You haven’t seen your kitchen countertops in months. You prepare your meals on the dining table, because it’s the only unclaimed flat surface remaining in your kitchen. Salad shooters, automatic bagel-slicers, electric shoestring-potato makers—wait, it’s not your kitchen anymore, it’s the clearance department at Williams-Sonoma. If you barely have enough room to make coffee in the morning, perhaps it’s time to thin the herd a bit.
What was I Thinking?
Taken individually, all your gadgets sort of made sense at the time you bought them. How could you live without the Wüstof Cutlery? Well, you can’t possibly. And wouldn’t those cutting tasks be easier using an electric carving knife? Or course they would. And wouldn’t those vegetables get cut faster with an electric vegetable chopper? Sure! Yet somewhere along the road to efficiency, you stumbled into the ditch of redundancy, and you’re feeling stuck there.
There are only a small handful of indispensable appliances. Most of the doodads cluttering up our cabinets and counter-tops simply boast of doing everyday tasks a little easier, faster, or cooler than our existing tools.
But those gleaming gizmos won’t really make you a better cook, and real chefs don’t mess about with such toys anyway. A true professional chef is far more likely to treasure some favorite knife than a clunky hunk of plastic that only has the brains to perform a single task.
So do like they do. Don’t purchase any one-trick-pony kitchen appliances, no matter what. Choose only sturdy, reliable appliances that can adapt to do many things well.
The Essentials
Here is a list of basic kitchen appliances that every well-equipped kitchen needs.
The Blender
The kitchen MVP. It makes smoothies, soups, sauces, crushed ice, you name it. But don’t get carried away, Inspector Gadget, a basic model will likely do just fine.
The Electric Mixer
Yes, you could do it by hand, but why bother? If you do any baking at all, you know how indispensable electric mixers are. Hand-held models are far cheaper and easier to store, but freestanding models mix more evenly, and don’t require baby-sitting while they work, freeing you up to multi-task in the kitchen. Either way, it’s a must-have.
The Toaster Oven
Despite a lot of marketing chatter from the high-end appliance makers, the most sophisticated toasters still only toast bread. But a toaster oven can do that, and so much more. They are perfect for cooking smaller amounts of foods that don’t do well in microwaves, and they save time and energy over conventional ovens. All this, and a footprint no bigger than the more limited toaster. Plus, some models can be mounted under your cabinets to save even more space.
The Microwave
Yes, they get a bad rap from foodies, and it has been a codeword for cheap, lazy cooking for decades. But for many kitchen tasks, nothing beats a microwave. Granted, not everything does well from being cooked in a microwave, but most professional kitchens have at least one.
The Crock Pot
It is inadvisable for safety reasons to leave food cooking on the stove overnight while you sleep, and even less so to go off to work with an open flame sputtering away. But with a crock pot, you can safely slow cook all manner of stews, soups, roasts, briskets, casseroles, desserts, and so on, using low heat, little energy and very little effort.
The Small Appliance Hall of Shame
Honestly, who would buy these!? Oh, you did? Gosh, aren’t you ashamed?
The Rice Cooker.
It harnesses the power of electricity! It cooks rice! It…well, that’s about it really.
The Electric Carving Knife
Somehow it seemed easier to buy one of these than sharpen the conventional knife you already owned. For most people, it was used once—and then forever banished to the bottom drawer.
The Automatic Juice Maker
Instead of spending money on expensive fresh orange juice, we bought these huge ungainly appliances. We wasted twice the price of juice on grocery store oranges, made a horrible mess, and then struggled to clean the parts before reassembling it.
The Hardboiled Egg Cooker
The creation of hard-boiled eggs, that eternal mystery which has forever bedeviled mankind, now gloriously solved! More fodder for landfills.
If any of the above are cluttering up your counters, or you have anything uselessly gathering dust in your kitchen, do yourself a favor and conduct a purge. Give unused gadgets to Goodwill, pawn them off on a neighbor, get a buck for them at a garage sale, whatever, so long as you reclaim your space and simplify your life.
The kitchen is more than just a place to prepare meals for the family, it’s an opportunity to use your creativity, experiment, and be a little adventurous. But you don’t need fancy equipment to make good food. Keep it simple. Bon Appétit!
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