NORTH BAY BOH EMI A N | DEC E M BE R 1 8 – 24, 20 1 3 | BO H E M I AN.COM
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Dining
1. Peugeot pepper and salt mills This French company makes luxury automobiles, bikes, scooters—and pepper mills. Their mills are not cheap, and they are often handsome to look at. Too bad they don’t work. What to give instead: I like Mr. Dudley mills, but, to be honest, my favorite mill was some off-brand acrylic thing. It still works great. Vic Firth (specialty: drumsticks, rolling pins) mills are well made, too. 2. Battery-operated milk frothers These little wands seem like such a great solution: froth milk at home for cozy, fancy coffee drinks. Save money all year long! But they’re fragile and often junky; many have life spans of less than a year. What to give instead: The much more expensive Nespresso Aeroccino works exceptionally well, until it stops working. I’ve seen dozens of frothing gadgets, and there’s no single one to recommend unequivocally. That’s why I like to leave it to the pros. How about a gift card for the recipient’s favorite coffee shop?
THE REJECT PILE Take our expert advice: you don’t want your loved ones adding to the appliance graveyard.
Food-Fad Fails Ten last-minute food-gadget gifts to avoid like the plague BY SARA BIR
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’ve spent plenty of holiday seasons on the other side of the register, working retail in culinary stores. Sure, the pay stunk, but it was fun in its manic way. The many shots of free espresso we brewed with the automatic coffee machines and the ceaseless soundtrack of
peppy Christmas standards kept us alert and full of . . . well, it wasn’t cheer, really. Let’s just call it adrenaline. Often, I was not really behind the register at all, but slowly circling the shelves laden with specialty serving pieces and larding needles, seeking fresh customers to zero in on. But I also handled scores of merchandise returns, especially in January. Sometimes people exchanged things because they
wanted a Dutch oven in eggplant instead of cobalt, or a knife with an eight-inch blade instead of a sixinch blade. But often it was because the gifts they’d received just plain didn’t work. The things listed below? I highly advise you not buy them for those you care about. But don’t take my word for it. Trust the sad sight of the returns shelf in the stockroom, sagging with busted crap.
3. Silicon bakeware of any kind I’ve used this stuff and it’s awful: floppy, challenging to store, impossible to get clean and (most importantly) useless at browning things in the oven. What to give instead: Aluminum baking pans are moderate in cost, and they usually outperform their more expensive, heavier counterparts. Steer away from nonstick lining if you can; it wears out, interferes with browning and still needs to be greased anyway. 4. Expensive knife block sets A hefty wooden knife block packed with a dozen different knives is visually impressive, especially if those knives are made by one of the big-name players: Wusthof, Shun, Henckel. Of the seven knives I keep in my kitchen, I use three in regular rotation: the chef’s knife, the serrated knife and the paring knife. There’s no reason to have a massive knife block using up a bunch of counter space when you’re only going to use only three or four of those knives. What to give instead: