Alton Brown's Gear for Your Kitchen

Borrowed "Alton Brown's Gear for Your Kitchen," from a coworker and am thus far finding it an engaging and informative read. I always have liked his philosophy of optimizing for quality and multi-utility so that you focus on buying as few items as possible to get the only pieces that do the best and most varied jobs. I very much approve of his ban on unitaskers. I've been curious about this book because if I have one criticism with the way gear is presented on the show is with the assumption that you want your kitchen prepared for every possible cooking eventuality and plan to stock accordingly. But of course the home cook is obviously not going to be making everything, at least not on a regular basis, due to individual tastes. I certainly don't fault the show for this-- they can't possibly know what every viewer is interested in and there's no other way to present such a wide variety of dishes, techniques, and ingredients --but I was curious how the book would approach that problem. Say, for example, I am much more of a cook than a baker-- what pieces of bakeware are useful for me? Or maybe, I don't plan on making a certain kind of dish enough to warrant certain special pieces, is there something less optimal but more versatile that I can sub in instead?

I am pleased to find that the book does attempt to reconcile optimization with necessity. He will say what the best of everything is, but he also acknowledged when you only need an item for very specific things, or what the absolute kitchen necessities are if you only plan on acquiring a few things. He also details all the important features of your various tools, such as the qualities of various materials. His chapter on pots and pans is awesome, and the one about knives is particularly excellent. He also recommends tracking how frequently you use each of the tools you already have and how well they work, in order to determine what is important to you, what is useless to you, and what is insufficient for its task. This lets you figure out what to keep, what to get rid of, and what to replace. I would love to run such a trial myself. All in all, the book is a more detailed, more intensive version of the sort of information they present on the TV show, but, as I hoped, with more of a mind to how you figure out what you really need in your own personal kitchen.