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Stocking Up

Arm your favorite chef with kitchen tools -- and reap the benefits

by Theresa Regli

When it comes to gift-giving, home chefs may be the easiest people in the world to shop for. There are so many kitchen gadgets out there that it's almost always possible to find something a cook doesn't already have. And unlike giving a new CD to a music lover who's already bought it, giving a duplicate gift to an amateur chef is never a bad idea: one will always be available when the other is in the dishwasher.

So, what to get your favorite chef? Start by imagining him or her in the kitchen preparing a sumptuous feast -- for you. The first thing that's needed is a cookbook holder. These stand cookbooks up at an angle, making it easier to read a recipe while cooking. A good one will have a clear plastic splatter cover to prevent pages from getting stained with olive oil and tomato paste. Kitchen Arts (161 Newbury Street, 617-266-8701) sells sturdy wooden cookbook holders ($11.50).

If you like pies (and your favorite chef likes to cook them), why not wrap up a few Pyrex nine-and-a-half-inch pie pans ($4.49 each at Lechters in the CambridgeSide Galleria, near Lechmere Station, 617-577-0353)? Make sure you get the ones with ridged edges -- they make it easier to create decorative crusts.

Cake and pastry lovers should pick up a KitchenAid heavy-duty stand mixer, which is available at most department stores and kitchen-supply stores for $200 to $300. Williams-Sonoma (Faneuil Hall, Boston, 617-439-7035) sells the four-and-a-half-quart stainless-steel bowl model for $239 and the five-quart model for $289. This mixer is particularly popular because the beaters not only spin, but rotate around the bowl as well, insuring more thorough mixing.

If the mixer sounds a little pricey, get the innovative checkerboard cake mold ($14) at Williams-Sonoma instead. It'll give your at-home chef a new way to bake cakes. This invention is a nifty circular divider inserted into cake molds. Two different-colored batters are scooped into alternating compartments, and when you slice into the cake, you end up with alternating-color cake cubes that look like a checkerboard.

For finishing touches, the Williams-Sonoma cake decorating kit ($28) is a good choice. It includes seven-inch-long reusable nylon pastry bags, pastry tips, and canapé nozzles, and even comes with an instructional video. Finally, to display the masterpiece, the footed cake plate with dome ($48.95) from Crate & Barrel (Copley Place, Boston, 617-536-9400, 48 Brattle Street, Cambridge, 617-876-6300, and Faneuil Hall, Boston, 617-742-6025) is a lovely clear glass display plate that can also be used for cheese or fruit.

For the main course, your home chef will need a high-quality roasting pan and rack.
The Cooks Club 22-pound covered roaster ($39.99 at Lechters) comes with a chrome rack and will hold one monster-size roast. Another good roasting pan is the Calphalon nonstick large roaster set ($69.99), which can be ordered from the Chef's Catalog (800-338-3232); it's made of heavy-duty aluminum and comes with an 11-by-15-inch rack. Some cooks like to roast meat and vegetables in clay pots, and the Römertopf 17-pound clay cooker ($59.99 from Chef's Catalog) has a beautiful etched lid depicting fish, vegetables, and wine glasses.

Other roasting tools include a baster, available at most kitchen-supply stores for anywhere from $4 to $12. But Kitchen Arts sells a no-frills, utilitarian, one-and-a-quarter-ounce baster for $1.95. A BarBChek electronic food probe thermometer ($12.95 at Lechters), which measures the interior temperature of a roast in two to six seconds, is useful for determining when the roast is done. But still, it's a good idea to keep track of how long it's been in the oven with a Lux long-ring electronic timer ($19.50 at Kitchen Arts). This can tick away for up to 10 hours and ring for just about as long.

Cookware that most gourmets would rather receive as a gift than buy for themselves, since it's rather pricey, is that made by All-Clad and Calphalon, which are the top two "professional" cookware manufacturers. Keep in mind that what's billed as a seven-piece set, for example, usually includes a few lids, so you may not be getting as much as you think. In spite of this trickery, the cookware is worth the money because it distributes heat evenly and is guaranteed to last a lifetime.

The All-Clad nine-piece set ($375 to $525, depending on whether you can catch a sale) is restaurant-quality cookware featuring a stainless steel cooking surface. This set includes two frying pans, a saucepan, a sauté pan, a stockpot, and a steamer insert. (Chef's Catalog sells the Master Chef nine-piece set for $379.99.) The Calphalon 13-piece set (available from Chef's Catalog for $499.99) includes two omelet pans, two saucepans, a sauté pan, a stockpot, a round griddle, and a stir-fry pan.

Most items can be purchased separately (the widest selection is in Chef's Catalog, though not necessarily the best prices; be sure to shop around). One excellent piece to purchase separately is a fish poacher, which is an oblong roaster pan that comes with a rack for cooking a whole fish. This can be found at Williams-Sonoma for $60.

