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Continuing with the fall catchup theme, in, I believe, late October or early November, Costco put a four-pack of KitchenAid ceramic knives on sale for $25, normally $30.
I've wanted to play around with ceramic knives for a while, and this seemed like a good opportunity. There's a six inch chef's shape, 5 inch santoku shape, and a couple of smaller utility/paring knives. I wasn't expecting much for six bucks and change per knife, but I've been pleasantly surprised.
They are sharp. At least as sharp out of the box as my metal knives are after many years of sharpening. And they seem to stay sharp, although again, only a month or two of messing with them so far.
What they aren't is heavy. And so any application where the weight of the knife is your friend is not ideal for them. For example, cutting carrots or potatoes? I stick with steel. Chicken breast or avocado slicing? I reach for the ceramic. Small illiums, like garlic or shallots? Ceramic. Halving a whole onion? Steel.
In addition to the lightness, the ceramic knives also seem a bit slicker than steel. This again comes into play on things like avocados, or goat cheese, or soft things where you want to just glide through it and not stick.
The other disadvantage is that you can't use them for anything requiring lateral force. For example, let's say you absentmindedly reach for the ceramic chef's knife when you need to pry a couple of pre-made hash brown patties apart because they've frozen together? You will snap the fucking tip off the fucking chef's knife and never find it. Well, you may find it. I never found it.
Overall, though, if you need a good, cheap set of general-purpose sharp utility knives, you could do a lot worse than these, even at the regular price. They're much better than other cheap knives in that price range, that's for damn sure.
In other, more recent tool news, a newfound obsession with hot/pressed sandwiches led me to research sandwich presses, which led me to pick up a Cuisinart Griddler, the one with the removable flippable plates. It's the least unitasking item in its class, and at $80 from Amazon (or, same price at Bed Bath Beyond with the usual 20% off coupon), it's pretty effective, or at least it was the first time I used it.
I do think there's very little use for any temerature above maximum, because a turkey-basil-avocado sandwich I made on whole grain bread crisped the bread nicely, warmed the sandwich nicely, and pressed the sandwich nicely, but it didn't brown the bread at all despite being sprayed with a bit of olive oil. I'm also looking forward to trying the rosti potatoes Alton Brown mentioned on this week's podcast - he talked about making them in a waffle iron, and this is basically a waffle iron sans texture. You can even turn it into a waffle iron with extra plates, and I may go through with that.
I also fell down a rabbit hole, took advantage of an Amazon deal, and ordered a Sodastream, but that hasn't arrived yet, so we'll see how that goes.
