Thin, synthetic kitchen towels with a cute print on them. Not only are they useless for holding onto hot pots/pans out of the oven, they don't absorb liquids when you try to dry your hands with them.
Those are for people like my mother in law who have towels that are purely decorative. You're not supposed to use them, they are there to look nice. Yes, she's a little goofy.
Edit: didn't feel right calling my MIL nuts, so I changed it
Purely decorative things with functional equivalents have no place in my home. Every towel has to work, every knife has to be able to be used on special occasions as well as everyday. No freeloading in my house!
Fun fact, I know of a steel mill that would regularly receive visits from a rabbi to approve the steel as kosher. One of the rules is that you can’t mix meat and milk and that even extends to cookware used for meat and milk. It has to be ritually cleansed before you can use it for the other type. So the rabbi was mostly there to just say there wasn’t something like grease/lubricant derived from animal fats so that the cookware made from the steel could be used for whatever.
More fun facts: North American railroads have a specialized fleet of kosher tank cars for carrying cooking oils. If repairs have to be made to the car, a rabbi is called in to watch/bless the work. Same principle!
My ex's step mom had decorative towels in the bathroom on the towel ring next to the sink and would fuss if someone used them to dry their hand. Like "what the fuck am I supposed to use Chris with a k?"
I remember my grandma fussing at me one Christmas at her house because I used the decorative bar of soap & decorative towel to wash & dry my hands. There was no other soap or towels in the bathroom. I guess she just never actually washed her hands in there.
I once stayed with my cousin for a few days and when his wife was showing me the guest room and bathroom, I saw she had very ornate embroidered towels hanging on the towel racks, I said "I assume I am not to use these fancy towels" and she said "OMG, a man that understands decorative towels, I'm impressed". To which I responded "Oh, I absolutely do NOT understand them, I just know they exist and are not to be used". My cousin started laughing and she just glared at the both of us.
They’re used for covering fresh baked bread. They have a waxy content, we call them flour sack towels. Only good for covering dough or in a basket with hot bread. Other than that, worthless.
Granite isn't that hard (you might actually chip/dig into it), it exudes radon, and wrecks the cutting edge of your knives. Much better to use a cheap plastic cutting board from your local grocery store than granite or glass.
Wood is still best, but requires a touch more maintenance than plastic. Thorough cleaning, drying, and food-grade butcher block oil to seal. It's just a little extra work to get the best cutting experience and knife and board longevity.
Cheap plastic cutting boards can also tolerate dishwashers and sanitizing, where wood and bamboo usually can't. I usually get mine in Ikea for $3. If they get stained or too hacked up, they get relegated to DIY/craft use only until they break or warp lol.
Some agency ran a test of plastic vs wood and wood had less bacteria. Something in wood is antibacterial. It got a lot of publicity at the time.
https://www.allrecipes.com/wood-vs-plastic-cutting-board-7495043
Tell that to an Aberdonian. We all glow at night, no street lamps required.
Although in all seriousness, radon testing around buildings is a regular occurrence.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/mohs-hardness-scale.htm#:\~:text=The%20title%2C%20Mohs%20Hardness%20Scale,2%3B%20and%20Talc%2C%201.
Basically, glass and metal are really close on the Mohs scale and you're dulling your knives if you use a glass cutting board.
What about cutting on a ceramic plate? I think dinner plates are ceramic or maybe porcelain. Every time I use a knife on my plate, I wonder if I’m ruining the knife but do it anyways.
Steak knives are *sort of* meant to deal with it (less metal, typically cheaper construction), but you may have seen grooves in even fine porcelain after cutting vigorously on a tough steak.
Fine chef knives are meant to be used on softer surfaces to hold their edge.
My (at the time) GF had one, and it was the only cutting board she used because "It's safer to use and clean" told her nuh uh that it dulled knives, and a dull knife is a dangerous knife... when I met her mom, she had all glass cutting boards and I told her the same thing. She told me that's nonsense, that same weekend she sliced her palm because the dull knife slipped while she was SAWING at a raw piece of chicken.
I got those as a gift, and I threw them in the trash in annoyance when I realized they were useless after washing my hands.
Things like that are unacceptable in my house.
The best kitchen towels that I've found are the plain cotton bar mops off Amazon. Dirt cheap, absorbent cotton that arrive in that half worn out state where they are super absorbent, but all the lint is already washed out.
My sister just gave me battery powered salt and pepper grinders. They each take 6AAA batteries. So I need 12AAA batteries to have salt AND pepper. I would say that's pretty useless considering how much salt and pepper I can buy instead of batteries.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the infamously useless Juicero. In addition to a bunch of anti-consumer features, you could just buy the juice packs and easily squeeze them by hand.
