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A couple of years ago I wrote two reviews for Wired. One was about knives and one about knife sharpeners. Despite the best efforts of my editors, both of the reviews suck and I give some terrible advice.
Not that the I picked the wrong knives or sharpeners. If you're rich and stupid, by all means buy the stuff I recommended, it's fantastic stuff. But you could do far better things with your money and that fact has been bothering me for two years now.
See, I'm with Moxie Marlinspike. [I am a believer in The Worst](http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/the-worst/) (you should follow this link and not just because it in turn links to a P.O.S. video, though it does, as you do).
What the hell does that mean? It means you should absolutely not ever buy anything recommended by Wired or any other consumerist propaganda rag. I'm not trying to denigrate Wired or anyone else for writing these reviews. They are what they are, I make no judgment on them. But you are not them. You don't have to buy any of that stuff to be great at whatever it is you want to do.
What's been bothering me all these years is that I had the incredible privilege of testing all this cool stuff to tell you about and I didn't have the guts to say, yes, it's cool stuff, but you don't need it. Or at least I don't think you do.
You should decide for yourself, but since I only told part of the story in those reviews I want to tell the rest now.
The baseline number I worked with in both those articles is $100. $100 for a knife and another $100 for a sharpener. That's madness. That's enough to outfit an entire kitchen.
How? Glad you asked. First go to your local thrift store and find a cheap 6 or 8 inch chef knife. Do not under any circumstances spend more than $10.
Now that you have what many people would call [The Worst](http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/the-worst/) knife money can buy, go ahead and drop $10 on the cheapest sharpener you can find. Now follow the directions that came with your cheapo knife sharpener. Congrats, you're all set for knives for the rest of your life. Trust me on this, I have had my $20 Ikea 8 inch chef blade for over 20 years now and it is still razor sharp. I minced garlic with it tonight. You do not need some artisanal handcrafted Japanese purple steel bullshit knife just to slice a tomato. Your piece of shit knife is now sharp and will get the job done.
Now we're going to go high dollar. Take another $30 to your local thrift store and pick up a couple cast iron skillets. Brands don't matter, just avoid rust (Lodge brand are the most common where I live). Buy one 8 inch cast iron skillet and one 10 inch. Follow these directions to season your new skillets. Also grab some mixing bowls, stainless steel if you can find them. Ceramic and glass are also fine. I suggest you get as many 2-4 Qt mixing bowls as you can, but don't spend more than $30 for all this stuff.
Okay peelers, you need them but they are pretty much unsharpenable so used is a no go. Buy the cheapest you can find new. Don't spend more than $10 for a 3-5 pack (Asian markets are a good source for cheap peelers).
Okay so we've spent around $50 and we have a knife, a sharpener, 2 skillets, 3-8 mixing bowls and some peelers. We still have about $150 bucks left. You could go back to the thrift store and get a nice enameled cast iron braising pot with part of it (no more than $20). But I suggest you put the money in a savings account, head to the library and check out these books:
For the basics:
* La Technique by Jacques Pépin
* Mastering The Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck (Knopf, 1961)
* The Frugal Gourmet by Jeff Smith
* The Joy of Cooking (Scribner, various editions 1931-2006)
Because they are awesome:
* Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan (Knopf, 1992)
* The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution by Alice Waters (Clarkson Potter, 2007)
* Invitation to Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey (Knopf, 1973)
* The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
* The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden (Knopf; Revised edition, 2000)
Okay, now, cook. That was the point right?
The beauty of buying cheap stuff is that it gets out of your way. You don't have to think about it, you don't have to obsess over it and read reviews. You buy it once for a minimal amount of money and you move on to the actual point -- in this case cooking. You simplify not by buying some quality item you think will last forever, but by eliminating the need to think about anything other than the cooking.
I'll leave you with Marlinspike's words, which I think are good enough to live by:
> In a sense, the best gives a nod to this by suggesting that getting the very best of everything will somehow make those things invisible to us. That if we can blindly trust them, we won’t have to think about them. But the worst counters that if we’d like to de-emphasize things that we don't want to be the focus of our life, we probably shouldn't start by obsessing over them. That we don't simplify by getting the very best of everything, we simplify by arranging our lives so that those things don't matter one way or the other.
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