Viking/le creuset - Page 4

The advantage of having cheap knives: you can use this: http://www.abestkitchen.com/store/sharpener-280.html

Like a lot of stuff written about cooking and food, there's also a lot of rubbish written about knives and cookware. Frankly, having expensive can be nice, but ultimately it becomes almost pornographic. I have friends who have spent $50 000 (yes, that's right, $50k) on stainless-steel kitchen set-ups that are virtually professional-grade. They have amazingly expensive cookware, and have spent many hundreds of dollars on knife sets. Of course, they enjoy cooking and do produce some nice dishes. However, I cook on a small, four-element electric stove in a kitchen with little bench space, using only two knives (albeit ones that I was given by a couple of Japanese chefs with whom I briefly worked whilst at uni in Japan). Most of my pots and other kitchen stuff came from a wholesale company that supplies restaurants - it doesn't look fancy, but it does the job well. I'm not boasting when I say that the dishes I cook are equal to, or better than, the stuff that comes out of my friends' kitchens. Ultimately, it pays to bear in mind that what you cook depends largely on you, not on the pans you cook with or the knife that you cut with. Such accessories might make preparation easier, or might provide you with a slightly nicer finish to a dish, but they can't turn a sow's ear into a silk purse (so to speak). I second (or third) Matt's suggestion regarding knives - you don't need a whole set, as two or three will do just fine. The chefs that I knew in Japan would do the most amazing things to meat, fish and vegetables using just one or two different knives. They were amazingly dextrous - it was a pleasure to watch them at work.

Money well spent imo! You might get marginally better results from that kind of gear, but it really is a pleasure to use. 50k is pretty high. When you consider a 6 burner thermador is like 8-10k, sub-zero fridge, 5-6k? What's the rest of the money going toward? A second over and microwave don't add too much to the cost. I'm guessing the bulk of that money is cabinetry and granite counters or something. Either way, a really nice kitchen equipped with a 6 burner thermador is the thing i'm looking most forward to when I buy a home. Huntsman's pic of his thermador makes me weak in the knees.

I wonder what M.F.K Fisher used?

In reality 50k for a kitchen is not bad, and especially if you are counting the knives etc. We recently had some water damage from our upstairs neighbors in our kitchen, and the repair was basically taking down a bit of sheetrock, scrubbing the joists, putting it back together and painting along with site protection, and the bill (paid by insurance) was 14.5k. Building costs vary by area, but in San Francisco, excellent quality building is north of $400 psf for a whole house and kitchens are much more. Other areas in the country are cheaper, but today to do a first class kitchen of 4-600 sf runs around 100k and up, and that is without tons of bells and whistles. Cabinetry is incredibly expensive, and I would say that in my experience, appliances are the least worry financially in a kitchen remodel.

He was talking about the appliances from what I could tell though. You're right, the appliances are the cheap (but most fun) part.

Someone my father knows spent $100,000+ on his kitchen remodel.

As iammatt said, the bulk of it was for cabinetry and such things.

If you can't cook a decent meal with a Coleman stove and a hunting knife , then you should burn your cookbooks.

When it comes time, I would be happy with ikea cabinetry if I have to choose between that and the 6 burner thermador range to keep costs down. Z's NYC pad looked really nice and he had ikea cabinets.