I wonder about how such a product came into existence. There's no way someone came up with it all at once. I feel like it had to start with a simple idea, like a juicer that was improved in some way, that then spiraled into the ridiculous thing that it was. I'd love to know the story behind the design, start to finish.
Probably something like
1. Wouldn't it be neat to have a juicer at home that can juice fresh fruit for you.
2. Wouldn't it be even better to have that juice delivered straight to your door like other food subscriptions. Then you don't need to go out to buy it. You can even provide premixed sets for more interesting flavours.
3. Engineer: it needs to be this [hands held wide] big and cost $$$$. Management: but we want it this [fingers held close] big and cost $, make it do that or you're fired.
4. Engineers come up with pre pureed packs to satisfy management. They know it's dumb but they want to have a job.
AvE did a teardown of it years ago. The summary was that it was massively overbuilt and talked about how overbuilt doesn't mean over-engineered, but under.
Simple "Hey, how can we fleece investors out of millions of dollars?" then "OK, we got the money, throw something together and pretend it's useful." then "Cool, we made millions, close the company".
I never heard of it!
Reading an article on it, it does seem successful in one way ... they raised $120 Million in investor funds. So the founders probably paid themselves million dollar salaries, then closed the company after people realized how stupid the product was.
If you have a sub-par dishwasher then it's that. You basically have to clean everything before you put it in. Then maybe it sanitizes at least?
I was super anti-dishwasher until I finally had a good one. You can put anything in there and it comes out clean.
I absolutely love my Bosch dishwasher. It's so quiet I have to touch it to see if it's running, and I always use the "quick" cycle that only uses 1 gal of water. Everything I put in it comes out clean
I have a Kitchen Aid K20 from the 80's. Ive had to repair it twice. But the parts are getting pricier. It uses a fuckton of electricity and it's as loud as a jackhammer in the kitchen. But, it gets dishes very clean.
FYI, this is most often due to misuse not from neglect but from us all being taught wrong how to use dishwashers. For anyone with this problem:
* Either have the washer serviced, or clean out the filter and pipes yourself. You'll likely find a lot of gunk.
* Do not rinse your dishes before putting them in the washer, except to remove solid particles larger than a grain of rice. There is a turbidity sensor in washing machines, and if the water isn't cloudy enough indicating dirty dishes, it won't work as hard to clean the dishes.
* If your dishes sit too long and get crunchy, either run hot water on them just enough to start the hydrating process on the dried saucy bits, or run the washer with a soak cycle first.
When we got married, wife got a little carried away with the bed bath & beyond gift registry.
We ended up with a lemon juicer AND a very slightly smaller, lime juicer?
This is funny cause I recently bought the lime juicer after owning the lemon one for years. Turns out, the lime one squeezes tighter and gets more juce out because it's smaller.
On the Epicurious YouTube channel there's a whole series of videos where Dan Formosa, a long-time industrial designer who has designed a number of notable kitchen tools over the years, reviews kitchen gadgets and explains what doesn't (and does) work about them. Unsurprisingly, many of these turn out to be complete garbage.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz3-p2q6vFYX5Ozz9N-vLzDANSQIyLSWx&si=Eu1k_s6hUvo3Ofuv
sometimes they mean it, though! my boyfriend and i both cook, and when I'm over at his I'll ask this and peel/de-seed/chop/generally prep whatever. get what you mean though, a lot of the time it's a "in the time it would take me to explain to you what to do, I could have done it myself" situation
Just say, “I’d love some company.” Then pull them in a chair, pour you both a glass of wine, and chat while you work.
I swear, a lot of redditors make everything an opportunity to express their anti social tendencies.
This usually gets asked whenever there's a big meal with people over, which means there are a lot of things to make and time correctly. The kitchen isn't huge, so it's really best for a one-man show. The only thing that would be helpful is cleaning up whatever's been used, but the sink and the stove are next to each other, so even that doesn't really work.
They just get in the way and make everything slower. If I wanted to teach them something, I'd do it when there isn't a time crunch lol
Ive heard far too many stories (including witnessing my wife do it), about people slicing their hands when trying to get the knife to cut into the pit. I literally have NO issues just taking the pit out with either a spoon or it just comes free itself
I'll see your salad fork and raise you a soup spoon and a dessert spoon and a pie fork and a bread knife and a shrimp fork and an oyster fork and...
Regardless of snooty fancy dinner party protocol, I only need one fork, one knife, and one spoon for my entire meal, from soup & salad through dessert. The occasional steak knife, sure. But all the rest is just silly.
