NPD Intelect Market Tracking, Port Washington, N.Y., reports that from 1995 through 2000, the number of electric mixers sold dropped 11 percent. From 1994 to 1995, sales of drip coffee makers fell 5 percent, but have slowly been increasing since then, according to NPD. That some consumers have become anti-technology is simply a question of experience. Steven Hefner, a medical-supply salesman in Houston, is such an avid coffee drinker that in November he bought a used restaurant espresso machine for $600. Then he paid $400 to have the machine rebuilt and spent three days reworking the plumbing in his kitchen. Around the same time, he bought an autodrip coffee maker from Starbucks.
So how is Hefner taking his morning java these days? From his Chemex, a glass coffeepot he got on eBay Inc., San Jose, Calif., for $19.50. It holds a paper filter filled with coffee grinds and a person has to pour hot water into it. “The coffee I get out of my Chemex is better than any other,” says Hefner.
For a lot of people, electric appliances are just a bother. They take up too much space, are hard to clean and don’t make the cooking job any easier. Bob Hopkins, a retired money manager in Palm Coast, Fla., is a devotee of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Using an electric juicer just seems silly to him. “You still have to cut the oranges in half, stick them on the cone and hold them down while the cone rotates,” he says.
Some manufacturers are worried about the back-to-basics cooks and are rolling out new products to bring home chefs back into their fold.
For the first time in 20 years, Cuisinart has redesigned its signature food processor. The company is not only launching a national print campaign to promote the new processor, it will advertise the product on television — a first in its history. Likewise, KitchenAid just introduced two new 6-quart mixers with souped-up motors. It’s the first major change in capacity in the machine since the 1930s. Of course for the nostalgic gourmet, innovation is just not the point. Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon.com ,was surfing his company’s new kitchen Web site recently when he came across a $159 hand-cranked ice cream maker. “I hadn’t seen one since I was three feet tall,” says Bezos, who bought the 6-quart machine, thinking of the days when he used to make ice cream with his dad in Miami.
Bezos says he made his first 3-quart batch on Mother’s Day. “Here’s a secret tip,” he confides. “You want to crank early in the rotation” because it gets harder to turn as the ice cream forms. Was it as good as store-bought? Doesn’t matter, says Bezos. “After 25 minutes of cranking, you’re ready to believe it’s delicious,” he says.
Here’s what’s in:
– Chitarra, about $30. A frame strung with wire that slices sheets of pasta into strips. “It gives you a really beautiful noodle,” says Jonathan Moore, a student in Cambridge, Mass.
– Whisk, from $5 to $25. Whisks plus elbow grease give you emulsified dressings and frothy eggs. “The best are the ones that are rustable,” says typeface designer Bill Troop. “They are hell to clean, but they make the best egg whites.”
– Food mill, from $20 to $90. Purists use this hand-cranked mill to puree everything from apples to asparagus. “You get a better consistency,” says one home chef.
– Mandoline, from $10 to $170. A tool that shreds and juliennes vegetables (or fingers) over sharp blades. “You take off the finger protector and chant,” says travel agent Brooks Ogden.
– French press, about $10 to $50. The classic glass carafe topped with a plunger looks great even when empty. So what if it sometimes leaves grounds in your coffee?
– Mortar and pestle, from $5 to $100. Chefs use this age old tool to grind spices, garlic and nuts.
And what’s out:
– Electric pasta machine, about $160. A staple of the trendy kitchen during the last decade, now gathering dust in many closets
– Stand-up electric mixer, from $100 to $430. They’re versatile enough to knead dough and stuff sausages, but can require more accessories than a Barbie doll.
– Blender, from $50 to $300. This appliance is perfect for soups, stocks and pancake batter — not to mention margaritas — but when contents spill onto the keys, they are hard to clean.
– Food processor, from $100 to $800. A classic, but it lacks the subtlety of good knife skills
– Electric drip coffee maker, from $19 to $200. Some of the new ones are so complicated you can’t even find the “on” switch. Then again, a French press doesn’t come with an alarm clock.
– Miniprocessor, from $30 to $40. These tiny food processors were designed for smaller loads. “Often it’s easier to take out a good knife,” says Nick Giovanucci, the owner of Fante’s, Philadelphia, Penn.
