The best chefs have the best tools to make their food delicious. Cooking utensils help you cook food efficiently. Here are a few tools chefs use all of the time. These tools are great for the more experimenting cooks or for aspiring culinary students.
- Salad Spinner
If you’ve ever washed your fresh vegetables and then immediately tried to make a nice salad out of it, you may have noticed a soggy, watery taste to your salad. The lingering water ruins the effect of many dressings and just isn’t as pleasant on your taste buds. A salad spinner allows you to wash all of your vegetables and quickly dry them without waiting for the water droplets to air-dry. Just put the vegetables in the container, and the spinner forces the water droplets to the sides of the spinner and off of the vegetables.
- Mortar and Pestle
A mortar and pestle allows you to have the freshest herbs and spices in all of your dishes. Designed to simply mash your ingredients, using a mortar and pestle on your herbs allows the flavors to really come out and allows you the thin texture that you get from canned dried spices.
- High-Quality Chef’s Knives
A set of sharp, sturdy knives are a must for any aspiring chef. Probably one of the most-used tools in your kitchen, knives are vital to the food process. If you want excellent knives, they don’t come cheap, but they’re worth the investment.
- Onion Goggles
Despite their reputation for giving people bad breath, onions are a great ingredient used by many chefs in all kinds of dishes. However, the potency can be a bit harsh, especially for the chef who may be cutting a handful at a time. Many chefs wear onion goggles to spare themselves the streaming tears that come with cutting 20 onions a day.
- Thermometer
While you may be cooking in your home kitchen and may not worry too much about the difference between medium-well and medium-rare meat, a chef is sure to care when the chance of not cooking food to the guest’s specifications means the guest will send the food repeatedly back to the kitchen. Thermometers are excellent for testing the temperature of meats and for more complex dishes that don’t turn out right unless they are cooked to a specific temperature.
- Pressure Cooker
Pressure cookers are essentially tightly sealed pots that allow the boiling point to be higher than normal, effectively cooking food faster and allowing the food to absorb more moisture. Chefs love pressure cookers because they can cook things like meat very quickly without drying out the food.
