Reddit reviews OXO Stainless Steel Good Grips Multi-Purpose Scraper & Chopper, 1 Count

Bench scraper:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00004OCNJ
~$10, best multitasking tool in the kitchen.

Need to put all those chopped onions into the pan? Done

Need to square-off that layer of bread/cake/crust you’re about to bake? I gotcha

Need to cut something but are too lazy to get a knife? Might work.

FOR MY PASTRY

it's more of a technique than a recipe... most pastries are more technique than recipe for that matter! The real trick is keeping the dough gold so the butter won't melt. if your butter melts it won't puff up right.

(oz measurements are by weight)

• 12oz BREAD flour (put the flour in the freezer for about an hour first)
  
• 10oz unsalted butter, cut in cubes and frozen (real butter people.. come on)
  
• tsp kosher salt
  
• about 12 tbsp ice water
  
  
  .. this is very simple:
  
  

1. Put the flour out on the counter, then cut the butter into it until its crumbly butter pieces are about the size of a pea (that means to put the butter on the pile of flour then chop it up with a bench scraper like this dude)
   
   
2. Now, mix the water in with the bench scraper (kind of a folding motion) about 2tbsp at a time until it's doughy... this is where the experience comes into play, you don't need to add all the water every time, just use your better judgement. Things you don't even think about can affect this, the humidity of the air in your kitchen for instance! too much water, and it's too heavy, not enough and it's brittle.
   
   
3. When you've got that all done, you need to roll it out to about the size of a sheet of paper, now fold it in thirds.. (visualize it as 3 panels, fold the right panel over the center, then the left panel over the center)
   
   
4. Now, whack it with the rolling pin until its about the size of a sheet of paper again, beat that bitch like it owes you money!
   
   
5. rotate 90 degrees... fold, and beat it down again
   
   
6. rotate 90 degrees... fold, and beat it down again (nope I didn't copy and paste on accident)
   
   
7. rotate 90 degrees... fold, and beat it down again
   
   
8. Now, fold it in half (but in quarters..?) imagine it's 4 panels, you want to fold the two outside panels in so they meet in the middle.
   
   
9. Now fold it completely in half. (so the outside edges are in the center)
   
   
10. Wrap that crap up in some parchment and shove it in the fridge for about an hour.
    
    
11. When it comes time to use it, dust it with flour, roll it out to about 1/4 inch thick
    
    I normally bake it at 350 for about 35 - 40 minutes, but I use a convection oven, so you'll have to play with the temp and time, 400 for about 25-30 minutes might be a good place for conventional ovens. Center rake by the way.
    
    For the filling:
    
    I simply chop up some onions, carrots, celery, and mushroom, how ever much looks right, I just eyeball it. cook all that in about 1tbsp of olive oil, then when it's all looking nice and tender I toss in a stick of salted butter (8 tbsp) I add some dried thyme, salt, pepper and garlic powder (you could use fresh garlic to get a stronger flavor, but I like the thyme to be the star of the show) then I add some chicken, (just get a rotisserie chicken because i'm lazy) Then I dump in about a 1/2 cup of flour (it gets thick... this is a roux) then I slowly add in 1 1/2 cup of chicken stock, and 1/2 cup of milk. Whisk it up with the fury of god, then let it boil until it's nice and thick.
    
    Put it together
    
    fill some ramekins, porcelain bowls, or whatever, with the filling, then slap some pastry on top... not too hard.
    
    Eating it
    
    Use a fork, get some food on it, insert into mouth. yum.
    

Knife sets are generally recommended against around these parts, as you'll usually end up with a bunch of medium-quality knives you don't need for an inflated price tag. I'd recommend using the money to get one really nice chef's knife, a paring knife, and a cheap bread knife. Go for other specialty stuff if you need it - but this covers 99% of use cases. I've heard that Shun's are perfectly nice but perhaps a tad overpriced; I have a Masakage Kiri which has been serving me extremely well.

All Clad totally rules. I've been slowly building my collection of tri-ply. Well worth it. Same comment about sets - only go for it if you really want each piece. Cast iron skillets are fun but I'm not sure I would insist everyone go out and buy one.

Can't comment on the Dutch oven - I have a non-enameled Lodge cast iron, and if I had to start over I'd get an enameled one. Either the Staub or Le Creuset will serve you well.

