Originally Posted by
exerda
My most critical kitchen gadgets:
- Good Japanese high carbon steel knives. Much more care required but so much sharper and better cutting than even the priciest stainless steel knives. My general-purpose kitchen knife (a gyutou vs. a santoku) cost only a bit more than my stainless steel santoku and is 1000x better at cutting. Granted, the sharpening stones cost double what the knife did, but I could have gone cheaper on those stones had I wished.
- Pressure cooker. Easy risotto, quick beans, grains, etc.
- Sous vide. Perfect meats, parcooked starches, and more. I don't get the hostility toward them... Properly used, they're invaluable in the kitchen. Yes, you can turn your meat to mush... but you can also cook a steak to medium-rare all the way through, straight out of the freezer, and you can end up with fork-tender roasts. As with any kitchen tool, you have to know how to use it!
- Vitamix or equivalent. Regular blenders cannot replace them. I use mine daily, sometimes multiple times a day. Smoothies, soups, salad dressings, etc.
- Immersion blender. Great for soups, and almost foolproof for making aioli and mayo and other emulsions that can be a pain otherwise.
- Specialty pans for tamago-yaki, crepes, and paella. You can improvise, but the results aren't the same.
- Good mixer. I have a KitchenAid Pro 6 from 15+ years ago, and other than having to effect a repair on my own (correcting a design flaw), it's been a workhorse of the kitchen.
- Microplanes.
- Half-sheet pan silicone sheets.
My least-used kitchen gadgets:
- Ricer. I typically mash potatoes with a masher. If I really want them done right, I sous-vide them to the gelatinization temp for the starches (I'd have to look it up), then put them on ice for a couple of hours, then cook them. No need for a ricer IME if you do them that way.
- Jaccard. Yes, I know some people swear by them, but I just haven't found the need. Maybe I cook better cuts of meat, or prepare them differently. I'm also concerned about introducing surface bacteria into the inside of a cut of meat that I want to cook to rare or medium-rare (yes, you can cook longer in the sous vide to achieve effective pasteurization, I suppose).
- Crock pot. The problem is that my wife doesn't eat meat, so I lose most of the benefits since I'd have to cook the meat separately and add it at the end for my portion. Otherwise, this would be a much more-used device.
I have to use my bosch mixer and a few other gadgets like griddles - I have like 4 in my kitchen - zester, sandwich press to name a few
Last edited by cblaisd; May 28, 2016 at 6:44 am
Reason: Removed broken link