Cookware, knives, coffee equipment and small kitchen appliances.
Espresso equipment fails in taste before it fails mechanically. Rancid coffee oils build up in the group head and the basket, and they contribute a bitter, stale note to every shot long before anything stops working. Most people diagnose this as bad beans. There are two separate maintenance jobs, and they are frequently confused. Backflushing … Read more
Non-stick pans are consumables. Even treated perfectly they have a finite life, and almost everything that shortens that life comes down to one thing: heat. What the coating is, and where its limit sits Most non-stick coatings are PTFE — polytetrafluoroethylene — a fluoropolymer applied in thin layers and cured onto the pan. It is … Read more
A knife that will not cut is usually not blunt. It is bent. Distinguishing between the two is the single most useful thing to understand about knife maintenance, because the fixes are entirely different and one of them takes fifteen seconds. Honing versus sharpening A knife edge is extremely thin — a few microns at … Read more
Wooden boards are better for knives than any plastic or composite alternative, and the research on their hygiene is more favourable than most people assume. What they need is a maintenance routine, and the two things that destroy them — water and the dishwasher — are both about the same underlying problem. Grain direction, and … Read more