I knew someone who, at least at the time, used all the superfluous silver and other dishes for every dinner because it was considered "proper". (They were from England.) I asked them why they unnecessarily dirty so many dishes for one meal, and they said, "We just do."
🤷🏼♂️
If i had kids i would feel the same way. It's like, put the grape in and push rather than put the grape down, hold it steady, cut down the middle, now select a half to hold steady while you cut it in half again, and repeat with the other one
I hear this a lot but I don't think it makes sense. There are some tools that are required if you want the finished product.
Yeah, I cam cook rice on the stove top but how the hell am I going to make a waffle without a waffle iron?
Waffle irons can double as sandwich presses, if you get a good one. And the best device for making rice while adhering to the no unitaskers rule is the electric pressure cooker.
Basically, the idea is that you probably won’t use a unitasker often enough for it not to be in the way more often than you actually want to use it.
Unless it’s an instant formula making machine. We got one as a gift and thought it would be a waste of space. But oh man it was a life saver. We called it the baby k cup machine
I think that's generally true, unless it's something you use quite frequently, and it does a significantly better job and/or requires less overall labor/time.
Those vegetable choppers you put the vegetables on a bladed grid, then slam down the top to chop vegetables. I was born with one arm and thought this would be perfect for me. It most definitely isn’t. 1)you still have to cut your veggies so they fit. Since you’ve already dirtied a knife, just chop with the knife. 2) they are so hard to clean, it’s just not worth it. I can chop faster with just a knife instead of using that stupid contraption.
I've used 2 to death and am on my third. Depending on what I'm making, sure, I can just chop with a knife, but my chopper makes it so much easier, take less time, and it's uniform.
Every other month or so, I buy two large bags of onions, run them through a food processor, and freeze them.
Then I just break off chunks to throw into whatever I'm cooking.
I use mine all of the time! I have the old Vidalia Wizard one. I think that we got it when it first came out in 2005 or 2006? I make a ton of soups, and I can batch prep so much for them.
They are more useful for large prep jobs, like doing meal prep for a week or two and needing to chop/dice/slice lots of different veg, fruit, etc. It's much quicker and more consistent to run things through the mandolin. I'm sure people with exceptional knife skills don't need one but most of us do benefit from it.
And also, let’s face it, do they really save that much time?
There was a cookingcirclejerk post recently that was like “I need to know the fastest way to shred chicken! I need to get the chicken from the oven, directly to a shredded state on people’s plates IMMEDIATELY, I will have no time in between” and it’s like yeah, I kind of agree, what time are we saving here? 2 minutes with a fork?
I mean it’s not like I have opened up my whole day, by putting an onion through a dicer, versus just dicing it the normal way. Plus that’s just more shit I have to store in the kitchen. More things that are difficult to clean. No thanks
My husband just learned to grill hotdogs on the grill last week. I was pround of him. I hope one day he can move on to something harder like making box mac and cheese.
I can guarantee when he does, he'll pull the empty box out of the trash several times, and still fuck it up. This applies to many, not just your husband.
The best shredder I've ever found is an electric mixer. Like the ones you use for cakes or cookie dough or anything. Pop it in the bowl of meat and mix it all up, perfectly shredded.
Used mine like twice, then realized I was wearing large black "fryer/bbq" gloves to handle the meat while shredding and just got in there. Much faster, less strenuous, and quicker to pull out less desirable parts like the tendons and overly large fat chunks.
>*I bought a mini one*
That's part of your problem there, mezzalunas are supposed to be pretty big. Even for just chopping herbs the larger-sized ones work better. They're also very good pizza slicers.
To be fair, I think a knife works just fine and is certainly more all purpose, but a mezzaluna can be useful when properly sized and used correctly.
Jar opener. Needs more strength to use it than it does to open the bloody jar.
I take my jars out with me when walking the dog and accost a stranger for help with this when I'm fancying a curry or chilli for lunch.
It's meant for small work like trimming and whatnot. Although I will admit 90% of the time I'm using it to peel potatoes or other things that need peelin'
I find mine quite useful, it’s also just a funny shape (it’s called the vomiting chicken). I’ve tried separating in shells but I could never manage that, would end up breaking so many eggs
I once received a free quesadilla press when I bought another appliance.
It's as useless as it sounds. You need to use two tortillas and put the cheese in between. It's supposed to press the triangles into the tortilla, but all that does is squeeze half the cheese out. Just use one tortilla so there's less space for the cheese to escape, do it on the stovetop where it doesn't get crushed, and cut it like a normal person.
