Boring Tools That Are Secretly Impressive

I think anytime you buy a countertop slushy machine, you'll get a lot of comments from house guests about how cool it is. If oohs and aahs are what you're after, dedicating $500 a month to a new Shark Ninja product savings fund is the sure-fire way. But, I wanted to spend a few months taking note of which everyday tools I already own that get that same response. These are things that, whenever I pull them out, someone seems to make a remark, whether it's a dinner guest or my wife watching me cook from the other room. Here is what made the list. First, Chef's Press

weights. I use these once a day minimum, and I see them on social media so frequently that I foolishly assumed that they had become commonplace. My note-taking exercise revealed that the Chef's Press is still very much a niche tool. They're weights that go on your food while it's cooking to press the food against the pan more fully. — They come in different weights, but you can stack them or stagger them to dial in the pressure. Any sandwich with one of these on top is going to come out really well browned edge to edge. A hunk of meat that wants to pucker up and curl is well wrangled by a Chef's Press. some of these for like 15 years, and as far as I know, nobody really makes a cheaper version of them. Somebody from my Patreon made these extra-large custom ones as prizes for a cooking competition that we held in the Discord server last year. Unless that's a violation of intellectual property law, in which case

no, they didn't. This is a Silpat. Well, not really. Silpat is a registered trademark like Kleenex or Velcro. Technically, this is an off-brand silicone baking mat. Unlike Chef's Press, there do exist cheap knock-offs of Silpats. Whenever cookie baking time comes, Bree is bringing one of these out with delight. Nothing sticks to them. You can pour liquid sugar right on top, let it harden into an impossibly sticky hard candy, and then peel it right off. I don't go crazy for these because I don't like washing something big and floppy in the sink, but Bree finds this to be far superior to parchment paper, which warps, shreds, and wrinkles when you try to wrestle it down onto the baking sheet. The reusability of this silicone mat makes her feel nice as

well. I had to Google the name of this thing since it's an item I took from my mom's kitchen in 2010, and it turns out it's called a spiral whisk. It's the perfect tool for whisking something in which the vessel is nowhere near full. It stays low to the bottom with lots of material for lots of aeration. A single toddler-sized portion of instant pancake mix in a bowl means it's spiral whisk time. Melting cheese into a béchamel I still use a milk frother for micro-sized whisking tasks, but as soon as I have a task that might overwhelm its motor, like emulsifying three [snorts] servings of vinaigrette for our family's salad at dinner time, it's spiral whisk time. Just a short

mention for this one, since long-time viewers already know it by name, the DiOro silicone spatula. We have like six of these in different colors and shapes. They work on nonstick pans without scratching them, but they're stiff and sturdy enough to hold up to tough tasks. There's a spiritual bond between all of us who grew up in households where wasting food could get you whipped with an extension cord, so being able to get every last drop of scrambled egg out of the bowl makes me and certain onlookers feel like good people worthy of love and affection. I don't know if I would ever

tell someone to buy one of these, and I certainly don't feel loyal to any particular brand, but we did receive one for free as a hand-me-down from Bree's coworker. It's a combination pressure cooker and air fryer. It is heavy. It takes up a ton of space. The shrill beep that it makes every time I power it on drives me nuts. The design isn't great as an air fryer alone, because the hot air rises, so opening the lid to stir your chicken nuggets around lets out a ton of valuable heat, but I put up with all of that, because it's also a pressure cooker. That enables the cookery of steel-cut oats in a couple minutes, chicken stock in an hour, and braised beef in 40 minutes. It does a great job at pressure cooking, a good job at air frying, and so-so job at its dozen other multi-cooker functionalities. I would never use this thing to sear meat by choice. I did try making yogurt five times, but it didn't turn out to be very effective on time nor cost. Even though it doesn't spark joy in this household, it does start a conversation every time we bring it out from people who go, "Wow, it's an air fryer and an Instant Pot? " And then I get to go, "Hey, there's no such thing as an Insta pot. You must be thinking of popular automatic pressure cooker brand Instant Pot. " And then, before you know it, we have one fewer house guest on our roster for future engagements. The last

entry in this list isn't really a product as much as it is a product concept. Having tools in all different sizes, shapes, and materials. People who cook all understand the inexplicable joy of pulling out the perfectly shaped spoon for a job. Like this short, wide, wooden spoon that I use anytime I'm about to serve rice. Grilling outside with live flames lapping up at your forearm hair requires a long metal tong, but flipping tiny meat chunks in a pan one by one is a lot more enjoyable with a tiny tong. Whenever we imagine the tools of a seasoned chef, it's always different shapes and sizes of knife. Never the prized collection of spoons, slotted, long, shrunken, and bulbous. The part that nags me in the back of my mind whenever I make a list about tools is I know someone's out there building an Amazon cart piece by piece with every new entry I bring forth, but at the very least, let this part of your collection be the one that you commit to building slowly from hand-me-downs and thrift stores. Allow your arsenal to grow slowly, and each piece is far more likely to be imbued with meaning. I want

to close this schlong-form listicle with some dishonorable mentions of items in our kitchen that elicit negative comments, especially from my wife who has to look at them every day. She hates this giant roll of plastic wrap that I keep on the windowsill. I buy one every five-ish years, and I love it. The weight of this giant roll means that you can just pull out a small sheet and tear it with ease, rather than holding a tiny, narrow box in one hand and cling film in the other. I think seeing this massive box brings her attention to the wasteful nature of single-use plastic. Try as I might to switch to beeswax, it's simply ain't happening. She also hates this open

container of compost. She finds it ugly as sin, and I agree. I use it because it slots into this device called a Lomi that I got for $40 second-hand. I think the Lomi is an annoying product that never should have been able to make the claims that it originally did. And I imagine that the brand agrees because years ago it appears the legal team replaced all instances of this machine makes compost with this machine makes loamy earth, which is of course a nonsense phrase that means nothing. These machines dry and grind your food scraps. That's not what compost is. If you sprinkle loamy earth all over your house plants, it's going to rehydrate, get moldy, and attract 100 flying pests per day. — I got it because it was available at a mega discount and I use it because I prefer to feed my worms ground up food waste that they can eat much faster. Yes, I could achieve this by blending all my food scraps in a blender every day, but can you imagine the optics? Like all good compromises, we land in the middle with this ugly bucket on our counter every day in exchange for yummy homemade meals on the table every night. You say, "Happy spouse, happy house. " I say, "At the heart of the meal is the art of the deal. "

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