Smita Diwan
No matter how long the actual cooking takes, preparing your ingredients is always a drag.
Unless you’re a trained chef, or have been in the kitchen from the time you learnt how to walk, all the slicing and dicing, mixing, and measuring probably takes way too long. But no matter how frustrating it is, prep is important and a crucial part of the cooking process. You can’t just do a sub-par job and hope for the best.
So what do you do? You pick kitchen accessories that make your life easier and practically do the prep for you. Here’s a handy list of the best kitchen gadgets to have.
Blender
Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons
Whether mixing, pureeing or emulsifying (like when you make vinaigrettes), there’s nothing as necessary in a kitchen as an electric blender. It’s absolutely vital for smooth curries and sauces. If your model can crush ice, you could use it for smoothies and milkshakes as well.
You could even make your own coconut milk by blending grated coconut with a little water. Get more out of your blender by using it to crush spices like cinnamon sticks or cloves to powder.
Zester/Grater
Image Credits: Didriks
Now we all know graters are useful in the kitchen, but a zester/grater lets you grate your cheese over your pastas and zest your citrus fruits as well.
A little bit of lemon or orange zest gives a lovely kick of freshness and zing to any dish, sweet or savoury. Getting just the rind out without the white pith on the fruit can be a pain, and is made easier with a zester. But a multipurpose tool is always better, so a zester/grater make a great addition to your kitchen.
Vegetable Chopper
Image Credits: rediff
Uniformly cut vegetables means they will cook evenly, and look and taste all the better for it. Cutting or dicing vegetables is also unfortunately one of the hardest things to master in the kitchen.
Forget practice, get a vegetable chopper instead. You can choose from a variety at Rediff.com, and buy the one that suits your needs the best. You can peel your onions and garlic, and cut all your vegetables as fine as the recipe demands in half the time. Get one right away so you can get to the actual cooking as fast as possible.
Kitchen Scale
Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons
Most recipes have measurements listed out for all the ingredients in a dish, and accurate amounts go a long way toward making sure your food tastes like it should, and is enough for everyone you’re feeding.
While you could guess at the right proportions and become more accurate at it over time, you might as well make your life easier and get a kitchen scale. They’re small, easy to tuck away and an invaluable addition to any kitchen.
Stand Mixer
Image Credits: Ryan Snyder
As any baker knows, mixing the batter by hand is possible, but really not worth the effort.
From whipping egg whites till they’re fluffy with peaks, or creaming butter and sugar together, some things take too long when they’re done by hand and need serious arm strength to pull off.
Mixing batter can be a breeze with a stand mixer, most of which come with multiple attachments, so you can use them to knead dough as well. And they reduce clean-up by just needing one bowl for everything. It may as well be a baker’s dream that’s taken physical form.
With these kitchen accessories, you can pick the most complicated recipes you can find, and still come out with a (relatively) clean kitchen and the tastiest food in half the time. Get them right away!
