GREAT cooking equipment -- copper pots, high-tech gadgets, anything manufactured by European car companies -- can set you back some. So now, while we're waiting for Ben Bernanke to cook up something in his kitchen, is a particularly good time to appreciate a chef's tool that's as inexpensive as it is versatile.
Parchment paper is a cook's hide-in-plain-sight secret. It's one of those things that's so innocuous, so low-tech (it's just a sheet of silicone-treated paper) that it's usually overlooked as a kitchen tool. Yet with a simple roll of parchment, you can accomplish wonders. Think how often you use a blank sheet of paper.
The catalog of its uses is downright astonishing: to line cookie sheets or cake pans; to slide breads and pizzas onto baking stones; to encase fish en papillote; to wrap aged cheeses, cones of frites or roasted nuts, even those yummy breadsticks you get at Pizzeria Mozza.
Who said paper was obsolete?
In cooking school, one of the first things they taught us to do (after making stock and knotting our ties) was to cook rice, which we simmered under a parchment lid. Called a cartouche, it's a circle of paper cut to fit the circumference of the pot, with a little hole snipped at the center like a release valve. We used it for braises and stews too, and for glazing baby vegetables. At the time, we all thought it was kind of silly, cutting out little circles of paper instead of using the shiny lids that rose in stacks on the shelves of the teaching kitchens.
But the little circles were revelatory: They kept some moisture and heat in the pan yet allowed enough of it to escape through the vent so that the liquids could reduce at a leisurely pace.
The paper-and-scissors fun didn't stop there. We crimped more of it into pouches for salmon or bass en papillote, made cones (or cornets) for piping frosting and writing with chocolate, like a group of patient origami-makers or a diligent kindergarten class.
And the best thing? No cleanup. The cartouches and cornets, the baking sheets and cake liners, the piping bags oozing with melted Valrhona chocolate and pastry cream, were thrown away when they'd served their happy purpose. (Disposable may not be chic, but it makes practical sense for some things; and think about your harried dishwasher.)
Take it from the pros
Unlike many of the cooking techniques and fancy gizmos I got to play with in culinary school, parchment paper translates perfectly to an ordinary home kitchen.
