a well-edited kitchen: what's in yours?
Let me come clean right now, I’m not talking about my own. I have way too many pots and pans stuffed into my cabinets and enough kitchen gadgets to open a store! That said, I am trying to edit my over-stocked space (so I don’t have to remove seven items to get to the one item I want to use). As a food editor, I’ve written countless times about the five (or 10 or 20) most essential kitchen tools a cook needs. I’ve discussed the reality of only needing three knives: a chef’s knife, a paring knife and a serrated one. I have six. I’ve mentioned the versatility of a cast iron pan and touted its ability to stand up as a household’s sole skillet. Mine sits underneath a stack of four others still waiting to be seasoned. I know I should practice what I preach, but each time I go to rid myself of unwanted clutter my mind races with thoughts of, “but one day I’ll need that.”
The truth is, there is a substitute tool for almost every item in your kitchen. Before all these one-hit-wonder convenience products hit the market cooks did just fine without them. I can still slice an apple without an apple corer, can’t I?
Tell me then, what are your most used/loved/essential kitchen items? What one item can’t you live without? What’s taking up space in your cabinets and drawers, but you just can’t seem to find the courage to toss it out? — Erica P.
I need EVERYTHING in my drawers and cabinets. Otherwise, how would my girlfriend create the mountains of dishes for me to clean after dinner?
I have a lot of kitchen stuff, but on an average night I use:
-8 inch chef’s knife, bird’s beak paring knife or 4-inch paring knife from E. Dehillerin
-Medium and small Epicurean composite cutting boards (love these)
-Either a 3-quart all-clad sauce pan, my pasta pot or a 14-inch all-clad skillet
-1-cup and 3-cup pyrex measuring cups, for mixing sauces, etc. and/or my stackable glass mis en place bowls, which come in sizes from single egg yolk to pasta salad
Occasionally I use the cuisinart, more often I use my immersion blender. I almost never use my wok, but I keep meaning to. I have a garlic twist that I really like, and a good vegetable peeler. And a little wood citrus reamer. A digital scale. A zester. A great bread knife. Among the piles of tools and gadgets I’d say those are the ones I use regularly.
I am extremely lucky for a city-dweller, though–here is a before/after of my walk-in pantry, from right after I moved last summer.
I also have a baker’s rack holding my pans, and a butler’s pantry storing all the dishes. When we did our kitchen we installed its first-ever cupboards, but the two original pantries store so much that I just use one of the cupboards for an appliance lift to hold the KitchenAid (best idea ever, the appliance lift) and the other to hold the wok and panini press.
I have a gigantic pizza cutter that we use maybe once a year, yet for some reason I MIGHT NEED IT so I still hang onto it (even though I nick myself on it in the drawer regularly). I need a really large pot to boil corn and seafood in, yet somehow never get around to buying one. Oh, I also have a food processor disassembled into parts in at least three sections of our tiny kitchen, that we haven’t used in two years. Just in case we suddenly get the urge for hummus, i guess.
I bought an All Clad 10″ skillet and 3.5 qt saucepan last winter to replace a motley collection of scratched and toxic nonstick pans and unintentionally enacted the “two pan rule” in our house. The change in our kitchen has been dramatic: I’m a lazy dishwasher, but two pans simply can’t pile up in the sink. It may sound silly, but I’ll admit the simplicity of this system has been a great relief.
Disclaimer: I have a grill on one-half of my stove (so only two burners anyway), and I keep some special pans–a 12″ skillet and a large enameled cast iron dutch oven among them–tucked away in a cupboard, but I’m amazed how convenient it is do the majority of stovetop cooking–appropriately, too, not half-a**ed–in those two pans.
As an avid home cook and fledgling caterer, I really do need a lot of stuff, but I have edited down quite a bit, paring down things like my vintage le creuset collection down to just a few favorites. I have 3 chef knives, but I couldn’t give up my Henkels to save my life, and I also would *never* part with my perfectly seasoned 10 inch cast iron skillet, which I salvaged from a customers trash and restored. I travel with my cast iron skillet. Oh. and you can pry my Gaggia espresso machine from my cold dead hands.
Tell me then, what are your most used/loved/essential kitchen items?
–Food processor, stand mixer, immersion blender, wooden spoon, silicone spatula.
What one item can’t you live without?
–Well, when it comes down to it, I could probably live without most things. However, the super-sharp Global chef’s knife is pretty essential.
What’s taking up space in your cabinets and drawers, but you just can’t seem to find the courage to toss it out?
–Nothing. If I had a bigger kitchen, this wouldn’t be an issue. ;)
My cast iron skillet is the one item I couldn’t live with out…..and a spatula. Really, that is all I need. I saute veggies/tofu/all kinds of fake meat in there and also make pancakes and that kind of stuff, plus you can put it in the oven. I used it to make a pineapple upside down cake the other night. If I had one pan I had to have forever it would be this pan.
Plus, the iron in the pan gets in your food and contributes to iron in your diet! It’s win win.
