I want to talk about home kitchens and how the equipment and ingredients vary from what I generally use in a restaurant. While it's obvious that there are advantages to having the budget and capacity of a restaurant kitchen, there are still plenty of tasks for which a home kitchen is ideal. The cooking I do at home almost never overlaps with the style I use at work because my home kitchen allows much more time and space to work slowly and without distraction. Here are a few of the major differences.
1. The stove.
A decent home stove's burners top out at about 10,000BTU. I'm not going to try to explain what BTU is, and if you're very curious about it Wikipedia offers a very comprehensive explanation. For our purposes we'll use it as a relative measure of the heat a burner is capable of generating. The burners on most commercial stoves that I've used run up to 30,000BTU, which makes an obvious difference. When combined with a very conductive pan it's possible to either sear foods at a much higher temperature or to maintain a consistent level of heat in boiling water or fryer oil when dropping cold foods into it.
It's certainly possible to get a pan hot enough to burn oil on a non-commercial stove, and there is nothing I know of that benefits from being cooked that hot. The real disadvantage you face as a home cook is the immediate loss of surface heat when you drop a piece of food into a hot pan and lack the base heat to keep the pan at the desired temperature.
While restaurant cooking relies heavily on the ability to sear and serve proteins very quickly, it's unnecessary in the home and I think that one of the hallmarks of home cooked food is the incorporation of proteins into sauces and braises rather than serving them like a steak on top of everything else.
Cooking proteins along with starches and vegetables is a more subtle process, and I find that I'm generally far more satisfied by the results of the incorporated flavors than by a slab of meat accompanied by vegetables and starches.
2. Storage.
While restaurants typically come equipped with a wide array of industrial wrappings and locking-lid containers, your kitchen probably lacks these things. Most of my friends' kitchens have a handful of plastic containers used for storage, but most are recycled yogurt or margarine tubs. While the lids do lock, they are virtually useless for food preservation outside their ability to keep other things from falling into them.
Even worse are consumer-grade plastic wrap and aluminum foil; the former sticks to nothing but itself and the latter is far too thin and fragile to be of much use.
For my own kitchen I've found a line of plastic containers which work marvelously and keep foods much fresher and for much longer than even their industrial counterparts. A good test of a container is to fill it full of water and drop it from a foot or higher. If any water comes off you might as well stick with the yogurt tub.
I'm sure I don't need to explain to you the value of preserving your food for a long time, but a particularly strong example of the importance of good containers is my friend's first attempt at homemade kimchi. He made such a large batch that it wouldn't all fit into the two good locking containers we had on hand, so he filled a third container which was identical to what you would find in most restaurants. After a few weeks of fermentation we opened the containers to see how the kimchi had developed. While the first two were delicious, the restaurant grade container had turned rancid and had to be thrown away.
3. Cleaners.
Most restaurant kitchens have a downright disturbing array of potent cleaning chemicals with bottles that say things like, "Dissolves all organic matter." The types of dish soap and cleaners that you find in the supermarket are so watered down by comparison that it's no surprise that there are entire lines of special soaps and sponges devoted to replicating the kind of cleanliness that can be found in a commercial setting.
We use wire scrubbers, green pads and the occasional towel. Only one kitchen I have ever worked in stocked absorbent sponges, and in home settings I've often found them sitting in sinks full of water and reeking of mold.
With that said, you probably don't want to go to the trouble of laundering a load of towels every time you cook, nor can you squeegee mop water into a conveniently located floor drain in your home kitchen.
What I do advise is that you keep buy a pack of wire scrubbers for a quarter apiece at your local Asian/Mexican market. They prove invaluable for cleaning bakeware or for removing gummy foods or caked floor from cutting boards and counter tops. Another useful tip is to throw away your eco-friendly dish soap and buy something that can actually penetrate grease. I love helping the environment, just not as much as I love having dishes that are actually clean.
4. Space.
While there is never enough space to work in a professional kitchen, I've found an abundance of it even when living with five or more roommates and sharing a single refrigerator. I've become so accustomed to rearranging the contents to make more space that at home I find the inefficient storage hilarious. Finding space to store a few ramekins of rillettes or or quart of kimchi in the back of the fridge is easy, and your refrigerator will use far less energy when it's packed with food.
Believe me, if I can hold enough food to feed 300 people in a refrigerator that is roughly three times the size of a home model you can preserve and keep enough food to last weeks if you're smart about how you use your space. Round containers, giant styrofoam boxes of restaurant leftovers and things that don't need to be kept cold (vinegars, Worcestershire sauce, artificial syrup, ketchup) tend to suck up a huge amount of space.
If you keep your fridge clean everything in it will keep much much longer. Ask yourself if you're really going to eat that pasta before you take a box of it home. It's a shame to waste it, but much more of a shame if it spoils the rest of the food in your fridge when it goes bad.
Oh yeah, and the baking soda thing is a myth. You're just wasting space by putting that box in. If you want your fridge to smell good, buy some air fresheners or just clean it regularly.
5. Pots and pans.
I mentioned the difficulty of using low heat on a range before, but there are a few things you can buy which will maximize the capabilities of your home kitchen.
Cast iron tends to be thick, inexpensive and very conductive. Almost everything I cook with at home is made of cast iron. It works great in the oven, holds up to foods that require high heat and suck it out of most surfaces (hash browns are a great example) and it can retain a good seasoning and add a lot of flavor and character to your food. In a restaurant setting it's nearly impossible to keep a seasoning on a pan because of the way things are cleaned, but at home you can keep your pans seasoned by cleaning them without soap immediately after cooking. You'll probably have to talk to your roommates about this. If you don't you'll probably come home to a stack of cast-iron pans covered in rust.
Alternately, you can invest in slightly more expensive enameled cast iron pots. They require almost no maintenance and are virtually impossible to burn anything in. The industry leader is Le Creuset, but you can probably find a cheaper equivalent at your local thrift store or just buy an off-brand for a fraction of the cost. The Creuset pots will last you for life, but the price is very high for a home cook and you'd probably rather buy a stand mixer or food processor for the same amount of money as one dutch oven.
Okay I've ranted for a while and I'm ready for a break.