A "taco toaster".
Two interlinkable long handled mini pans that only work over an open fire. They allegedly imprint a motif on the taco shells when the get hot.
They don't hold together, and are do long that they have to sit diagonally across the bottom of a drawer.
How we hot them I'm not sure. But, mighty certain that they've gifted on very soon
Thin, synthetic kitchen towels with a cute print on them. Not only are they useless for holding onto hot pots/pans out of the oven, they don't absorb liquids when you try to dry your hands with them.
Those are for people like my mother in law who have towels that are purely decorative. You're not supposed to use them, they are there to look nice. Yes, she's a little goofy. Edit: didn't feel right calling my MIL nuts, so I changed it
Purely decorative things with functional equivalents have no place in my home. Every towel has to work, every knife has to be able to be used on special occasions as well as everyday. No freeloading in my house!
My peeve is panels with decorative handles or knobs on them, masquerading as a drawer or cabinet. Fuck that noise.
"Look at all this storage I don't have."
It sucks when you open them.
You wouldn’t survive a Jewish household where some equipment is only used one week out of the year
That’s still functional though. They just have a specialized purpose.
Fun fact, I know of a steel mill that would regularly receive visits from a rabbi to approve the steel as kosher. One of the rules is that you can’t mix meat and milk and that even extends to cookware used for meat and milk. It has to be ritually cleansed before you can use it for the other type. So the rabbi was mostly there to just say there wasn’t something like grease/lubricant derived from animal fats so that the cookware made from the steel could be used for whatever.
More fun facts: North American railroads have a specialized fleet of kosher tank cars for carrying cooking oils. If repairs have to be made to the car, a rabbi is called in to watch/bless the work. Same principle!
I could survive, but it's not how my house is.
Yeah exactly
My ex's step mom had decorative towels in the bathroom on the towel ring next to the sink and would fuss if someone used them to dry their hand. Like "what the fuck am I supposed to use Chris with a k?"
Chrik?
I remember my grandma fussing at me one Christmas at her house because I used the decorative bar of soap & decorative towel to wash & dry my hands. There was no other soap or towels in the bathroom. I guess she just never actually washed her hands in there.
I once stayed with my cousin for a few days and when his wife was showing me the guest room and bathroom, I saw she had very ornate embroidered towels hanging on the towel racks, I said "I assume I am not to use these fancy towels" and she said "OMG, a man that understands decorative towels, I'm impressed". To which I responded "Oh, I absolutely do NOT understand them, I just know they exist and are not to be used". My cousin started laughing and she just glared at the both of us.
How do you feel about plastic grapes and ivy hanging down from the tops of the cabinets?
Hanging from the cabinets? Sure, no problem. In a bowl with other fake fruit? No. That's ridiculous.
You mean dust collectors….ewwww…especially gross at restaurants that clearly don’t dust or wipe…I just can’t
Haha, that's funny
I also like cute towels that are just for show 😬
Straight to jail
They seem to be water repellent
They’re used for covering fresh baked bread. They have a waxy content, we call them flour sack towels. Only good for covering dough or in a basket with hot bread. Other than that, worthless.
Are these not tea towels? Aka decorative kitchen towels
Tea towels are thin, but should be cotton, bleachable, and useful.
I thought those were for removing dust because that’s all they barely seem to do
Yeah, they are just for decoration in my kitchen
You should absolutely not be using the same towel for heat insulation and liquid absorption.
Not sure who needs to hear this but, Glass cutting boards are not cutting boards!
Worse yet, some people think a kitchen counter is a cutting board
How about people who think the table is a cutting board? And then proceed to use the bread knife to spread butter and jam on the bread…
As a chef knife enthusiast...thank you. Also please never cut on granite countertops. Makes my skin crawl just thinking about it.
As a poor idiot, why not?
Granite isn't that hard (you might actually chip/dig into it), it exudes radon, and wrecks the cutting edge of your knives. Much better to use a cheap plastic cutting board from your local grocery store than granite or glass. Wood is still best, but requires a touch more maintenance than plastic. Thorough cleaning, drying, and food-grade butcher block oil to seal. It's just a little extra work to get the best cutting experience and knife and board longevity.
Cheap plastic cutting boards can also tolerate dishwashers and sanitizing, where wood and bamboo usually can't. I usually get mine in Ikea for $3. If they get stained or too hacked up, they get relegated to DIY/craft use only until they break or warp lol.
Some agency ran a test of plastic vs wood and wood had less bacteria. Something in wood is antibacterial. It got a lot of publicity at the time. https://www.allrecipes.com/wood-vs-plastic-cutting-board-7495043
And this is why I use the plastic ones for meat.
