Essential Kitchen Tools

In our last lesson, I recommended making a packing list for your kitchen as if you were planning on moving and could only take the essentials for your kitchen with you. The goal is to pare your kitchen down, and in the process, transform it to a much less time consuming space in your home. But how do you know what the essential tools are?

The answer to that is pretty personal, but there are a few universal essentials to get you started:

• Sharp kitchen knife
• Knife sharpener
• Cutting board
• Cooking pot with lid
• Utensils for eating
• Soap dispenser and soap
• Cleaning cloths

Most of us are not super minimalists, but if you want to go hard core mimimal in your kitchen, go you! If you’re not interested in such an extreme reduction (I’m not, personally), you still may be able to achieve a more streamlined kitchen by applying this principle:

• Replace specialty items with multi-use items.

Specialty items are things like apple corer slicers and sandwich toasters that cook an imprint of mickey mouse into PB&J sandwiches, as long as they’re made with the right size of bread. Multi-use items are things like super sharp knives that, if you’ve got good knife skills, can cut not only apples, but anything else as well. If you really want to toast your PB&J, you can do that with a multi-use item like a griddle that can also cook pancakes, eggs, bacon, and a lot of other stuff too. 

If you’re pressing 20 cloves of garlic at a time on a regular basis, a specialty item like garlic press may be worth the time it takes to clean and store a garlic press. Some specialty items make sense for you in your streamlined kitchen. But if you’re not frequently pressing lots of garlic, using, storing, and cleaning one or two good knives may end up being more efficient than using,storing, and cleaning that garlic press. Your knives can take care of the garlic and a LOT of other food prep. The garlic press is pretty much only good for garlic. 

I don’t know how often you can really cook on that mickey mouse griller thing, and it’s a pain to clean. Removing those kinds of super specific gadgets from your kitchen will free up your life. If printing mickey on the sandwich the only way you can get your kid to eat though, you better keep the thing.  

I recommend having two place settings per person for regular use, but you may even be able to go with just one place setting per person. 

You may be thinking, “But my specialty gadgets save time whenever I do this thing or that!” They may be much quicker at chopping, cooking, or embossing mickey’s face, but do they still save time when you factor in the space and cleanup and care they require? How easy is it to clean that gadget? Is it as easy as cleaning your knife? Looking at the bigger picture of the time and effort and space your things take (and the benefit they give) will help you know what should stay and what should go in the streamlined kitchen. 

Homework: Refine your kitchen packing list based on ideas from this lesson.