A while back, I saw an article from The Daily Meal entitled “Garlic Presses and 12 Other Kitchen Tools Chefs Never Use“. While I totally get that in a professional kitchen there isn’t room for lots of single-use tools (Alton Brown calls them multi-taskers), some of the chefs said things like, “Get rid of it!” implying that the kitchen tools they mentioned were useful to no one. I beg to differ! Here are the kitchen tools from that list that I’m proud to say I use on a very regular basis.
1. Pasta “Remover” (I call it a pasta spoon)
Sometimes I do take the advice of the chef here and use tongs to remove pasta from the pot, but just as often I grab the pasta spoon and scoop it out with that. It’s a handy tool that sometimes I use as a substitute for a slotted spoon, since for some reason I only have one of those (I should really remedy that).
2. Garlic Press
Now, I will say that I have run across some pretty terrible garlic presses in my life, but my garlic press is fantastic and gets more use that most of the other tools in my kitchen (after, of course, my chef’s knife, cutting board, and wooden spoons). It finely crushes the garlic (and I also use it to press ginger) and I don’t have stinky garlic hands after I’m done. Bonus: you don’t have to peel the garlic first, and it comes with a handy little tool to get the skin out of the press when you’re done.
3. Toaster Oven
Guys, I live in the Southeastern U.S. It gets really hot here in the summer and I like to keep my heating bills down. Between May and October, if I can fit something in my toaster oven, that’s how it’s getting cooked. I have a super-duper awesome countertop convection oven that my in-laws bought me for my birthday a couple of years ago. It helps us keep the temperature down in the house and only takes a couple of minutes to preheat. It’s big enough to hold my 10-inch Lodge skillet, so it’s plenty big enough for me!
4. Rabbit Wine Opener
We own a couple of different types of corkscrews and sorry, this one is just far and away the easiest one to use…completely foolproof. So maybe that’s saying that we’re fools because we don’t do very well with the standard waiter corkscrew, but it’s definitely not announcing that we’re lacking in any other areas (as the chef in the article implies)!
5. Oven Mitts
Okay, so maybe I can give them this one….kitchen towels as potholders/oven mitts do make a lot of sense, and as I remodel my kitchen I’ll probably move on from the Orka silicone mitts I’ve had for years just for aesthetics and storage purposes. But for now, I still use them on a regular basis.
6. Citrus Squeezer
I actually have multiple citrus juicers…a wooden reamer, a handheld press, and a countertop glass reamer. I just find that they’re the best way for me to really get all the juice, and I use my handheld press frequently…it literally turns the fruit inside out while keeping the seeds inside the press. I don’t know what I did before I had it!
7. Slow Cooker
The argument for slow cookers is pretty obvious. You can’t (or at least I can’t…too afraid of fires) just leave my oven on with a roast or a chicken or a stew in it all day long. You can, however, leave a slow cooker out on the counter all day long cooking the aforementioned items. It’s totally worth the storage space if you ask me.
Do you use any of these kitchen tools? What are your most used kitchen tools?
