The kitchen is considered one of the most important parts of a home, as it is in the kitchen where the family will be able to prepare or cook food that is served for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Because of the importance of the kitchen in a household, it is essential for many families or homeowners to fill the kitchen with all the necessary products, items, tools, and appliances that are needed for cooking or preparing meals.
While appliances like stoves and ovens are already known by many, a lot of people actually don’t know about some of the smaller items that are important to have in the kitchen, like the pepper mill and the thermometer. To learn more about them, here are details about the essential and underrated items and tools for your kitchen.
Pepper Mill
The pepper mill is a kitchen item that is used to grind peppercorns in order to make pepper, an essential ingredient for many dishes or recipes. You can easily buy ground pepper in grocery stores and markets, but a lot of people say that they don’t taste as good as freshly ground peppercorns. So, if you really want to enhance the flavor of your dishes, you should get peppercorns and a proper pepper mill that will give you a fresh supply of ground pepper whenever you need it.
Instant-Read Thermometer
When you are cooking whole chicken or steaks, you often can’t tell if they are properly cooked on the inside, especially if you are a beginner. So, in order to see if the food is cooked properly, you would need to use an instant-read thermometer, which is a type of thermometer that has a needle that you can use to pierce the meat and see if the temperature at the center of the meat is sufficient for it to be cooked from the inside. As the name of the tool suggests, the instant-read thermometer will be able to tell you the temperature inside the meat in just a few seconds.
Measuring Cups and Spoons
Most people make the common mistake of not measuring a lot of things when it comes to cooking food, and this mistake could often lead to bad dishes that don’t really taste good. So, if you want to make the perfect meals for your family, you will need to have a proper set of measuring spoons and cups that will allow you to measure ingredients efficiently.
Kitchen Scale
Another tool that you should have in the kitchen to have proper measurements is the kitchen scale, which is typically smaller than a weighing scale used in markets and grocery stores so that it can fit on small kitchen desks or tables. The kitchen scale measures the weight of ingredients, which is also essential for various recipes. A lot of kitchen scales today are battery-operated, and there are also some that you can connect to the internet to get more information about the ingredients you are measuring.
Tongs
Handling meat and other ingredients that you are cooking on a skillet or frying pan can be quite difficult or challenging if you are just using a metal or wooden spatula. So, if you want an easier time turning over ingredients on the pan, you should use tongs, a tool that is used to grip or lift meat and ingredients to turn them over or to transfer them to another pan or container. The tongs act like a crab’s claw because they give you a firm grip on whatever you are supposed to hold on the pan.
Immersion Blender
If you don’t really have space in your kitchen for a large blender, we recommend that you get an immersion blender, which is a much smaller blender that looks like a stick instead of a regular blender that has a transparent container and a lid.
Unlike the regular blender that has the blades located at the bottom of the container, the immersion blender features the same blades, but those are located at the end of the stick opposite the power plug. Because the immersion blender doesn’t have a container, you may need to place the ingredients you will be blending in a bowl or cup.
Kitchen Shears
Sometimes, a kitchen knife is not enough to cut several pieces of vegetables, fruits, and meat efficiently. In order to have an easier and quicker time cutting through ingredients, you will need a pair of kitchen shears, which are scissors that are specifically used in the kitchen for ingredients or for opening food packaging.
Besides cutting ingredients into several pieces, the kitchen shear is also used to cut away unwanted parts of vegetables and meat, like herb steams and meat fat that is usually trimmed. There are many kinds and models of kitchen shears you can buy online and in physical stores, but we recommend the ones that you can disassemble so that you can clean them thoroughly after use.
Timer
One of the most underrated kitchen items today is the timer, which is used to count specific minutes or seconds that are needed to prepare certain dishes or ingredients. The reason why the timer is underrated today is because smartphones, a gadget that we use every day, already have built-in timers, so people would say that there is no use for a separate timer anymore.
However, using a timer on a smartphone can just get you distracted from cooking since you will be enticed to use the phone for other purposes like checking out other apps or playing mobile games. So, to avoid distractions, you should have a timer in the kitchen so that you can leave your smartphone on the kitchen counter or even outside the kitchen to retain your focus on cooking or preparing food.
And these are some of the essential and underrated items that you should definitely have in the kitchen. Fortunately, getting the items and tools we mentioned above is relatively easy since they are widely available in online stores and physical shops. However, make sure that you read reviews of specific models of the mentioned items so that you will know if they are reliable, durable, and efficient in accomplishing their purpose in the kitchen.