Food

The Equipment You Don't Need

Roy Choi

Lesson time 09:15 min

Simplify and streamline. Pare down your equipment list to the bare essentials through Roy’s “philosophy of one.”

Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars

Topics include: The Equipment Roy Needs • A Rice Cooker Will Change Your Life • Pare It Down Even More

Preview

ROY: Warning, this class contains some bad -ing-- [BLENDER WHIRRING] --language. [MUSIC PLAYING] You don't need a whole plethora of knives. You don't need a sous vide machine to do sous vide because you can do that easily in a pot. You don't need measuring cups. This is your measuring cup. 1 cup, 2 cup. A hand blender-- you don't need a hand blender. You just need your hands or your elbow. Electric thermometer? This is your electric thermometer right here. You don't need a electric thermometer. Just touch, touch. When you start cooking, you think you need all of these things and you build up all of this inventory of life and all of this clutter and this equipment and thinking that you're cooking has to grow with the equipment itself. There's nothing wrong with having all this equipment, but it's also fun to just go right back to the essence and have maybe just one knife, one board, one bowl, and kind of see where it goes from there. Coming from an immigrant family, it was kind of like get in where you fit in type of environment. And so anything was at your disposal-- buckets, like this. And it was always about repurposing, reusing. A lot of Asian immigrant families, or any immigrant family, we're kind of like zero waste not on purpose. We're zero waste because we're frugal and we're cheap. We ain't got no money. That's why we're zero waste. So if the pickles come in this or your whatever the case may be comes in this, this is the perfect container. Why go buy a container, you know? Why go buy-- why go buy something like this when you already got this for free? When you go to either culinary school or you begin cooking in a high-level kitchen, there is a huge fascination with gathering equipment, knowledge, skills. You're at the beginning of your journey. You're rarely at home because you're working maybe 16 to 18 hours a day. Your bank account is usually negative. When you stick your ATM card in, there's nothing comes out the other end usually. But somehow, you end up with like 52 knives and like 300 cookbooks. Before you know it, you got to figure out how to Marie Kondo that shit all the way back down to really the essence of why you started and wanted to cook. When you have your first kid, you have like 4 bags, 15 bags of wipes, and all these things. And by the fourth kid, you just dunk them in the sink. It's the same thing with knives and cooking. So this is pretty much all I travel with here and a pair of chopsticks. But-- [MUSIC PLAYING] But this is all I would need. And I'm going to pare this down even more to show you a realistic example of how it can really work. So we've gone from here to here to here to now here. So not only I don't want you to just believe my words, but you can go back in history on the internet and check it out. Literally the first year and a half of Koji, this is all I had. And the reason why, I can show you, is this-- all I need...

About the Instructor

Roy Choi wasn’t trying to start a revolution when he took tacos, kimchi, and more to the Los Angeles streets with the Kogi BBQ taco truck. He just wanted to make what he loved and knew by heart: immigrant-influenced all-American food. Now he’s teaching you his recipes, sauces, and techniques. Learn how to cook with your instincts using equipment you already have—and start adding your own twist to tried-and-true favorites.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

Roy Choi

Food truck “godfather” Roy Choi teaches you his signature recipes and mother sauces—then empowers you to make them your own.

Explore the Class
Sign Up