Perhaps you've had enough turkey and potatoes for one season and would like to encourage your favorite foodie to experiment. Think cheese. Few meals that are as communal and filling as fondue require such minimal preparation time. Tradition has it that fondue started in the Swiss Alps, when a shepherd who was bored by his nightly dinner of cheese, bread, and wine decided to throw it all together in a pot and heat it up. Hundreds of years later, groups of people all over the world huddle around pots of bubbling cheese to enjoy Switzerland's most famous dish.

The Williams-Sonoma stainless steel fondue pot ($99) includes six long forks. Extra forks can be bought in sets of six for $15. Kitchen Arts carries a wide variety of fondue pots, including the heavy-duty earthenware Auberge fondue pot for $44.95. For those who prefer to not play with fire at the dinner table, the West Bend electric fondue pot ($79.95) is a good choice. For dessert, slice some fresh strawberries and bananas for dipping in the chocolate fondue your host will cook up in the Emile Henry chocolate fondue pot ($29.95). This is a much smaller fondue pot heated only by a small candle, as opposed to the sterno that heats the larger pots.

But for those of you who think a mere fondue pot is not enough, there's the awesome Crate and Barrel fondue set ($94.95), which includes the pot, six forks, a rotating wood board, and six small bowls for sauces. Sauce bowls are necessary in the realm of fondue bourguignonne, which consists of beef, pork, and chicken cubes cooked in hot vegetable oil and then dipped in sauce. A good accompaniment to any of these fondue gifts is Eva and Ulrich Klever's Fondues from Around the World (Barron's, $12.95). Fondues is available at WordsWorth Books (30 Brattle Street, Cambridge, 617-354-5201) for $11.66. This book is a superb collection of recipes from Switzerland, Italy, Mexico, Jamaica, and every other country that has a melt-and-dip dish as part of its culture (you'd be amazed).

But, truth be told, a fondue pot is not the zenith of Swiss party-food cookware. The T-Fal Raclette Swiss party grill ($74.95 at Kitchen Arts) and the Williams-Sonoma Raclette Maker ($149) really take the cake. Raclette, like fondue, is a prepare-it-yourself communal meal that is often enjoyed after skiing or other winter activities. Raclette is a type of cheese made for melting and pouring over potatoes and occasionally other vegetables and meats, and is traditionally prepared over an open flame. But this home version features small nonstick trays that slide underneath a tabletop grill for easy cheese-melting, while the top grill can be used for heating potatoes or meat. This neat device can also be used for the French dish pierre chaude (literally, "hot rock"), whereby meats are cooked on a communal grill and then eaten with various sauces.

Don't forget stocking stuffers. Single-purpose kitchen implements make great ones, particularly for cooks who like to create elaborate dishes with many ingredients. Start with an olive pitter ($10.50 at Kitchen Arts), which, as the name implies, is used expressly for the purpose of pitting olives. Other ideas include a melon baller ($8.95 at Kitchen Arts), the RevereWare cookie dough scoop ($2.99 at Lechters), the Cooks Club shrimp deveiner ($1.99 at Lechters), and the Good Grips garlic press ($13.95 at Kitchen Arts). A Cooks Club pot drainer ($2.99 at Lechters), which is a crescent-moon-shaped implement full of holes used to drain liquid from a pot while keeping the solid food in, is very handy and cuts down on the need for colanders.

The king of all single-purpose food-prep items, though, is the zester ($2.79 to $6.95 at Lechters and Kitchen Arts), which is used to scrape off the outer peel of citrus fruits for use in everything from cocktails to sauces. And if the zester isn't the most gratuitous cooking implement a chef can have, surely the Misto olive oil sprayer ($15 to $20 at Williams-Sonoma and Kitchen Arts) is. The Misto is a nonaerosol sprayer that produces a fine mist of oil for coating a skillet or for lightly flavoring food. Just fill the canister half-full with your favorite olive oil, pump the cap a few times to pressurize the container, and voilà -- a whole new way to apply the great Mediterranean elixir.

Less specialized, but still an excellent single-purpose item, is the pepper grinder. Not only does fresh pepper taste exponentially better than the pre-pulverized stuff, but a pepper grinder just looks cool on a table. The Olde Thompson imperial pepper mill ($19.95 at Lechters) is a good choice, since its clear shell will allow everyone to see the peppercorns as they're churned.

The addition of any of these gifts to your chef's kitchen will help him or her throw one heck of a dinner party. But there are two more must-haves (for the chef and for you). Your at-home gourmet will need a table sweeper ($2.75 at Kitchen Arts), an innovative rolling device that picks up crumbs with one swift motion across the table. And you'll definitely want to make use of the Italian Bialetti espresso maker ($37.95 or $55.95 at Kitchen Arts). It brews espresso the old-fashioned way, and is the classic home espresso implement used by Italian families everywhere. What better way to get your message across to your favorite chefthan a gift that says, "I love your cooking so much, I want you to load up on caffeine and keep cooking for me."

Theresa Regli is an Internet content coordinator for the Boston Phoenix. She owns a T-Fal Raclette Swiss party grill.