Highly highly recommend the Thermapen, as already commented. Depending on what else you like to do - consider a good wood cutting board, a bench scraper, and some nice baking sheets / trays. Enjoy!

PART 2:

Prep:

Around the 3 hour mark, you need to start prepping the kitchen for the tasks of cutting, shaping, rising, boiling, cooling, topping, and baking. You need:

• to make some space for laying out the dough. You will be cutting and shaping the dough into the round bagel shape in a little while, and you need some space to do this.
  
  
• a baking pan. and either lay down a bit of semolina flour, cornmeal, oil, PAM, or parchment paper to help prevent sticking. I prefer parchment--you can reuse it 1 to 2 times if you're careful, and cleanup is just a matter of pulling out the paper.
  
  
• to preheat your oven to 245 C, or 475 Fahrenheit. You want the time for heat to soak into the walls of the oven reaaallly well.
  
  
• (If you are not boiling with lye, disregard my shenanigans about the type of metal used) Grab a stainless steel pot, one which can hold 1.5 to 2 quarts of water with a few inches to spare. I said stainless steel! More on this in the safety details later.
  
  
• an implement for fishing and straining the bagels out of the boiling lye solution. Alternatively, you could use two forks, two spoons, or even chopsticks.
  
  
• a large bowl or container and fill it halfway with water. You will be adding lots of ice to it later to halt the cooking process after boiling the bagels. This will also wash off the NaOH, making them easier and safer to handle.
  
  
• a long bladed knife, or a dough blade.
  
  
• If you plan to use toppings, get a shallow dish with raised sides and dump them in. You'll probably need to dump in much more than you think. A LOT will stick to the bagels.
  
  
• a stopwatch or nearby analogue clock for timing the boiling of each bagel.
  
  
• plenty of plastic film for covering the dough during final proving.
  
  
• Lastly, rubber or latex gloves, preferably marked HDPE or LDPE. These are what I use.
  
• and protective eyewear
  
  

  ---

big pain in the ass, you have to work very quickly, the "glass" breaks very easily, very time consuming

If you do try this, here are some tips:

• like I said, work very fast, as soon as you pour the candy starts to cool and set
  
  
• if you can find/make a rectangular candy mold, use it!
  
  
• work in small batches, the larger the amount you pour the longer it takes to spread out and the easier it'll be for it to set improperly
  
  
• get one of those creme brulee torches/food torch/torch of some kind
  
  
• get a pastry/dough knife like this
  
  
• when you go to cut the slides, heat up the knife, not just warm but freakin hot
  
  
• be prepared for a lot of trial and error
  
  
• DO NOT leave on the counter, put in fridge, any amount of water (including food coloring) will start to melt the candy and then you wake up the next morning ready to take your awesome candies to work for a halloween party only to discover they look like complete and utter crap and then you start to cry and then your co-workers are all like "oh no I see it, they're great, no really... "

I've been making tons of these smashed burgers for the last few months. I don't think what you use to press the burgers matters that much as long as it is wide and flat and you use enough pressure, its going to be 99% the same.

In terms of scraping, you do want something that can definitely get between the burger and the surface to preserve all of the char on the burger. I recently bought this scraper from Amazon and it works perfect: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00004OCNJ/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Probably the most important factor in working with pie dough is keeping it at the right temperature. If it's too warm, it'll get sticky and hard to work with, the butter will melt, and your crust won't turn out flaky. In order to keep my dough from warming up, I put a marble slab in the fridge ahead of time to get it cold, then take it out and roll out the dough on it. If you do this, then I recommend rolling out your lattice strips/top crust immediately after finishing your pie shell and putting it in the plate. (If you wait too long between those steps, the slab will warm up.)

Of course, if you don't have a marble slab, you can do other things to keep your dough cold - refrigerate the ingredients, chill the dough in the fridge periodically as you go, and use bags of ice to cool off your countertop. But keep in mind if your dough is too cold (like if it's straight from the fridge after being refrigerated overnight), it'll be difficult to roll out and will crack as you do so. Based on various sources and my own experience, I think the best temperature for rolling out dough is around 60-65°F. If you have to brutally attack the dough with your rolling pin to get it to budge, it's still too cold and needs to sit out longer.

