An 8-quart pot is a beautiful thing. It’s a vessel for simmering stocks, the beginnings of beer, or heating up frying oil. But—and this hardly needs to be said—it is also a very, very big beautiful thing. Finding space for such a massive pot can be a challenge in professional kitchens, much less a home cook's cabinets.
If you haven’t made the 8-quart splurge (or don’t have room to), Smitten Kitchen’s Deb Perelman offers a happy compromise in her latest book, Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant and Unfussy New Favorites. When making her chicken noodle soup, rather than filling two pots with equal parts of the recipe, Perelman uses evaporation to cut down on dirty dishes.
“I put in all the ingredients and as much water as I could in my pot, often having a quart that didn’t fit,” she writes. “Because liquid will evaporate as you simmer the base, I’d keep adding the water throughout, keeping the pot as full as possible until all the extra water was used.”
Yes, this trick takes a keen eye. But what’s harder: watching a pot or figuring out space to store one?
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Have you made the 8-quart splurge? Do you think it's necessary? Let us know below!
Written by: Katie Macdonald
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