Top Chefs’ Pantry Must-Haves: What’s Worth Buying and What Isn’t
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Today on The Chef's Cut, we are opening up our pantries and sharing the ingredients that you should stock in your own kitchen. This one, this guy here is my homie. It's my best friend. We'll tell you which brands will take your dish to the next level.
Chris Bianco makes those Bianco Di Napoli tomatoes, and they are phenomenal.
And we'll share our list of high-priced ingredients that are not worth the splurge. For most home cooks, I don't think Maldon salt is worth buying. All right, Chefs Cut Nation, you know what time it is. We need 10 seconds of your day. Please rate and review the show wherever you get your pods. It really helps.
To start this week, be open with a quote. By the great Sean Brock, who once said, whoever dies with the biggest pantry wins. Because this week we're talking pantries. I love it. In my opinion, it's not about having the biggest pantry, right? You don't need to have the most stuff. I do love the idea of like the old school Southern mentality of all the pickles, all the things, right? Yeah. Of like, you know, you have the huge root cellar and all these things. But I think we overdo it sometimes. And I think if you break it down to the bare essentials and you buy less things, but you buy good quality things and you have the things that you need to use. You have a better pantry. You better have a better workhorse kitchen.
I told you that when we were talking about, you know, a day in the life of me doing private work, I live and die by my pantry because there are times that my clients like, oh, I'm going out tonight. No need for dinner. So I'm just there doing prep. I didn't buy certain things. I didn't plan on cooking a plated dinner. But then it's like change of plans. It's raining. Somebody got sick. Somebody had to cancel the reservation. So I'm home for dinner. And that is when the pantry is clutch.
All right, so today I want to break down the pantries. Like if you had a start over tomorrow, move into a brand new place, and you got to build out the pantry and you just want to build out a central. So I kind of, in my mind, I broke it down. I got five categories. Okay. Okay, we'll go through them. Vinegars is a really important
one. Yes, key.
A carb of some sort that's dry you can put on a shelf. You know what I mean? A canned good. Got to have a good canned good. We're proper Midwesterners. Even if you live in New York now, you travel all over France, girl, I know where you were born. I've driven down that block.
I'm the queen of the canned goods.
And then lastly, one jarred.
Ooh. Got to have a jar of something, right?
Got to have a jar of
something. Yeah.
Yeah.
So those are my five. So I think to kick it off, first one right out the gate, we're going acidic. What is... Yeah, and I'm just saying one. Like, obviously, we all have more than one in our pantry. But I'm saying if you just have one where you're like, I can get the most bang for my buck out of this and do a lot of the things I need to do, what's your one vinegar?
I mean, okay, I'll give you one and then I'll give you my
honorable mention. No, you get one. Yes. Oh, I'm doing it. It's
happening, sweetheart. So my one... Rice vinegar.
Okay, seasoned or unseasoned?
I like unseasoned because if I want to add mirin or if I want to add some sugar to it, but I like the base unseasoned rice vinegar as my blanket vinegar. I use it for everything from salad dressings to, you know, adding a little drop into a couple of sauces to bring up acidity, even put a little splash like, you know, in a braise or in a marinade here and there.
So I
use that.
I mean, a rice wine vinegar pickle, too, is delicious. It's divine. I like the seasoned rice wine vinegar, too. I use it for a ton of stuff. We use it to season grilled vegetables after we pull them off the hearth and stuff. It's a workhorse.
It does. See, I like the unseasoned because I do usually add stuff to it. So if I'm making a glaze or something like that, there's got so many other components that I'm just rolling with the blanket one.
But that season one, like a pinch of salt, you pour it over anything and you got really good
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4 chaptersSpeakers
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