- Category
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- Prep 99
- Cooking 62
- Serving 48
- Entertaining 15
- Storage 23
- Miscellaneous 12
The Essential Kitchen
We thought it might be helpful to group our Cool Tools in categories that reflect their role in the meal creation process. So here is our attempt to be helpful:
- Prep: These are the tools that are your workhorses, and the ones that most take the place of a sous-chef. These Cool Tools help you prepare your ingredients to be cooked. In finding Cool Tools for food prep, functionality, time saving and ease of use are the most important things we look for. Each and every one of these does its job particularly well and takes your food prep from drudgery to fun (well, almost!) When we finally carry knives, they will fit in this section.
- Cooking: These are the Cool Tools that you actually use during the cooking process; that means they have to be easy to use, handy to pick up, and work well without thinking about it, because your focus should be on the food--these Cool Tools take a supporting role.
- Serving: These are the Cool Tools that take your meal from the kitchen to the table, and make it easy and beautiful to serve your food.
- Entertaining: These are all the Cool Tools that are part of your entertaining repertoire and make the event easy for you and memorable for your guests.
- Storage: When the meal is over, what do you do with all those leftover bits? These Cool Tools will help.
- Miscellaneous: These are some more Cool Tools that we love, but they didn't fit neatly into one of the other categories.
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Gefu Primeline Carving / Serving Fork - G26Why It's Cool: Thin tines and sleek look make this carving and serving fork as pretty as it is functional.Serving a beautiful roast is a celebration, but it can also be a challenge … you spend all the money, time, and effort to acquire the perfect piece of meat - in quality and size...
GEFU Primeline (Fish, etc.) Turner - G25Why It's Cool: At last: the perfect turner! The silicone edge makes it usable in non-stick pans, while the flexibility of the fish turner design makes it easy to slide under your food.The ‘basic’ turner - or ‘spatula’ - presents several issues, especially if you use non-stick or coated pans. Many have single-piece blades, either rigid or semi-rigid,...
Norpro Stainless Steel Herb and Kale Stripper and Chopper - N12Why It's Cool: Not only does this strip all different kinds of herbs and kale, it has a blade to chop them as well.OK - you know you love the special flavors that herbs can add to a variety of dishes. But the ‘dried’ stuff in bottles doesn’t deliver the punch you want, and the effort of...
Olipac Stainless Steel Olive Oil Bottles by IPAC - I10Why It's Cool: Strikingly beautiful olive oil bottles for kitchen or dining tableWe always look for kitchen tools that are high design, high functionality, but sometimes we see something that blows us away. When we were walking the show in Chicago last month,...
fusionbrands Silicone WaveSponge - F51Why It's Cool: A great multi-functional cleaning tool for all your pots and pansWe’ll start this review from a 180⁰ perspective: instead of discussing tasks that need to be performed in your kitchen, and concluding with ‘why this Tool is a...
Gefu Flexicut Vegetable Splitter (Cutter) - G30Why It's Cool: Easily cuts round things (fruits or vegetables) into quarters or eigths, without risk to life or limbOne of the most difficult categories of things to cut a lot of are round things. Think about it: Brussels sprouts, carrots, small potatoes, cherry tomatoes, radishes, cucumbers,...
OXO V-Blade Mandoline SlicerA mandoline is both awesome and scary. Awesome, because it really can do things a knife can’t (at least not when wielded by a mere amateur), like julienning a couple of pounds...
Norpro Stainless Steel Scoops-1 TbspOne of my favorite hors d’oeuvre to make when I have company is gougères: those airy, cheesy puffs that melt in your mouth. The hardest thing about gougères is dealing with...
Zulay Pizza Cutter - Z11Why It's Cool: A more natural way to cut pizza (the leverage is from above); the blade is deep enough to cut through even a fluffy frittata and is covered for safe storage in your drawer.We love pizza...who doesn't? But cutting pizza is always an issue. Knives don't always do a good job; and the traditional pizza cutters just seem to have really weird...
Tovolo Olive Wood Tools - T31Why It's Cool: Beautiful natural wood tools that won't scratch your pots and pans in useful shapes with comfotable handlesThe natural beauty of olive wood tools just make you feel good using them in the kitchen--it’s a back-to-nature kind of thing. And they’re also good for your pots and pans and...