Holiday Wine and Food Toys -- With an Edge
It's that time of year. Friends and family members daily accost you with the question: What do you want for Christmas? Or Hanukkah? Or Kwanza? Or whatever holiday is your flavor this time of year?
It ain't easy, for getters or givers. Gifts, after all, can be so ... bland. So perfunctory or dull. Even if you get what you asked for, the thrill isn't necessarily there.
This is particularly true if wine or food is your thing. Oh, terrific ... another flour sifter. Or: Fabulous ... a personalized corkscrew. You know the feeling.
Fortunately, there's hope. For the wine and food lover on your list this holiday season, a bevy of entrancing, alluring, slightly dangerous, even a bit over-the-top gifts abounds. Best of all, many will fulfill the secret desire of countless home cooks and amateur enophiles to obtain as much gear -- especially attention-getting gear -- as possible.
Which of course means that many of these gifts solve the eternal problem of what to give the men in your life. More men than ever before, besotted on reruns of Emeril Live, have decided to give cuisine a whirl. Fathers, sons, husbands, brothers -- an enthusiastic new brotherhood of the saucepan has been formed.
Here's Wine Spectator Online's annotated rundown of a few gift ideas for this demographic. But remember: girls like gear, too. And since more and more women are becoming connoisseurs and collectors of wine, there's something here for them, too.
The Chef's Blowtorch. Sure, sure, guests are impressed the first time they watch a home cook rapidly dice a carrot, pro-style, or dramatically flambé some protein on the stove. Oooh. Ahhh. But then they become jaded. The cook on your list requires a new toy, and what could be better than a blowtorch? In the old days, chefs used to march down to the hardware store and pick up an industrial-strength model, but now there are smaller versions intended strictly for the home kitchen. Perhaps the best-known application for such a flamboyant device is the creation of a richly caramelized crème brûlée crust, but not every pastry chef agrees that the blowtorch is the way to go. No less an authority than Claudia Fleming of New York's Gramercy Tavern warns that the torch can impart an unpleasant propane flavor (she still uses one to brown meringue, however). In any case, the downsized versions of this incendiary stocking-stuffer can be found through Sur La Table (www.surlatable.com) for around $50. Most are butane, so Fleming's propane dilemma is solved, sort of. While you're at it, throw in a fire extinguisher (Home Depot sells a basic household version for $10).
The Monogrammed Steak Brand. Not to be used, as one might suppose, to personalize one's backyard herd of steers -- rather, a gift for the barbecue maven who already has all the tongs, skewers, forks, marinades and rubs he or she can use. The idea here is that in addition to perfectly crisscrossed grill marks, the Weber jockey on your gift list can now burn those initials right into everybody's T-bone, just in case there was any doubt about who seared the steaks. Available from Williams Sonoma, $35 (up to three initials).
The 6-inch Meat Cleaver. Almost every self-respecting home chef now owns at least one high-quality hunk of French or German cutlery. Unfortunately, as one graduates from slicing and chiffonading to home butchery, the limits of the standard-issue chef's knife become apparent. It's just not that easy to chop through the back of a whole chicken or bust up a bundle of stock bones with an instrument designed for detail work. Solve this problem for the unrepentant carnivore on your list with Wüsthof's Grand Prix model, $100 at Amazon.com.
The Lang Trailer-Mounted Smoker/Cooker. Okay, okay, this one isn't exactly something you slip under the tree -- more like park in the driveway. Weighing in at 1,500 lbs. and costing $2,495, the "Model 84" hails from Nahunta, Ga. (the firm also manufactures several smaller and somewhat less expensive versions). The 84 looks as if it could do double duty with highway repair crews, firing up fresh asphalt. This is the Humvee of grills. Of course, it's intended to barbecue BIG TIME -- like for two football teams, or a light infantry company, or just your average extended family of hungry Texans. The testimonials on Lang's website (www.pigroast.com, and we're aren't making that up) provides an indication of the appetites that are drawn to this sucker: "I really haven't put the 84 to real use," demurs one satisfied commercial customer, "but in a typical week we cook 600 pounds of spare ribs, two whole hogs, 300 pounds of pork butt and 200 pounds of beef brisket." A guy named "Big Earl," from Tennessee, reports that "on Monday, I cooked two slabs of baby back ribs, eight leg quarters, two whole chickens, a turkey breast, and eight brauts. Let me tell you! Even a rookie can cook perfectly on this thing." Wonder what he did on Tuesday?
The BonJour Wine Logic Thermometer. Unfortunately, there are not that many fun gadgets out there for the wine lover. Once you get past a decent corkscrew and some nice stemware, you've about got it covered. Enter the folks at BonJour, who have created an enhanced wine thermometer -- a thermometer with a brain. It looks like a digital watch mounted atop a stiletto, and it's calibrated to discern the appropriate serving temperatures of a wide variety of red and white wines, all at the touch of a button. The nifty little thing even emits a sequence of beeps to let you know when a wine's temperature is approaching optimum drinking condition. $40, from Chef's Resource (www.chefsresource.com).
