Five Must-Have Tools for Any Kitchen
It's all too easy to get seriously excited about expanding your kitchen repertoire—and seriously in debt buying for that kitchen. Here are five kitchen-related things you really need and how to use them efficiently.
Neither you nor your Lifehacker editors have the time and foresight to run down everything you'll need for all your cooking, in any kitchen, for every recipe, throughout your entire life. What we're listing here are five core purchases that any kitchen should have, along with the best advice we've seen on how to get the most for your money out of them.
The tips and research for these items are pulled from one editor's experience growing from a single dude who calls his mom to make mashed potatoes to a fairly reliable home cook who makes the big dinners, along with a few great reads:
- A No-Frills Kitchen Still Cooks (Mark Bittman, New York Times).
- Kitchen essentials, and items you can pass by (Russ Parsons, Amy Scattergood, Los Angeles Times).
- Cooks Illustrated (from print editions, subscription required for web reading).
- Our interview with food writer Michael Ruhlman.
Three decent knives, sharpener for two of them
If we were crazed minimalists, we'd say you only truly need an eight-inch, plastic-handled stainless alloy chef's knife, one you can find at a restaurant supply store for $10 (more on that later). You should test out any chef's knife you're looking at, and consider santoku-shaped blades if you do a lot of mincing or fine chopping. The key is making sure any knife feels right in your hand. The handle and weight in your hand are just as important as the blade, since proper use and sharpening should take care of that. Other than that, a sharp, sturdy paring knife and a cheap-as-you-can-get serrated bread knife have you covered for everything else. Skip the boning/fileting and utility knives, because you definitely don't filet fish or slice giant mozzarella wheels that often.
How do you keep your knife sharp? Popular Mechanics has a good two-paragraph primer. Using a two-sided sharpening stone:
... Lubricate the coarse side of the stone with mineral oil or water; then push the blade (at a 22- to 25-degree angle) across in a sweeping motion, like you're cutting a thin slice off the stone. "Flip the knife and work the other side until a slight burr forms along the edge," Montagno says. "Switch to the fine side of the stone, lift the blade to a slightly higher angle and hone off the burr to create a razor-sharp micro bevel." Obviously you can skip this process with the serrated bread knife, which can probably cut through loaves of bread long after you're dead.
Five pots and pans
How you save money here depends on how you cook. Unless you make a lot of meat dishes with reduction sauces containing browned bits, you really need just one cheap medium-sized nonstick skillet for your day-to-day cooking, small and larger-sized metal saucepan, a pasta-sized pot with a lid, and one serious, large (12- or 14-inch) steel pan with steep sides for your grander culinary ambitions, stir-frys, and bigger meat meals. We're serious on the nonstick skillet being cheap, if safe-looking, because even the most expensive kind inevitably flake off, chip, and lose their egg-repelling properties over time.
Update: We don't intend to imply you should completely cheap out on your pots and pans. As many commenters noted, good cast iron pans, treated well, can last a lifetime. We're just suggesting the multi-piece sets with every single size of pan, pot, and boiler, with three different lids, aren't really necessary for cooking.
Everything else? That's where it gets discretionary. One doesn't spend three months' salary at Sears to make sure they've got every tool for any imaginable home project, but instead builds a tool set over time. Roasting pans, springform cake pans, loaf pans, double boilers—try to borrow them for rare occasions, make do with makeshift versions, or possibly get lucky at your local Goodwill. Otherwise, another trip to the restaurant supply store is in your future.
A restaurant supply store, or an Asian market
If you're thinking about buying your cookware from a store in a mall, strip or otherwise, don't do it. Similarly, don't buy multi-pot sets, especially the kind signed by a chef you've seen on television. The best value for your dollar is found at your local or regional restaurant supply store. That's where the restaurants you recommend to friends buy their stuff, and they make their money on volume. For certain kinds of cooking hardware, Asian food markets and "trading companies" often stock a lot of really cheap goods. For recipes that require random equipment you're not sure you might use again, they're often the smart buy.
No such luck with your local map search? Try an online purveyor of restaurant wares, at least for the smaller stuff. I've had success with BigTray.com, but there are, to be sure, other sites with reliable service. Know of one? Tell us about it in the comments. Photo by star5112.
Serious instant read thermometer
You don't have to spend a lot on this, but it's crucial to buy quality instead of cheap. That's spoken as someone who loves to grill, and whose wife does not like to eat on the bleeding edge of food safety. Cook's Illustrated, the magazine that takes no advertising and tests things out to a kind of ridiculous degree, rates this $15 Taylor thermometer (pictured at right) as a best value, and you can find it even cheaper through some merchants. Go too cheap and you end up with unreadable LCD screens, melted plastic, and seriously slow updates that leave your food overcooked and the chef overworked.
Reliable, small kitchen scale
When you're new to stove-top cooking, you'll want to get precise with your meat, vegetable, and starch measurements to ensure everything stays flavored in proportion. When you start dipping your toes into baking, that's when you'll really be glad you have a scale. The way you pack flour, the moisture in the air, and the random sizes of ingredients like eggs or fruits can seriously impact the outcome of a baking recipe—unless you're weighing things in proportion. You don't have to spend a lot, but you do want something digital, that holds up to 10 pounds, and which can "tare," or set itself to zero, when you've got a container on it that doesn't count in the measurement. Photo by advencap.
What cookware, gadgets, or other kitchen items can you not imagine living without, despite our minimalist proclamations? What's the best cheap, yet awesome, item in your own cooking space? Trade your tips in the comments.
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