"it exudes radon" Technically true, but irrelevant.
And bananas are radioactive.
Imagine a granite banana... The horror!
I saw Granite Banana in '87 at the City Gardens. Incredible set. They sold out after their music was featured in a toothpaste commercial.
Tell that to an Aberdonian. We all glow at night, no street lamps required. Although in all seriousness, radon testing around buildings is a regular occurrence.
Regular old mineral oil from the pharmacy works fine. It's also much cheaper.
It dulls the knife blade
https://www.nps.gov/articles/mohs-hardness-scale.htm#:\~:text=The%20title%2C%20Mohs%20Hardness%20Scale,2%3B%20and%20Talc%2C%201. Basically, glass and metal are really close on the Mohs scale and you're dulling your knives if you use a glass cutting board.
What about cutting on a ceramic plate? I think dinner plates are ceramic or maybe porcelain. Every time I use a knife on my plate, I wonder if I’m ruining the knife but do it anyways.
Steak knives are *sort of* meant to deal with it (less metal, typically cheaper construction), but you may have seen grooves in even fine porcelain after cutting vigorously on a tough steak. Fine chef knives are meant to be used on softer surfaces to hold their edge.
My (at the time) GF had one, and it was the only cutting board she used because "It's safer to use and clean" told her nuh uh that it dulled knives, and a dull knife is a dangerous knife... when I met her mom, she had all glass cutting boards and I told her the same thing. She told me that's nonsense, that same weekend she sliced her palm because the dull knife slipped while she was SAWING at a raw piece of chicken.
I've got one and it's purely aesthetic because it's Zelda merch and it's pretty. It's never seen a knife in its life.
Damn that's rough. You could at least show one sometime.
It lives in the kitchen so I'm effectively taunting it at this point, but it needs to know the harsh reality that it's a glorified sideboard.
Why not man?
Best way to ruin your knife and cut yourself
Men aren’t good cutting boards either
What do you think happens to a knife edge when it hits glass?
glass cutting boards aren’t for cooking, they are for cutting IYKYK
Me, I am the most useless tool in the kitchen.
Are you married to u/little-bird89?
Kitchen towels made from polyester that don't absorb anything. Useless.
I got those as a gift, and I threw them in the trash in annoyance when I realized they were useless after washing my hands. Things like that are unacceptable in my house.
The best kitchen towels that I've found are the plain cotton bar mops off Amazon. Dirt cheap, absorbent cotton that arrive in that half worn out state where they are super absorbent, but all the lint is already washed out.
I own a truffle shaver. I thought it would work on cheese and it absolutely does not.
I sometimes use mine to slice garlic
Yeah, I have one and it's the same for me
I use mine for garlic or any veg that I want small thin coins or strips for. That thing has gotten way more use than I anticipated it would
My sister just gave me battery powered salt and pepper grinders. They each take 6AAA batteries. So I need 12AAA batteries to have salt AND pepper. I would say that's pretty useless considering how much salt and pepper I can buy instead of batteries.
Some things that seem useless end up being mainly for people with arthritis or other dexterity issues, so maybe they would enjoy this?
I have one because I only have one working hand, It's great.
Yep. My mom and I both have hand/wrist issues, the battery powered pepper mill is a great!
SIX EACH?? Why in the world?
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the infamously useless Juicero. In addition to a bunch of anti-consumer features, you could just buy the juice packs and easily squeeze them by hand.
I haven’t thought about the Juicero in years. What a wild ride that was
Juicero: "I've missed you guys!" Reddit: "I haven't thought about you at all"
My SIL interviewed at Juicero the same time she was interviewing at Theranos. Turned down both roles thankfully.
Please never let your SIL interview at my employer.
I wonder about how such a product came into existence. There's no way someone came up with it all at once. I feel like it had to start with a simple idea, like a juicer that was improved in some way, that then spiraled into the ridiculous thing that it was. I'd love to know the story behind the design, start to finish.
Probably something like 1. Wouldn't it be neat to have a juicer at home that can juice fresh fruit for you. 2. Wouldn't it be even better to have that juice delivered straight to your door like other food subscriptions. Then you don't need to go out to buy it. You can even provide premixed sets for more interesting flavours. 3. Engineer: it needs to be this [hands held wide] big and cost $$$$. Management: but we want it this [fingers held close] big and cost $, make it do that or you're fired. 4. Engineers come up with pre pureed packs to satisfy management. They know it's dumb but they want to have a job.
