Cookery meme, via lots of people

[kaberett]

Bold the ones you have and use at least once a year, italicize the ones you have and don't use, strike through the ones you have had but got rid of. And (my suggestion) add any items that you have that aren't on the list:

I wonder how many pasta machines, breadmakers, juicers, blenders, deep fat fryers, egg boilers, melon ballers, sandwich makers, pastry brushes, cheese knives, electric woks, miniature salad spinners, griddle pans, jam funnels, meat thermometers, filleting knives, egg poachers, cake stands, garlic crushers, martini glasses, tea strainers, bamboo steamers, pizza stones, coffee grinders, milk frothers, piping bags, banana stands, fluted pastry wheels, tagine dishes, conical strainers, rice cookers, steam cookers, pressure cookers, slow cookers, spaetzle makers, cookie presses, gravy strainers, double boilers (bains marie), sukiyaki stoves, ice cream makers, fondue sets, healthy-grills, home smokers, tempura sets, tortilla presses, electric whisks languish dustily at the back of the nation's cupboards.

I don't have, but have seriously contemplated buying or otherwise wish I had because I would use it regularly:

• sandwich toaster
  
• deep fat fryer (doughnuts, chips, falafels... I sometimes pour a bunch of oil into a saucepan and use a slotted spoon but it is, uh, not the same)
  
• bamboo steamer
  
• piping bags (well, nozzles - I am perfectly happy to use greaseproof for the bag itself)
  
• electric whisk (whipped cream! egg whites! everything that is good and glorious and entirely not vegan about cake!)
  
• pressure cooker! Rice, potatoes, EVERYTHING THAT TAKES FOREVER, misc. huge saucepan abilities...
  

I eyeroll at people having specific spaetzle makers (you use a fork or a colander or a slotted spoon honestly); I am also gently unimpressed by commercially sold double-boilers vs the rather more storage-space efficient "stick a pyrex bowl over a gently simmering saucepan of water".

The breadmaker is getting used 3-4 times a week at the moment, and will probably continue likewise once I move back into college (though the proportion of rye-and-caraway will go down to accommodate the more British tastes of the people I'll be "baking" for); the blender gets used for soup and pesto and chopping nuts for fesenjan (and for cakes) and smoothies and (once so far, but maybe it will happen again) making soya mince; the pastry brush gets used for, yes, glazing pastry[1]; the steamer gets used for broccoli + substrate pretty regularly, and for other things at other times.

So! That is a list of the kinds of ways in which I use my various gadgets, and they all of them make life significantly easier for me. (Where, for example, I don't have a garlic press because chopping garlic is less upsetting to my hands than standing for long enough to wash the wretched thing up afterwards...)

So - what do you have? & what do you use it for? :-)

---

[1] I have a GCSE in making quiche. This is only a slight misrepresentation. Anyway, the upshot is that I make a mean shortcrust.

Comments

[jamfish]

oh brilliant, this is one of the best memes I have seen all year! :P I am nosy about other people's kitchens it seems!

I really desperately want one of those prohibitively expensive Kitchenaid/Cuisinart whatsit blenders — the hands-free kind that comes with various paddle attachments. Never gonna happen. :(

[kaberett]

Other people's kitchens are FASCINATING. I enjoy nerding over other people's cooking about as much as I do over their libraries :-)

[sorrillia]

I've not heard of most of the items in that list, and wouldn't know what to do with them even if I did have them. Cookware I do have:

-- a steamer (of the unfolding sort you put over a pot of boiling water, and also what purports to be a microwave steamer) -- neither ever used, though in theory I should someday.

-- an incredibly overbuilt potato-masher -- used fairly often, though mostly for things that aren't potatoes.

-- an apple slicer -- quite useful for making pies and sauces.

-- a rice cooker, which gets used by me when I make rice (perhaps twice or thrice a year?) and by my flatmate much more frequently.

-- formerly, a crock pot, but after four years of never using it as an undergrad I gave it away rather than ship it across the country. It might actually be useful to have one again, but I'm not sure I'd use it and I think the whole concept makes me uncomfortable.

-- a cheese grater for the pasta and cheese that I cook far too often (though less recently now as student government has demolished my opportunities to be at home at dinnertime).

-- a Really Big Pot (I'd give the volume in American customary units, but I'm guessing most of you are used to Imperial and would find that confusing, so around 18 liters.) which was purchased for cooking pierogi for Polish Food Nights at Tech, and still occasionally gets used for that but is also good for huge-scale stews quite often.

Cookware that I've used in Boston but don't own:

-- a deep-fryer borrowed from an undergrad dorm I knew someone in, used to make paczki for Paczki Day the year before last. Other than paczki, though, I never deep fry things--I'm frankly rather uncomfortable with the whole concept of frying in general--and I have cause to make those once a year and generally don't bother, so definitely not worth it.

[kaberett]

UK uses pints as a fluid measure :-) Only the rest of Europe as doesn't!

[sorrillia]

Yes. But you don't use the same pints we do. You guys changed the rules on us in 1820 or so, after we'd already settled on the traditional English customary units.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_imperial_and_US_customary_measurement_systems

Your pints are about 20% larger than ours, same goes for your gallons.

(Thus my comment that American units would confuse people used to Imperial. I have a rant about this in one of the recent posts on my Wordpress blog. Americans like to call US Customary units "Imperial" even though they aren't.)

[sorrillia]

Also, translation questions.

What do you mean by a "sandwich toaster"? "Piping bags"? "Salad spinner"? "Jam funnel"? "Spaetzle"? "Greaseproof"?

I'm not really sure if these are because I don't speak British or because I don't speak chef.

[kaberett]

Sandwich toaster: two hotplates between which you place bread+filling, and it squeezes them into two nice toasted triangular sandwiches.

Piping bags: bags to contain icing, for piping icing designs onto... stuff. Biscuits, etc.

Greaseproof: greaseproof paper, approximately equivalent to baking parchment, I think?

Salad spinner: this is US, I think - at least, I was introduced to them by someone USois. They're a sort of colander in a bucket and you can rotate the inner wossname by cunning means of a handle, in order to shake water off the salad leaves you just washed.

Spaetzle: ... um, these are Germanic food, I... don't really know how to explain them in English? Um. They are sort of gnocchi-noodle hybrids typically served with cheese? But that's a really incomplete description and they don't contain potato?

Jam funnel: I dunno, I had to look this one up :-) Things for transferring jam from jamming-pot to jars without getting boiling sugar solution everywhere, it seems.

[sorrillia]

Interesting. I don't think I've ever seen a sandwich toaster before, though I've had restaurant sandwiches that seemed consistent with the existence of such a device. I had been guessing you might mean "toaster oven" or something.

Ah. I've always just heard those called "icing bags", though I've never seen one.

(In the US there's a distinction between baking parchment and waxed paper that I've come to conclude is mostly a matter of price. I'm not actually sure if there's a difference between the two otherwise.)

I've never seen or heard of such an implement before.

I'll see if Wikipedia can inform me more about this one. It's probably tasty or something.

I hadn't known there were special tools for that, either.

[sorrillia]

Also, I strongly encourage indoctrinating the British with rye bread. I should bake that regularly, except I've been too hosed to keep the sourdough starter Cathy gave me alive. (Even with it, I never tried more than about 60%, rye 40% wheat, though.)

[tim]

I usually whip cream in a blender: pour cream into blender; turn blender on; wait a few minutes; yay whipped cream.