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As a cookbook author, I like to think that I spend most of my time dreaming up, and then perfecting, delicious recipes: silky pasta doughs, succulent roasts, beautiful tarts.

In reality, most of my time is spent at the kitchen sink, scrubbing roasting pans, washing out the food processor and rinsing knives and prep bowls.

The 16-by-19-by-9-inch white porcelain basin is large enough to fit my big roasting pan, if not my baking sheets. Next to it is a small, shallow prep sink to capture vegetable peelings and other debris. This sounds convenient, but that prep sink is the bane of my kitchen existence. It's too small to be practical, and I am forever trying to maneuver my cutting boards and platters on an awkward angle so that I can scrape peelings and scraps into it. Usually I end up using it as a place to drain clean pots and utensils.

"We call those spittoon sinks," jokes J. Paul Lobkovich of Lobkovich Kitchen Design in Tysons Corner. Popular during the 1980s and early 1990s, those shallow ancillary scrap sinks have fallen out of favor.

"It's fair to say we've learned our lesson from those small sinks," Lobkovich says. "Now we're doing a lot of big, rectangular cleanup sinks in one area of the kitchen, and a smaller -- but not cramped -- prep sink in another area."

One thing is certain, say Lobkovich and other kitchen designers: Customers are paying more attention than ever to their kitchen sinks. It used to be that sinks ranked far behind other appliances and features (the range, the oven, the cabinets and countertops) on the list of priorities.

"These days, people are a lot more specific about what they want" with their sinks, says Gary Lancaster, president of AK Metal Fabricators in Alexandria, which makes custom stainless-steel sinks. And mostly what customers want, he says, is big. "People just want to fill the cabinet up. If they've got a 30-inch cabinet, they want a 29-inch sink. If they're serious cooks, they want to be able to fit their commercial-size sheet pans in their sink. If they like to entertain, they want to be able to stack all the dishes in their sink and not have to look at them."

 

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