The Impressor Tenderizes Tough Cuts

If some of your grilled steaks don’t turn out quite right, you aren’t alone. Un­less you mar­i­nate for hours, it’s hard to get those fla­vors to sink in- some­times a thick­er slice will need 24 hours of prep time. And if you’re us­ing less ten­der cuts of meat, it can be hard to get them nice­ly fin­ished. Lon­don Broil can end up love­ly, or it can feel like jerky, and the dif­fer­ence is all in the tools and meth­ods you use.

Con­tin­u­ing our mi­ni-kitchen set, af­ter yes­ter­day’s look at in­duc­tion and Sun­day’s piece on cof­fee, we bring you our re­view of the Butch­er’s Kitchen Im­pres­sor. Re­al­ly, it’s a pret­ty sim­ple piece of equip­ment, and while we won’t go so far as to say that ev­ery kitchen should have one, we will firm­ly state that ev­ery­one who cooks meat will get good use out of it. In fact, you can cut down on cook­ing time as well as the afore­men­tioned prepa­ra­tion time. And it’s easy to use, clean, fair­ly in­ex­pen­sive, and tucks away nice­ly.

All in all, we’re a bit dis­ap­point­ed in our­selves for not hav­ing one soon­er. Grant­ed, if you pri­mar­i­ly make filet mignon, this might not come in handy as much. But we like our brisket, and it’s tough to get brisket to ab­sorb your mari­nade. We took out our Im­pres­sor and went to town on some meats. Ba­si­cal­ly a dan­ger­ous-look­ing set of ex­treme­ly thin ra­zor sharp blades set be­low a su­per-dense block of chrome-plat­ed zinc, we found our­selves lov­ing cook­ing. Slic­ing through that tough con­nec­tive tis­sue, you’re al­so left with a holi­er piece of meat, with chan­nels that suck in those sauces. And be­cause those same chan­nels con­duct heat, we did no­tice a de­crease in cook­ing time- the in­te­ri­or heats up more quick­ly and even­ly, which can take a bit of ad­just­ment for those used to spe­cif­ic tim­ings.

At $70 or so, and avail­able on­line, we on­ly found one is­sue- the plates are hard to re­move and change. Clean­ing was pret­ty easy- it’s nice that ev­ery­thing is dish­wash­er safe- but we did have some trou­ble with as­sem­bly, odd­ly. Over­all, though, this is an easy gift for the chef who thinks they have ev­ery­thing- be­cause they al­most cer­tain­ly don’t have one of these.