19 Tools To Make Cooking Easier

I'm getting tired of kitchen gadget culture. 95% of that stuff is totally useless. That's a made-up number by the way. It's about time that we start talking about only the stuff that you need. Or what else, well, what I think you need. I don't know. It's up to you. Let me just start this off by saying you don't need to drop a whole paycheck on tools to be a good cook. That's just, that's just a fact. Now a good cook knows how to use tools, but you know, having good tools does, does help quite a bit. So for that reason, I'll be splitting this video into two different sort of segments. I've been getting a lot of DMs on Instagram, which by the way, if you don't follow me, the link is in the description. You won't be disappointed. Anyway, people have been DMing me and sort of commenting a lot about wanting to see me talk about my favorite tools. So I thought instead of just talking about my favorite tools, I'm going to talk about tools that I actually think are absolutely essential and hugely useful to me. And I feel like it will be to a lot of other people. So with all that said, let's do this, shall we? So, like I said, I'm going to break this into two different categories. Let's start with the absolute necessities. First thing is super obvious. I'm sorry, but a knife and a cutting board are King. If you're not starting with this, then you are in trouble. This combo alone solves way more kitchen tasks than you would think, other than just cutting stuff. And it's super economical if you don't want to buy a bunch of mechanical things like a food processor. Next thing is a personal favorite of mine, which is a pair of nice kitchen shears. These come in handy way more than you would think. Small tasks like removing tough stocks from stuff without damaging your knife, cutting through small bones in like chicken and fish, use something that you can get down and dirty with. Also in conjunction with that painter's tape and a sharpie, really great for labeling so you can keep track of all your stuff. Now, lots of people have a grater, but the one that I would really recommend is a microplane, which is really the best grater on the planet. If you want those nice delicate threads, you know, I'm bougie. As for pots and pans, you know, people really like to overcomplicate this. Just think about what you like to cook a lot or the things that you might be cooking and get the appropriate size. I have, you know, a small, medium, and large of every style of pot and pan because that's how I be. I would just recommend having different kinds of services. Have some that are nonstick, have some that are cast iron. I'm a big fan of pans that you can put in the oven because they're multi-purpose and you can roast small amounts of stuff in them or finish a steak in the oven if they're heat safe on the handle. Let's talk about spoons. You need different sized spoons. A, because you can make more spooning puns, and B, for multiple uses in cooking. Some will be for basting, some will be for sauce stirring, you know, efficient cereal eating. Just, you know, the little things count. Sure, everybody has measuring spoons, but why not kitchen scales? I'm putting this on the necessity side because I want you to do my recipes in grams. Not shelf, not self, wow, not selfish at all. Baking trays and wire racks are the multi-purpose king of any kitchen. You can roast tons of things in them, use them for baking cookies. The wire racks can be used to drizzle chocolate over stuff or to ice donuts or whatever so that it falls beneath and it's easy to clean up. You know, there's just, there's just so many uses. Now, if you've known me long enough, you know that I'm a big fan of jars. These are like the storage love of my life. You know, not only are they great for storage, but they're good for fermentation, pickling, you know, you can put sauces in them, oils. They're just, they're too good and they look so nice. I'm all about that jar aesthetic, you know what I'm saying? Now, last but not least on the essential side would be stirring spoons. I don't like to use metal stirring spoons. I much prefer to use something like a wooden stirring spoon or a silicone spatula, which are also great for scraping stuff out. The thing, the reason why I prefer wood is just you can use them for pretty much any surface because they don't scratch non-stick and they just look a whole lot nicer. Okay, so next piece is stuff that I prefer to have, but it's not a requirement. Forewarning, this is the stuff that's more expensive. So if anyone's like, oh my gosh, it's too expensive. These are not a necessity. You don't need to have a Lamborghini, but it's nice to have a Lamborghini. All right. So number one on this list is the coveted KitchenAid stand mixer. One of my most favorite tools in my kitchen. It does a million billion things other than just making dough. It does everything. I'm not even going to try and sell you on this. It's too good. Next up on that is my fermentation station. You guys already know how I feel about this thing too. I love this thing. It's great for making bread and fermentation. It is the perfect fermentation chamber. By the way, guys, just a reminder, all the links for this stuff is going to be in the description. If you want to see it or check it out, read about it, whatever. Next up is going to be a Vitamix blender. Now I know these things are expensive, but this is an industry standard for a reason. You can blend and make anything so velvety smooth from nut butters to sauces to purees. It's just, it's, I use mine all the time. Oh yeah, my bad. I almost forgot. Haha, nut butter. Another one would be a sous vide circulator. These things are super useful. There's a couple of different ones in the market, but there are two dominating brands that I really like and I'll have them linked below. It turns literally anything into a sous vide bath. So how can you complain about that? And the last thing, which is also a follow up to the sous vide circulator is a vac machine and vac bags. These are obviously going to be used for the sous vide. You vacuum seal your meats and then you sous vide them. But this can be used for so many things beyond that, not just food storage, but you can use it to ferment things. I love to ferment berries with this. I'm fermenting some blueberries here and it just makes storage super duper efficient in your fridge or dry goods or whatever. But these are just some basic things. I'm trying to avoid making this video too cumbersome and I put what I think is most essential. But do you want to know what else is most essential? B-roll. All right, guys, and that is it. So we talked about, whoa, there was a lot of directions. I was about to go with that. We talked about a lot of different tools today. There are many, many, many more tools out there that are great that I use, but I wanted to keep this as simple as possible down to like really just bare essentials or importantly, the multitude of uses for each individual tool. Because the thing is with these really simple tools, a lot of people only see them for one basic thing because they are so basic. But the reality is a lot of these really simple tools like a knife actually, in my opinion, are oftentimes better to just use that tool. You know, it's always going to be your choice, whatever tools that you like to use. Everybody's different. I'm just trying to spread the good word, you know, and make make homies. We're homies. I hope that you feel the same way. And if you're a true homie, then you should be following me on Instagram and Twitter, which is in the link below. That was that was next level shameless. If you enjoyed this video or you learned something, leave a like, subscribe, and I will see you next time. Yeah, you're out of the cabinet now, huh? I don't know what I'm doing right now, so I'm going to turn the camera off now.