Holy moly, I don’t think I could part with ANYTHING I have. My favorite pan might be the large “chef’s pan” that I got on sale at Tuesday Morning. It’s from the “Calphalon Contemporary Stainless” series – a nice, wide pan, about 4 inches deep and holds 3 quarts total. I fry, saute, steam, caramelize – I can do basically anything in that pan besides eggs! It heats beautifully and evenly and cleans up like a dream. I got 2-qt and 8-qt saucepans at the same time (from the same series), and those are the three items I use most in my kitchen. The 8-quart has cooked everything from a Thai winter stew with tofu and butternut squash to a wickedly delicious pot full of chocolate caramel for gift-giving. These are so superior to any other pans I’ve had that I’m almost willing to give up my dream of upgrading to All-Clad.
Almost.
I also have a lot of bakeware – I love baking and have recently started a smidge of catering. I have muffin/cupcake pans (regular and mini); cake rounds in 9 inch, 8 inch and 6 inch; a few casserole dishes, pie plates (one of which is filled with a no-bake strawberry pie right this minute), cookie sheets, jelly roll pans, loaf pans and a heavy-duty square Calphalon baking dish I couldn’t resist for some reason but have hardly used. (Maybe that’s the item I should pitch.)
Big equipment I can’t live without:
stand mixer/food processor
Ditto on this little stuff: wooden spoon, silicone spatula, candy thermometer, plastic piping bags/icing tips, parchment paper (after years of trying both, I like the results of parchment much better than those Silpat mats I used to swear by)
All my knives are essential.
What’s really helped my storage is getting a magnetic knife rack.
I can’t live without my colander!
This is such an appropriate question for me right now. We’re buying a house and we’re going to have to gut the kitchen. I love the way open shelving looks and feels in a kitchen so I’m going through all of my kitchen stuff to see what I really need.
What do I have that I use all the time?
-4 in. knife
-Set of 3 mixing bowls in a creamy green- bought at Big Lots because I like the color and they end up on my table as serving dishes all the time.
-Sunbeam Breadmaker- not the best one out there but I’m kind of hard on them.
- My medium sized Chili pot.
- Wooden spoons
- my pyrex 2 cup measuring cup.
What do I have but never use?
- The coffee maker- I bought a french press since I’m the only one who drinks it.
- The hard cheese grater, egg slicer, the cheap measuring spoons, the 4 large casserole dishes- wedding presents… need I say more?
- My muffin tin (only once in a blue moon does it come out)
- My china (to my frustration- it’s all got to be cleaned by hand and I am a little afraid I’ll break it).
[...] 1. Pairing down your kitchen to just the essentials is NOT easy. When asked what she would edit out, Holly summed up most of our thoughts by saying: “Holy moly, I don’t think I could part with ANYTHING I have.” Chara, on the other hand, did come up with a few things that could go: “The hard cheese grater, egg slicer, the cheap measuring spoons, the 4 large casserole dishes — wedding presents… need I say more?” What would you keep or throw out in your kitchen? Click here to weigh in! [...]
Before our recent move from the East to the Mid-west, I really took a good look at our kitchen things and did a lot of purging.
I got rid of an extra set of cookware–I put two sets in my registry in ’99 and got both sets as gifts. I only really used one.
Dishware that I didn’t love–I bought it for entertaining, but we never had anyone over. My aunt was happy to receive. I also had a mismatched set of Corelle that dh and I brought into the relationship. Those went too. As replacements, I bought White Corelle because I have small kids that needed a light plate to carry to and from the table. I bought a set of 12 and it is our entertaining set too.
Plasticware–I have a nice set of glassware with lids from Martha Stewart, so I didn’t need smelly and stained plastic for storage.
I got rid of the sippy cups–does a 4 and 6 year old need sippies? I replaced them with plastic tumblers.
I got rid of all collectible mugs, travel coffee mugs, that superset of glass cups that were given to us at our wedding, which I hated to move around for almost 9 years.
Mismatched silverware–I bought a nice set of 12 that all match.
I became more organized with storing the extra measuring spoons, cooking spoons, etc. Because I know that I use them all. I also don’t have a ton of small appliances. I know what I can manage, and what needs to be let go.
With the exception of the plasticware, I donated or gifted all the items that I parted with. It felt good, and I have reaped the rewards of being generous by getting some good luck in return.
Seems truly superfluous, but these days I can’t live without my salad spinner. I participate in community shared agriculture and receive a basket of fresh, organic vegetables each week. I don’t think that I’ve ever eaten so many greens in my life. Needless to say, the salad spinner is a major time saver, making drying veggies super easy. Proper cleaning and storage greatly extends shelf life.
[...] time in the kitchen and they’ll tell you how important it is to have a good knife. I have a few favorites in my drawer, but there is a new knife I’ve got my eye on. Knifemaker Joel Bukiewiciz hand [...]
[...] when I wrote about a well-edited kitchen? I shared my plight of way too many pots, pans, gadgets, and dishes that I’m just not ready to [...]