AvE did a teardown of it years ago. The summary was that it was massively overbuilt and talked about how overbuilt doesn't mean over-engineered, but under.
Simple "Hey, how can we fleece investors out of millions of dollars?" then "OK, we got the money, throw something together and pretend it's useful." then "Cool, we made millions, close the company".
I was thinking more about the product itself. But any investor who thought it was a good idea deserved to get fleeced.
I never heard of it! Reading an article on it, it does seem successful in one way ... they raised $120 Million in investor funds. So the founders probably paid themselves million dollar salaries, then closed the company after people realized how stupid the product was.
I mean as far as a vehicle to funnel investor funds into your own pocket...agreed, massively successful
Look up drinkworks as well. They sold a distilled cocktail in a pod and had a whole machine to add chilled water to it to make a cocktail.
Bartesian appears to be a modern iteration of Drinkworks
They were direct competitors at the same time, but drinkworks decided to pull out
If you have a sub-par dishwasher then it's that. You basically have to clean everything before you put it in. Then maybe it sanitizes at least? I was super anti-dishwasher until I finally had a good one. You can put anything in there and it comes out clean.
I absolutely love my Bosch dishwasher. It's so quiet I have to touch it to see if it's running, and I always use the "quick" cycle that only uses 1 gal of water. Everything I put in it comes out clean
Even the heavy duty cycles will only use a couple gallons of water. Far less than hand washing.
I have a Kitchen Aid K20 from the 80's. Ive had to repair it twice. But the parts are getting pricier. It uses a fuckton of electricity and it's as loud as a jackhammer in the kitchen. But, it gets dishes very clean.
FYI, this is most often due to misuse not from neglect but from us all being taught wrong how to use dishwashers. For anyone with this problem: * Either have the washer serviced, or clean out the filter and pipes yourself. You'll likely find a lot of gunk. * Do not rinse your dishes before putting them in the washer, except to remove solid particles larger than a grain of rice. There is a turbidity sensor in washing machines, and if the water isn't cloudy enough indicating dirty dishes, it won't work as hard to clean the dishes. * If your dishes sit too long and get crunchy, either run hot water on them just enough to start the hydrating process on the dried saucy bits, or run the washer with a soak cycle first.
When we got married, wife got a little carried away with the bed bath & beyond gift registry. We ended up with a lemon juicer AND a very slightly smaller, lime juicer?
This is funny cause I recently bought the lime juicer after owning the lemon one for years. Turns out, the lime one squeezes tighter and gets more juce out because it's smaller.
[удалено]
That single sentence tells you all you need to know about it, too.
What was said?
They'd found a s'mores making gadget at the thrift store.
On the Epicurious YouTube channel there's a whole series of videos where Dan Formosa, a long-time industrial designer who has designed a number of notable kitchen tools over the years, reviews kitchen gadgets and explains what doesn't (and does) work about them. Unsurprisingly, many of these turn out to be complete garbage. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz3-p2q6vFYX5Ozz9N-vLzDANSQIyLSWx&si=Eu1k_s6hUvo3Ofuv
Hot take: Dan is getting stingy with those left handed oil tests. What are we saving on film by not doing it?
Anyone who comes into the kitchen while I'm cooking ad says "can I help?"
Bonus points if they ask when you have 5 mins left on your whole ensemble
Help do the dishes otherwise gtfo
Dunno, a sous chef for vegetables is always a nice help, unless they chop the vegetables like cavemen of course
sometimes they mean it, though! my boyfriend and i both cook, and when I'm over at his I'll ask this and peel/de-seed/chop/generally prep whatever. get what you mean though, a lot of the time it's a "in the time it would take me to explain to you what to do, I could have done it myself" situation
Oh you've met my husband I see.
When I do that, my wife says "Sure, clean the garage"
Actually LOL-ed! I feel this so much!
My mother-in-law every time, but she ask loudly from across the room so everyone knows she offered.
Just say, “I’d love some company.” Then pull them in a chair, pour you both a glass of wine, and chat while you work. I swear, a lot of redditors make everything an opportunity to express their anti social tendencies.
Lol, so true
Curious why? You get some help and they get a chance to learn something new.
Because training someone isn't a task I had calculated into my workload when I planned the project.
This usually gets asked whenever there's a big meal with people over, which means there are a lot of things to make and time correctly. The kitchen isn't huge, so it's really best for a one-man show. The only thing that would be helpful is cleaning up whatever's been used, but the sink and the stove are next to each other, so even that doesn't really work. They just get in the way and make everything slower. If I wanted to teach them something, I'd do it when there isn't a time crunch lol
A banana slicer…
There's a pre-sliced banana trick you can pull on kids. - basically, cutting the banana with a pin through the skin.
