Gotta-have-it kitchen gadgets tame wildest culinary adventures
Walk into a kitchen supply store and you’re in an esoteric world. There’s a gadget for everything, including honey drizzlers, lemon zesters and egg separators. Cooks call it the “batterie de cuisine.”
Kitchen gadgets are kind of like golf clubs – there’s always a new one out there that will surely lead to success. As with golf clubs, men are often most lured by the latest gadget. “Women have been cooking for so long that they’re not as impressed,” says Amalia Duran-Wolff, cooking school manager at Everything But the Kitchen Sink in Hockessin, Del. Still, many women love their gadgets, she says.
In recent years, kitchen gadgets have become more ergonomic, made from new heat-resistant compounds and built to last. Many are expensive and you probably won’t use them every day or even every week.
So what does the beginning cook really need? Besides the basic knives, wooden spoons and spatulas, not much.
Here are six essential gadgets that you’ll use most often.
1. Salad spinner
Crunchy, unwashed salad is a bummer. Wet salad is almost as bad. Most salad dressings are oil-based, and water and oil don’t mix. So if the lettuce is wet, the dressing won’t stick, and the salad will feel slimy in the mouth. The salad spinner saves the day. Wash your lettuce and spin dry. Centrifugal force wicks the water off the lettuce. Various models use a pumped piston, string or a crank to get the basket spinning. The OXO pump version ($25) is one of the most popular.
2. Meat thermometer
Most chefs have a thermometer in their breast pocket at all times. Temperature is the best way to tell if food is cooked through. For pork and poultry, you’ll want to make sure that the meat is cooked to kill bacteria such as salmonella. With beef you can use it to cook to rare, medium or well done.
3. Corkscrew
This is the first and last gadget you’ll use when you throw a dinner party. Open a bottle of wine for yourself when you start cooking and another when your guests arrive. The classic waiter’s corkscrew (about $6) is a little difficult to use, but it is the most versatile. You need versatility to handle situations including dry corks that break off, thick lips on some bottles and slippery synthetic corks. Use the knife blade to cut the foil or plastic wrapper (underneath the band at the lip of the bottle).
4. Microplane grater
This product (about $15) caused a cosmic realignment in the world of cheese grating. It’s more like a wood rasp than a traditional grater. It’s sharp, produces fine strips of cheese and chocolate and works great for zesting oranges and lemons. Because the teeth are sharp and shallow, they bite off the oily skin but not the pith of fruits. It is available in various sizes, too.
5. Juicer
One of the best human-powered cooking tools, the reamer-juicer (about $4) allows you to get the maximum amount of juice out of a lemon, lime or orange because you can get to every globule in the pulp. The more you cook, the more you’ll find yourself using a little bit of lemon juice to perk up your dishes. Plus, once you taste a real margarita, made with fresh-squeezed lime juice, the reamer-juicer will become an extension of your hand. You’ll end up using it every weekend.
6. KitchenAid mixer
When you’re ready to really get cooking, one of the first heavy-duty gadgets to buy is the KitchenAid mixer. Solidly built and powerful, the mixer easily handles a variety of otherwise menial chores. Making whipped cream or mashed potatoes is nearly effortless. Bring egg whites to stiff peaks in moments. With the dough hook, you can make bread almost as easily as with a bread machine. You also can buy attachments for making pasta or sausages. The basic 325-watt mixer with 10 speeds lists for $289, but they’re readily available for far less on the Web and at department stores.