🟧 The perfect precision ladle
Appreciate your cooking tools.
Kyle Chayka: One strategy to improve your life is to take notice of the small annoyances you encounter every day, over and over, and then solve them. I’ll admit that it’s not one of my major talents. I let things sit and maybe address them the dozenth or hundredth time. But in the kitchen, I’m much better at it. My wife Jess and I are well-equipped with cooking implements, many of them heavy-duty stainless-steel tools from All-Clad. They’re great, but I kept finding that our ladle was too large. It was soup-sized, perfect for actually serving up completed dishes. But when I tried to scoop a little pasta water into a pan or throw some sauce into our normal-sized wok, it got lost in the ladle’s deep bowl and then splashed out sloppily.
Did we just maybe need another ladle? I was on the fence. It’s hard to add anything to an apartment kitchen, and the canisters holding our wooden spoons, spatulas, and the like on the counter are already overcrowded. Then on a trip to Paris we stopped in at E. Dehillerin, the city’s famous 200-year-old kitchenware store. The shop, sprawling across an entire corner of a block in the 15th arrondissement, is meant for actual restaurant chefs. Most of the inventory is listed in print binders and stored in the cavernous basement. But it’s also delightful for the over-ambitious home cook. These days you see more tourists and polished influencer types than harried chefs running through for a spare knife, though it still happens. Trawling through the utensils on display on the main floor, I found a small ladle. It was from the French manufacturer De Buyer, another heritage brand, and it was thick and dense enough to not feel flimsy, with a hook on the end in case I ever fulfill my dream of a real industrial kitchen. I took it home hoping it would solve all my problems. (Unlike a knife, you can pack a ladle in a carry-on.)
It only took making pasta once and tossing some starchy water from a pot on one burner into our low Le Creuset braiser to realize that it was perfect. The volume of the ladle is just over three tablespoons, an amount you need to deal with much more often during cooking than serving. (The size is marked 6 centimeters in diameter.) It has a tiny spout on the bowl for precise pouring and the handle is angled so it’ll never warp. Even though it’s a slightly cheffy indulgence, it’s fun to feel a little more professional. As a specialized tool should, it smooths out that one bit of friction in my life.
You can buy this specific De Buyer 6 cm ladle on Amazon or various specialty e-commerce sites, but probably any small ladle will do!
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