Cooking Utensils for Ropa Vieja Cuban Stew

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village and today I'm going to show you how to make ropa vieja which is a traditional Cuban beef stew. Okay with regard to things you're going to need to make todays recipe. First things first. Got to have a knife. I recommend a nice good knife for every day kitchen work and something nice and sharp. The duller your knife is or the, I guess the harder your knife is to use the more likely you are to cut yourself as well as the more likely you are to just have a really miserable time trying to cook. So I recommend a good sharp knife. I also recommend a good high quality cutting board. This is actually a wood and plastic composite. It's kind of the new thing that's out there. I'm trying it out for a little while. I'm normally like a bamboo or like an oat kind of person but I'm going to try this for a little bit. It's an interesting cutting surface. It's kind of the new thing. You'll see it talked about a lot on T.V. shows and you'll see it in a lot of the cooking magazines and especially at the cooking stores. They're pushing these things really hard. My opinion so far, it's a good cutting board. A little pricey though. So a good bamboo cutting board probably works just as well but hey I always like to try something new. And also it's cool looking because it's black. Which is a neat touch. You can also get it in other colors. I've also got my favorite instrument of all probably. The high temp silicone spatula. I always get the high temp varieties because they, obviously it's a spatula which is flexible, but I always get the high temp ones because they don't melt. Which if you leave it in your pot and you forget about it for 5 minutes you don't turn around and have a big huge goopy mess. It will still melt but it takes 500 degrees for it to melt which is a lot hotter than I plan on getting our dish today. Also, something to cook it in. This is a 12 inch straight sided sauté pan. One of my favorite pans. I really recommend you get one of these. They're great. You can fry stuff in these. You can sauté in these. The good thing is though they also accommodate a lid and they also have some depth to them so you can get a little bit of liquid in there as opposed to regular sauté pans where you can slosh it all out. So I highly recommend something like this. If you don't have something like this though we could also use a, like a 5 or 6 quart stock pot, too. But you want to make sure whatever it is has a lid. Because you'll be doing some simmering with the lid on for a long time today. And let's see, naturally we've got to have towels or a towel. I typically go with a darker color. That way they'll last longer because you can't see the stains. And also a good set of tongs. These are actually high temp silicone tipped tongs. This way they wont scratch up your, whatever your cookware is. At the same time also they don't conduct the heat up the metal nearly as badly as the ones that are all metal which we all used to use and they have a neat little hook here on the end. With that let's get cooking."