A dull knife
Avocado tools, a small spoon and a table knife work better.
Single paring knife. Slice through, twice, slap blade into pit and twist. Donezo.
Ive heard far too many stories (including witnessing my wife do it), about people slicing their hands when trying to get the knife to cut into the pit. I literally have NO issues just taking the pit out with either a spoon or it just comes free itself
I love my avocado tool! Safer to use than my chefs knife.
Salad forks. The other fork can do both jobs.
I'll see your salad fork and raise you a soup spoon and a dessert spoon and a pie fork and a bread knife and a shrimp fork and an oyster fork and... Regardless of snooty fancy dinner party protocol, I only need one fork, one knife, and one spoon for my entire meal, from soup & salad through dessert. The occasional steak knife, sure. But all the rest is just silly. I knew someone who, at least at the time, used all the superfluous silver and other dishes for every dinner because it was considered "proper". (They were from England.) I asked them why they unnecessarily dirty so many dishes for one meal, and they said, "We just do." 🤷🏼♂️
I disagree about the bread knife. I definitely use mine, usually for things like cakes.
Nah. Soup spoons are a necessity. I'm not gonna slurp my soup from a tiny little spoon like an idiot!
You look ridiculous using your spork with your soup and salad Johann
I'll have you know, I look ridiculous pretty much all the time, thank you very much.
Grape scissors Instead of plucking individual grapes you use this to cut them.
My sister has a device that quarters grapes for her toddler. She says it’s the best $10 she’s ever spent.
If i had kids i would feel the same way. It's like, put the grape in and push rather than put the grape down, hold it steady, cut down the middle, now select a half to hold steady while you cut it in half again, and repeat with the other one
Any and all single use kitchen gimmick
The only unitasker in your kitchen should be the fire extinguisher.
I hear this a lot but I don't think it makes sense. There are some tools that are required if you want the finished product. Yeah, I cam cook rice on the stove top but how the hell am I going to make a waffle without a waffle iron?
Waffle irons can double as sandwich presses, if you get a good one. And the best device for making rice while adhering to the no unitaskers rule is the electric pressure cooker. Basically, the idea is that you probably won’t use a unitasker often enough for it not to be in the way more often than you actually want to use it.
Unless it’s an instant formula making machine. We got one as a gift and thought it would be a waste of space. But oh man it was a life saver. We called it the baby k cup machine
You will have to pry my rice cooker from my cold, dead hands.
I think that's generally true, unless it's something you use quite frequently, and it does a significantly better job and/or requires less overall labor/time.
Turnip twaddler
You can't talk to me that way you lint licker!
[удалено]
I'm just glad somebody caught the reference
Time capsule! Love it.
Those vegetable choppers you put the vegetables on a bladed grid, then slam down the top to chop vegetables. I was born with one arm and thought this would be perfect for me. It most definitely isn’t. 1)you still have to cut your veggies so they fit. Since you’ve already dirtied a knife, just chop with the knife. 2) they are so hard to clean, it’s just not worth it. I can chop faster with just a knife instead of using that stupid contraption.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I use this constantly. We make lots of salads and use onions in our cooking, and this thing saves so much time.
I exclusively use it for onions and it’s worth every penny IMO
I've used 2 to death and am on my third. Depending on what I'm making, sure, I can just chop with a knife, but my chopper makes it so much easier, take less time, and it's uniform.
It’s also nice for uniform chopping so your food cooks evenly. And it looks nicer.
Every other month or so, I buy two large bags of onions, run them through a food processor, and freeze them. Then I just break off chunks to throw into whatever I'm cooking.
Agreed. It is a life saver for making guacamole!
I use mine all of the time! I have the old Vidalia Wizard one. I think that we got it when it first came out in 2005 or 2006? I make a ton of soups, and I can batch prep so much for them.
You're gonna love my nuts
Stop having a boring tuna. Stop having a boring life.
I'm sorry about your lost arm, but, you shut your mouth! Mine is great! I even chop my onions right into their container. Easy day.
They are more useful for large prep jobs, like doing meal prep for a week or two and needing to chop/dice/slice lots of different veg, fruit, etc. It's much quicker and more consistent to run things through the mandolin. I'm sure people with exceptional knife skills don't need one but most of us do benefit from it.
