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My day-job career (recently reborn) of being a chef working for a high-end catering and managed services company involves a lot of finding solutions. We constantly need to figure out how to best prepare new menu items, how to scale up ideas for food so that it can be presented in a quality way on a large scale, how to fix mistakes when they happen, how to get things between two points (both literally and conceptually). Again and again over the years I have found that what can save the day is a product that actually performs its intended function without any fuss.
A mainstay of my day-job life and my home-kitchen life is food-service film. Civilians would think of this as "plastic wrap" or "Saran" wrap. "Saran" is, of course, one of those brand-name words, like "Kleenex" or "Xerox" that became synonymous in colloquial usage with a type of product. But actual Saran Wrap and all of the other grocery-store brands in that same class are what we call, in the professional kitchen, "fucking worthless." For a film wrap to be efficacious, it needs to cling to itself, so that tight and taut seals can be formed. It needs both self-adhesion and a good degree of stretchiness. After generations of claims of ever more new and improved versions of this product for civilian use, they are all still fucking worthless. Yet these same plastic manufacturers produce for the professional kitchen a commonplace, ubiquitous product that does the job: food-service film. And, for about 12 or 13 bucks at Sam's Club or Costco, anyone can buy a 12"x3000' roll of it. Which will last any normal household for years.
Today my friend Pat called me with the news that his roll of such film had run out and that they had started on a new one. It was I who turned Pat on to buying this product in the first place. He did so around the time of the birth of his son. That was four years ago, and only now has he started on the second roll. By the time the kid is in college, he will probably only be on roll number 5. Here's a picture that I will explain below:
This is the current roll of film in my kitchen. I wrote on the box "May 2010" and "Roll 2." This means that May of this year is when we started using this roll of film and that it is the second civilian-use roll of film of the era of Jeff and me having a combined household. He and I both had our own rolls of this before we merged households almost seven years ago (mine dated back to 1999 and his to 2001) but both of those were sucked up by our restaurant in 2005. So, anyway, this is Roll 2 of the Common Era/Post-Restaurant. Roll 1 lasted even under heavy use from January 2007 until May 2010. Pat has also dated his new Roll 2 box, and we intend to follow our film wrap progress over the ages. Cuz we're dorks like that.
But also because we respect a product that offers value for money and that actually works. If you are still using "Saran" wrap and (worse) think it's satisfactory, then you are in for a pleasant, eye-opening revelation. Simple things that just work are the unsung heroes of, well, work.
A mainstay of my day-job life and my home-kitchen life is food-service film. Civilians would think of this as "plastic wrap" or "Saran" wrap. "Saran" is, of course, one of those brand-name words, like "Kleenex" or "Xerox" that became synonymous in colloquial usage with a type of product. But actual Saran Wrap and all of the other grocery-store brands in that same class are what we call, in the professional kitchen, "fucking worthless." For a film wrap to be efficacious, it needs to cling to itself, so that tight and taut seals can be formed. It needs both self-adhesion and a good degree of stretchiness. After generations of claims of ever more new and improved versions of this product for civilian use, they are all still fucking worthless. Yet these same plastic manufacturers produce for the professional kitchen a commonplace, ubiquitous product that does the job: food-service film. And, for about 12 or 13 bucks at Sam's Club or Costco, anyone can buy a 12"x3000' roll of it. Which will last any normal household for years.
Today my friend Pat called me with the news that his roll of such film had run out and that they had started on a new one. It was I who turned Pat on to buying this product in the first place. He did so around the time of the birth of his son. That was four years ago, and only now has he started on the second roll. By the time the kid is in college, he will probably only be on roll number 5. Here's a picture that I will explain below:
This is the current roll of film in my kitchen. I wrote on the box "May 2010" and "Roll 2." This means that May of this year is when we started using this roll of film and that it is the second civilian-use roll of film of the era of Jeff and me having a combined household. He and I both had our own rolls of this before we merged households almost seven years ago (mine dated back to 1999 and his to 2001) but both of those were sucked up by our restaurant in 2005. So, anyway, this is Roll 2 of the Common Era/Post-Restaurant. Roll 1 lasted even under heavy use from January 2007 until May 2010. Pat has also dated his new Roll 2 box, and we intend to follow our film wrap progress over the ages. Cuz we're dorks like that.
But also because we respect a product that offers value for money and that actually works. If you are still using "Saran" wrap and (worse) think it's satisfactory, then you are in for a pleasant, eye-opening revelation. Simple things that just work are the unsung heroes of, well, work.
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Film Wrap Dating
Date: 2010-07-12 11:07 pm (UTC)Another point we discussed at length is that we have indeed tried every fw 'plastic' wrap available, and yes they are all fw. Do yourself a favor, get a big fat roll of film and know what it's like to actually seal a bowl of gelatin (jello, civilians) that you can turn upside down.
Re: Film Wrap Dating
Date: 2010-07-13 10:53 pm (UTC)