Other advice:

• Use a scale to measure ingredients by weight and an oven thermometer to make sure the oven is the right temperature, if you don't already.
  
• Using pastry strips will ensure you roll out the dough to an even thickness.
  
• Using pastry flour (or a pastry flour blend) will produce a more tender crust than all-purpose flour.
  
• In order to keep dough from sticking, I use a pastry sleeve and cloth, dust them with flour, and put the pastry sleeve on the rolling pin and roll out the dough on top of the pastry cloth (and periodically re-flour the pastry sleeve/cloth). Keep a bench scraper on hand in case you do need to un-stick your dough.
  
• After rolling out your pie shell and top crust/lattice strips, refrigerate them for at least 30 minutes, then take it all out, put your pie filling in, and finish assembling it. Then chill again in the fridge before baking. Multiple rounds of chilling will firm up the butter and give the gluten in the dough a chance to relax.
  
• To keep your crust from shrinking, make sure you roll out your dough to a large enough size (the pan's diameter + twice the pan's height, at least). If you roll it out too small and stretch the dough to fit the pie plate, it will end up resisting and shrinking back to its original size. I've had the most success in preventing shrinking when I rolled out my pie dough to be several inches bigger than what I really needed; you can always trim off the excess once it's in the pan.
  
• To make sure your crust gets baked through, put a baking sheet or pizza stone on the bottom rack of the oven, line it with aluminum foil, and pre-heat it. Then put the pie plate on top of that for baking. This will help produce a crisper bottom crust and keep any filling that bubbles over from making a mess in your oven. Note that if you use a baking sheet, darker metal will absorb and distribute heat better than a lighter-colored pan, which is a good thing if you want a crisp pie crust. This is why I put an old, blackened baking sheet under my pies rather than a newer, lighter-colored sheet.
  
• Use a foil ring to protect the crust edges during baking. You can just tear off a big chunk of foil, cut out a circle from the center, and cut around the outside to form a ring that will cover the edges of the pie plate while leaving the center exposed. Put this on the pie 15 minutes into baking, even if the crust edges are not overbrowned at that point.
  
• To prevent a runny filling, I always macerate my fruit for at least a couple of hours. Then I reserve the extra liquid instead of dumping it all into the pie shell. For berry pies, make sure your filling is bubbling thickly by the time you take the pie out of the oven. The bubbles should be gloopy and slow instead of thin/liquid-y and fast, if that makes sense. Finally, let your pie cool off completely before cutting into it.
  
• For blind baking crusts (completely baking an empty pie shell before adding the filling), you need to (a) chill the fully-formed pie shell for at least an hour or two in the fridge in advance, (b) prick the dough all over (bottom and sides) with a fork to discourage it from puffing up, (c) line the pie shell with aluminum foil, and (d) fill the pie shell with weights that come up all the way up the sides to completely fill the pie shell, not just cover the bottom. Most blind-baking instructions say to bake your crust at a high temperature (400-425°F) with weights for around 20 minutes, then remove the weights, put back in and bake for 20 extra minutes. However, ever since I tried baking for an hour at 350°F as outlined here, I've been a total convert to that method. It makes a huge difference in reducing shrinkage and distortion of the crust.
  
  King Arthur Flour also has some good tips for pie baking here and here. Good luck!

Ooh! It's Prime Time!
For under $10, you totally need this Oxo Good Grips scraper/chopper and all-'round kitchen gadget. Measure with it! Scrape stubborn things from other things with it! Make even slices of things with it! The uses are endless. Well, I'm sure they end, but there are a lot of them.

A good way to store flours so they aren't exposed to humidity or bugs. I use these. Also a pastry mat and pastry scraper. And a kitchen scale is a must. Some of the best bread and pizza dough recipes rely on weight rather than volume, and having a kitchen scale will allow you to do British and European recipes, as they go by weight and metric measurements most of the time.

