Bricks are not something you can buy at Williams-Sonoma or Sur La Table, but perhaps they should be, as they are extremely useful in the kitchen. Actually, scratch that. Both retailers are extremely skilled at making the once-affordable inaccessible, and would probably end up selling “locally sourced sediment weights wrapped in food-grade silicone” or something like that. (Wait. They already sell $35 “grill presses,” which are just fancy bricks with handles. My mind!)
Anyway. Bricks are useful in the kitchen, especially once you wrap them a couple of times in heavy-duty aluminum foil. If the foil gets dirty, just replace it. It’s a perfect system. What do you do with the brick once it is wrapped? You set it on top of things and hit things with it, obviously.
For starters, you can make chicken under a brick (or two bricks), but once you’ve finished that I think you’ll find that many meats benefit from a little pressure up top. Bacon, for instance. A brick keeps your strips of cured pork flat while they fry, preventing portions from curling up away from the pan, leaving you with bacon that is both burnt and raw. It can also help you get a faster, more even sear on a steak, chop, or thick burger, though I would not try it with a thin smash burger—that sticks to the pan just fine after an initial pressing.
A foil-wrapped brick is also handy if you need to press tofu, or sandwiches, or anything that needs a little help draining or setting overnight. If a recipe tells you to “weigh it down with soup cans” you can use your handy brick. You can also use it as a meat tenderizer or stand-in mallet, which feels powerful. Try it. Just wack the shit out of something (a food) with a foil-wrapped brick. Neither your chicken breasts nor your pie dough will stand a chance.
What would you do with a kitchen brick? Do you own a fancy grill press? Is it worth the mark up? How much could one brick cost? Ten dollars?