In Appreciation of Kitchen Tools

If you do much cooking or baking at home, you probably have several tools to help you. Maybe a favorite cutting board or knife, a blender, a favorite baking dish or pot, or more.

I don’t know about you, but these aren’t things I think about that often. I tend to take them for granted, but in reality, they’re extremely helpful, and I likely wouldn’t do nearly as much cooking or baking without them.

So, I thought I’d take a minute to appreciate a few kitchen tools.

Stand mixer

I started thinking about this a little over a week ago when I was making angel food cake for a friend’s birthday. In case you’ve never made angel food cake before, the most important step is to beat egg whites until they’re stiff and glossy. (Note that separating the eggs is also very important because if any yolk gets in, you’ll never get the whites to that glossy stage.)

Doing this with a stand mixer is a cinch. I just put in the ingredients, started the mixer, and let it do its work. I worked on other things while it was going, just periodically checking it to see how things looked, until it finally got to the right stage. Here’s the mixture after I just started folding in the flour.

As someone who watched all of Downton Abbey, I couldn’t help thinking of the “downstairs” kitchen staff who had to do everything by hand, including beating egg whites. My arm and hand almost hurt even thinking about it. I suppose one advantage would be developing some serious arm muscles, but even so, I’ll stick with my stand mixer.

Oh, and I’m happy to report that my friend greatly enjoyed the resulting angel food cake.

I will add that I also appreciate my stand mixer a lot around the end of the year when I do a lot of holiday baking. When I’m making lots of cookies, especially double batches, it’s so much nicer to let the mixer do the hard work of stirring everything together.

Oven

A more basic but still very important tool is my oven. It heats food evenly and consistently, it doesn’t require me to gather firewood or other materials, and as long as I’m paying attention, there’s very little chance of something getting burned.

Maybe one reason I appreciate it is that I watch some cooking competition shows, like BBQ Brawl, where the contestants have to cook outside over an open flame. This is also around the time of year when I’m getting ready to go camping, and even though the only thing we cook over an open flame is s’mores, I’m well aware of how temperamental fires can be, how you have to worry about the wind, damp firewood, rain, etc., and the challenges of getting something cooked evenly. Marshmallows, at least, are also unfortunately likely to simply burst into flames.

I don’t have to worry about any of that with my oven, and I greatly appreciate its reliability.

Toaster

I realize a toaster may not seem very exciting, but I do appreciate mine. I have to admit, though, that it’s not something I thought much about until I heard Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about making toast on StarTalk.

It turns out that it’s more interesting than expected (especially with commentary from Chuck Nice). The short version is that most of the time that bread is in the toaster, it’s not browning. It’s just having the moisture removed. The bread has to get dry before it can start toasting. This is similar to how wet firewood won’t burn well.

This is also true if you use a toaster oven or regular oven to toast, although you have to be a lot more careful with those because it’s much more likely for the toast to burn. I witnessed this firsthand when a friend tried to make toast in her oven and ended up with black bread.

That’s why I appreciate my toaster. I don’t use it every day, but when I do, I like being able to put the bread in and let the toaster do its thing without worrying about the toast burning. Sometimes the simple things really are the best.

So many tools to appreciate

These are just a few examples. I could also talk about my best knife, my cutting board, my well-used baking dishes, and more, but you get the idea.

It’s easy to take all these things for granted, but I think it can be helpful at times to pause and consider how much these tools help us, and to appreciate everything they do.