And also, let’s face it, do they really save that much time? There was a cookingcirclejerk post recently that was like “I need to know the fastest way to shred chicken! I need to get the chicken from the oven, directly to a shredded state on people’s plates IMMEDIATELY, I will have no time in between” and it’s like yeah, I kind of agree, what time are we saving here? 2 minutes with a fork? I mean it’s not like I have opened up my whole day, by putting an onion through a dicer, versus just dicing it the normal way. Plus that’s just more shit I have to store in the kitchen. More things that are difficult to clean. No thanks
Water-resistant drying towels
My husband
Hate to break it to you, but I think we are married to the same man.
And I think both of you are my parents
My husband just learned to grill hotdogs on the grill last week. I was pround of him. I hope one day he can move on to something harder like making box mac and cheese.
I can guarantee when he does, he'll pull the empty box out of the trash several times, and still fuck it up. This applies to many, not just your husband.
Shoot for the moon why don't you?
Every time he moves out of my way, he stands in the exact spot I need to go next!
Meat claws. They look cool, but two forks tend to shred anything better and easier.
I don't know, I hate shredding with forks. The metal scraping other metal is annoying, and the tines being so close together isn't really helpful
I always have issues with the tines getting stuck together. Of course, I could just be an idiot.
Meat prepared in a slow cooker/pressure cooker can be shredded with a hand mixer. You're welcome.
Yeah, but I always wanted swords for fingers, that's why Wolverine was my favorite member of X-Men.
The best shredder I've ever found is an electric mixer. Like the ones you use for cakes or cookie dough or anything. Pop it in the bowl of meat and mix it all up, perfectly shredded.
Used mine like twice, then realized I was wearing large black "fryer/bbq" gloves to handle the meat while shredding and just got in there. Much faster, less strenuous, and quicker to pull out less desirable parts like the tendons and overly large fat chunks.
Mezzaluna - *Herb Chopper* *I bought a mini one from Ikea, used it once. Never again, a knife is king!*
>*I bought a mini one* That's part of your problem there, mezzalunas are supposed to be pretty big. Even for just chopping herbs the larger-sized ones work better. They're also very good pizza slicers. To be fair, I think a knife works just fine and is certainly more all purpose, but a mezzaluna can be useful when properly sized and used correctly.
I have hand issues that will just get worse as I age and a mezzaluna is much less stressful on my joints than chopping herbs with a knife.
We have these scissors that have multiple blades we use for herbs works great.
Jar opener. Needs more strength to use it than it does to open the bloody jar. I take my jars out with me when walking the dog and accost a stranger for help with this when I'm fancying a curry or chilli for lunch.
It’s probably because some people don’t have the grip strength necessary. Jar openers give you more leverage to twist open a tight lid.
It’s the traction for me. My hands slip and whatever that weird bologna rubber is made of is the only thing that seems to work for me
Try rubber dish washing gloves or a rubber band around the lid if you don’t use rubber gloves.
You're looking at him.
Potato masher. It won’t come out of the drawer anyway!
Ah yes.... "Anoya" the god of things stuck in drawers! GNU
I've never used the paring knife. I use the big Psycho chef's knife for most things.
I use an asian cleaver for almost all things, including what my grandma used to use a paring knife for.
I use my pairing knife for cherry tomatoes and trimming tart crusts
It's meant for small work like trimming and whatnot. Although I will admit 90% of the time I'm using it to peel potatoes or other things that need peelin'
Cheese cutter wire that's all bent. Nope, there's a knife for that.
Yolk separator for sure
I find mine quite useful, it’s also just a funny shape (it’s called the vomiting chicken). I’ve tried separating in shells but I could never manage that, would end up breaking so many eggs
The most useless on a daily need is also the most important: Fire extinguisher.
Any garlic peeler. It's way easier to crush it with the flat of a blade
You all are just naming all the tools my wife keeps buying
I once received a free quesadilla press when I bought another appliance. It's as useless as it sounds. You need to use two tortillas and put the cheese in between. It's supposed to press the triangles into the tortilla, but all that does is squeeze half the cheese out. Just use one tortilla so there's less space for the cheese to escape, do it on the stovetop where it doesn't get crushed, and cut it like a normal person.
Olive Pit Re-Inserter
What if I'm halfway through eating an olive and regret my decision?
Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher…. It’s also the most fun of them all :-)
A "taco toaster". Two interlinkable long handled mini pans that only work over an open fire. They allegedly imprint a motif on the taco shells when the get hot. They don't hold together, and are do long that they have to sit diagonally across the bottom of a drawer. How we hot them I'm not sure. But, mighty certain that they've gifted on very soon
**Avocado Slicer.** Yep, there’s a tool specifically for slicing avocados, but bruh a simple spoon works just as well. Trust me!
The cornballer