All you foodies out there might as well forget about your $350 set of imported titanium Tridents right now, because every kitchen in China has a set of Big Ol' Scary-Lookin' Kitchen Cleavers, (or, as they like to call them, "knives") that can match anything Williams and Sonoma can come up with chop for chop.
Knives in China are as they should be - easily sharpened, handy, well-balanced, and cheap. I haven't ever asked anybody their opinion on people plunking down $175 on a kitchen knife, but I suspect that they'd be very confused. Even better are the cutting boards - usually big, heavy blocks of hardwood that don't look like they'll crack until the next Ice Age. (If you walk into a restaurant kitchen, they go even one better, chopping everything on a 9-inch slice of a tree trunk.)
Of course, as any good cook knows, it's not the tool that counts, but the person using it. And because Chinese food consists primarily of slices, strips, chunks, and cubes of things, it follows that many more people here are good at cutting. Here's a video of a friend of ours in action:
Hi Dave and Jane,
ReplyDeleteWhere was this taking place?
Friends of ours operate a very small factory that recycles plastic (maybe the subject of a later post?); it was taken there.
ReplyDelete