The main thing I use most of the time are just a scale (in grams is best, but it's more about ratios than anything), a dough scraper (something like this, but any flat piece to manipulate the dough will work. It's also very useful for cleaning where you were shaping the bread.). For letting the dough do it's final rise, I cover a flour sack towel (other fabric will work, but you want it smooth enough so the dough doesn't get fuzz in it, but coarse enough for the flour to 'catch' on it) in flour (a mix of wheat and fine rice flour is best, but cornmeal and rice or just lots of wheat flour will work) and line a colander with it. And razors for cutting the dough without it sticking. (putting something like these on a wooden coffee stirrer stick works well, but any razors or sharp blades should be fine.)

Other stuff is nice to have, but not necessary, IMO.

I took a class on making blitz puff pastry at the King Arthur Flour site in VT, and it was AMAZING. It gave me so much confidence and really helped me learn a technique that I don't know I could have mastered otherwise. You might not be able to get to their site, but I highly recommend taking a baking class or two somewhere. It will be money very well spent. Pastries (and pie crusts) are a good place to start because the results are so impressive and rewarding!


I'm sure you've heard it lots, but baking is much more about precision than cooking. It's critical that you know how to measure and work with your ingredients, because as you saw with your biscuits, you can follow the recipe and still end up with junk. That's where a real education is so valuable.




With that being said, my new favorite baking tool is [this OXO bench knife.] (https://www.amazon.com/OXO-Multi-purpose-Stainless-Scraper-Chopper/dp/B00004OCNJ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1478832207&sr=8-1&keywords=oxo+bench+scraper) It's perfect for cutting through cold butter with next to 0 effort, and really helps make perfectly straight lines. It helps as you're working with dough to slide under so it doesn't stick to your surface. And probably my favorite part is that it also doubles as a ruler.




You'll want a rolling pin too, and I recommend a simple french style pin. The best deal I've found is from Walmart, about $6. Don't spring for the gimmicks like teflon or steel, they're just frustrating and pointless.

I want this pastry chopper from my kitchen wishlist. It will help me make apple pies on rainy days when I don't want to do anything and I'm sad because it's raining. It will also make my roommates really happy because everyone likes pie. I like making pies and knives just don't cut butter like a pastry chopper.

The old man is snoring

Some of them are. Mine is this one and it has an edge sharp enough that I've accidentally sliced my fingers a few times.

I like OXO scraper. Do you plan on leaving out the sipping stand? If so, this one is what I have. Ateco and Wilton are my go to for tips and bags. Here are some links.

Also, come check out r/baking There are a ton of helpful people there ♥️


https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000BVFYUO/ref=ox_sc_saved_image_8?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01EXHJCTA/ref=ox_sc_saved_image_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A35NO8HBZ6S6IT

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B008VMATVO/ref=yo_ii_img?ie=UTF8&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00004OCNJ/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502920863&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=oxo+bench+scraper&dpPl=1&dpID=311FAYKN2DL&ref=plSrch

I personally would get the following way sooner if I was building my kitchen all over again.

Also if there is a place you can get bulk spices near by I would go there for your spices, because if you havent already noticed spices are pricey at your local megamart.

Lavatools Thermowand - Same form factor as the much more expensive thermopen but at 1/3 the price.

Lodge cast iron skillet - great for searing meats or as a good starting pan.

OXO Bench Scraper - Makes prep work much easier and safer as you don't use your knife to scrape your food off the cutting board.

Immersion Blenders - When you dont want to use your big blender or want to blend something in your pot or pan.

Stainless Steel Cookware - Has a little bit of a learning curve but is great after the fact.

Aeropress - Life is too short to make shitty coffee.

Edit: added a thermometer/spelling

Just how gross are your counters? If they really need a good scrubbing (I'm not judging; I have a child and cats...) before you can use them for food, a scraper is a good thing to have. (Then just go over it with a damp paper towel.)

Go Cops!
I've been upgrading my kitchen lately, so here's a few things I found while browsing yesterday:
pizza cutter

Meh, that's a unitasker. Get one of these. Smash garlic clove, pluck out the skins, a few rocks with a chef knife, use scraper to quickly relocate garlic to where it needs to go.

I have this Oxo one and I'd say it works pretty well for me.

I was told by my SO that I have a huge butt....I'm a guy...Regardless, I think butts are funny. I'd love to get this chopper. I cook a lot and sometimes it's nice to have something to chop with and be broad enough to scoop it up and throw it in the pan. Plus, it's good for cutting pastries as well, so it comes in handy for baking as well.
Congrats on the Prime!