Home cooks know all too well the woes of cheap kitchen equipment. There's the Dutch oven whose enamel begins chipping after only a few forays into a 300-degree oven; the sautée pan with the hot spot that burns part of your omelet and leaves the other half just barely cooked.
This isn't to say every kitchen should be fitted out with the over-priced, perfectly marketed doodads and useless tools that line the shelves at Williams-Sonoma or Bed Bath and Beyond. The rubber-handled mango pitter that both stores push like cheap freebase to itchy junkies is the most useless thing since vibrating weight loss belts.
What you want is quality stuff that can stand years of abuse. Look to the kitchen supply stores along North Miami Avenue just west of the Adrienne Arsht Center. Sure, they're a collection of musty warehouses without pretty displays or 20 percent off coupons. What they all do have, however, is a lineup of pots, pans, bowls and every other kind of kitchen tool imaginable all designed for the harshest environment: the professional commercial kitchen.
See also: Pans, Knives, and Tom Cruise on Miami's Restaurant Supply Row
ABC Kitchen Supplies counts JugoFresh, CVI.CHE105, and Wolfgang Steakhouse among its customers.
Everything is affordable, well-built and designed to be used over, and over, and over again. If one sautée pan is designed to perfectly sear 150 scallops night in and night out for at least three years, it can surely handle that handful of mushrooms you'll toss in it every now and then.
Here's just a handful of things you can grab at a better value than most other places, and will last much longer.
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