The kitchen tools I regret buying

Every kitchen has a drawer. The drawer. The one that contains the avocado slicer your aunt sent you for Christmas in 2019, the herb stripper you bought at one in the morning after a Bon Appétit YouTube spiral, and the silicone garlic peeler that doesn’t work on garlic. I know this because I have one too — and I’m a professional chef, who, in theory, should know better.

What follows is a list of things I have spent real money on and regret. The point isn’t that these tools are universally bad — some of them have their use case. The point is that I bought them under the impression that owning them would make me a better cook, and they did not.

1. The Sous Vide Wand.

I used it twice. The first time was magnificent — a perfect 56°C ribeye, the kind of edge-to-edge pink that makes you feel like a wizard in your own kitchen. The second time was good. The third time, I realised I was spending ninety minutes preheating a tank of water to do something I could do in a hot pan in eight minutes, and that the wand had migrated to the cupboard above the fridge, where it remains.

The point isn’t that these tools are bad. It’s that I bought them thinking they’d make me a better cook.

If you cook for restaurants, sous vide is non-negotiable — it’s how you hold sixty covers’ worth of beef cheek at exactly the right temperature for a six-hour dinner service. If you cook at home for two people, it is, almost always, theatre. A £99 thermometer reads the centre of a steak in two seconds, costs a fifth of the wand, lives in the drawer next to the cooker, and tells you everything sous vide tells you without the hour and a half of waiting.

2. The Garlic Press.

I owned two. They both lived in the drawer, beneath the sous vide wand. A microplane and the side of a chef’s knife will do everything a garlic press does — faster, with less metal between you and the food, and you don’t have to clean a hinge.

The microplane is the more useful of the two. A clove turns to silk in a second, and the same tool zests citrus, grates parmesan, and shaves nutmeg over a finished plate. It is, pound for pound, the most-used object in any kitchen I’ve ever worked in, restaurant or otherwise. The side of the chef’s knife is the more honest. Smash the clove with the flat of the blade, the peel comes off in your hand, mince in three passes. Either way, the press is theatre.

3. The Mandoline.

I keep mine because I’m too vain to admit I don’t use it. The truth is, I used it five times and then sliced the tip of a thumb on it, and since then it has lived behind the food processor in the bottom-left cupboard. The food processor is also collecting dust.

Here’s the secret no kitchen-shop assistant will tell you: a sharp chef’s knife will julienne a carrot or shave a fennel bulb almost as thinly as a mandoline can, and it won’t take a slice off you while you’re not paying attention. The mandoline earns its keep in restaurant kitchens because we cut two kilos at a time, and at those volumes the speed difference matters. At home, you are cutting one fennel. Use the knife.

4. The Spiralizer.

Bought in 2017, at the height of the courgetti moment. Used for one dinner. Friend came round, I made courgetti, friend asked if she could just have pasta. I have not seen the spiralizer since.

A vegetable peeler will give you ribbons. A sharp knife will give you noodles. A spiralizer gives you a courgette wrapped around a plastic core, and then it gives you a piece of plastic equipment that does only one thing, and then it gives you something else to find a home for in your cupboard.

5. The Avocado Slicer.

I have never bought one of these. My aunt has bought me three. I have re-gifted all three. There is no avocado in the world that requires a £6 piece of injection-moulded plastic to render edible, and there is, I have come to suspect, a small but observable correlation between the people who own avocado slicers and the people who don’t actually like avocados that much.

A spoon. A knife. That is the entirety of the tool requirement.

6. Anything that does only one thing.

This is the rule, the underline-it-and-stick-it-on-the-fridge rule that took me a decade and several thousand pounds to learn. If a tool does only one thing, it has to do that one thing about a hundred and fifty times a year before it earns a spot in a drawer that has space.

The avocado slicer does one thing, badly, three times a year. The egg slicer does one thing, badly, twice a year. The aebleskiver pan does one thing, beautifully, on one weekend in December. None of them earn the space they take up. None of them survive a moving van.

If a tool does only one thing, it has to do it a hundred and fifty times a year before it earns a place in your kitchen.

The good tools — the chef’s knife, the microplane, the wooden spoon, the tongs, the cast-iron pan — do five things each, and they do them every night. The drawer rewards generality. The rack rewards excellence. There is no third category that justifies its space.

What I keep, then.

A list, in case you are wondering. A chef’s knife. A paring knife. A serrated bread knife. A microplane. A Y-peeler. Tongs. A wooden spoon. A fish slice. A digital thermometer. A £4 silicone spatula. And a pair of cooking chopsticks I stole from a Chinese restaurant in 2009 that have outlived seven other utensils I bought to replace them.

That is enough to cook everything in Nose to Tail, most of The River Café, and almost everything in your own head. It is not, you’ll notice, the contents of a Williams Sonoma catalogue. It is the contents of every working kitchen I have ever respected.

The drawer is honest. The rack is honest. Buy what you’ll use a hundred and fifty times a year, and let your aunt buy the avocado slicer.