5 Kitchen Appliances We Couldn’t Live Without
Which plug-in gadgets make cooking easier? Which kitchen gadgets come out of the cupboard most often? Without these five, we wouldn’t have a life.
What you like to eat determines which kitchen appliances you want to have. Addicted to smoothies? Buy an expensive blender. Is your rice always burnt or mushy? Invest in a rice cooker. Have chef aspirations? Then the sous-vide machine is probably on every evening. Aside from those personal preferences: these are five appliances that help everyone (yes, you too) cook faster and more easily.
Grill
A ridged contact grill. Don’t just use it to make the perfect toasted sandwich, but also to grill courgette, aubergine and other vegetables, or to get perfect grill marks or crosshatches on a juicy burger without a barbecue. Of course, you can heat up a grill pan, fire up the barbecue or use your oven’s grill, but a good contact grill works faster and more cleanly. Plus: those perfect toasted sandwiches.
Stand mixer
Almost everyone starts their cooking career with an electric mixer, whether it’s a cheap little mixer from Hema or a retro mixer from your parents’ kitchen cupboard. At some point the cord is rock-hard, the beaters are bent (you really shouldn’t have stuck a spoon between them) and those mysterious stains—is that blood or fermented cake batter? Enter: the stand mixer. Convenient, because your hands are free. No more juggling when you want to add a thin stream of oil to your homemade mayonnaise, pour hot sugar syrup into your Italian meringue, or whisk butter and sugar until white and creamy without getting a frozen shoulder. Treat yourself to a real Kitchenaid (heart) or keep an eye on Lidl and Aldi for a good knockoff.
Slow cooker
How much work is a stew or simmering curry, really? Almost none, but you do have to be home all day to stir a pot now and then. The solution is the slow cooker. In the morning, all the ingredients go into the pot at the same time, and both the pot and its owner get on with their own business. Once the cooking time is up, the slow cooker switches to the keep-warm setting. Another advantage: the slow cooker’s temperature is lower than that of the smallest burner on a gas stove, so the boeuf bourguignon becomes even more tender and the stock even more intense.
Kettle
A childish kitchen tool? Not at all. Use it just like Jamie Oliver and switch the kettle on when you start cooking. The water for cooking rice, pasta or vegetables reaches boiling point faster. Need to blanch something quickly? Kettle. Need to soak couscous? Kettle. People with sturdy freezer bags and an expensive kettle with adjustable temperature settings can also use it as a sous-vide cooker. Student tip: you can boil eggs in it too.
Immersion blender
Not just for baby food or when your braces have just been tightened, because no immersion blender stays in the cupboard for longer than a week. When buying one, pay attention to the cord length (where is the outlet and where is the stove?), choose an immersion blender with a metal blending foot (it can handle heat and won’t discolour from beetroot or curry sauce), and get one of those handy chopping bowls too. If we take stock of an average week: guacamole, chopped nuts, salad dressing, courgette soup, tuna sauce for vitello tonnato, banana-strawberry-coconut smoothie, cauliflower rice and aioli. No, seriously, how would you manage without an immersion blender?
Read also:
