So you’ve finally moved out of that tired, old apartment you were sharing with friends or even left the family roost and you’ve got yourself a classy new bachelor’s pad. And, horrors of horrors, it’s even got a kitchen. What the hell are you going to do in there? Well, cook, for starters. There will definitely come a time when you’ll tire of all the roadside junk or will find the food at the local Punjabi restaurant just too monotonous. Then, you’ll turn back to your kitchen. And when you do, you’ll find that you stocked up your bar, but you forgot to buy anything at all for the kitchen. So here are twelve essential culinary tools that you must buy for your kitchen. If not for yourself, then maybe for that cute babe from the office who’s been hinting that you invite her over. Now, it would certainly not do for her to discover exactly how bare your kitchen is.
If you’re the breed that enjoys your regular kitchen jaunts, then treat this article as a checklist to see whether you’ve got all the essentials or not. Collect all the items listed below and broaden your scope of coming up with well-cooked, not to mention delicious, items in your kitchen.
1. 8-inch Chef’s knife
This is the all-important kitchen devil that causes great ‘constructive’ destruction. The kitchen is all about cutting, chopping, slicing, and carving ingredients (unless you’re a ready-to-cook microwave junky), so you need to equip yourself with a good quality knife to get your cooking started.
2. 10-inch sauté/frying pan
This is the all-purpose pan that can be put to use everyday for tossing up a great breakfast, frying condiments to put in curries, to heating leftovers from last nights pizza party. Get a pan with an aluminum core which heats better and cooks evenly. Guess that would mean the end of your dented tin pans. Chuck ’em!
3. 1-2 quart saucepan with lid
Great for making soups, cooking curries, heating sauces or just boiling water. Saves you from a lot of splattering.
4. Large strainer
Makes it easy to wash vegetables, fruits and drain noodles and pasta.
5. Vegetable peeler
Not everybody can be an expert with the knife and sometimes it’s just plain boring to peel a load of potatoes or carrots with an ordinary chef’s knife. This one is a great time-saver.
6. Can opener
It’s inevitable that you’ll be sooner or later resort to a canned product such as baked beans, various cuisine curries, canned meats or fruits or Haldiram’s Rosgullas. Banging the lid with a knife would not be a brilliant idea, so invest in a good, ergonomic can opener.
7. A PYREX Measuring Cup
The devil might get into you one fine day and make you want to whip up something out of a cook book. It’ll be darn hard to measure the ingredients right with your fingers or spoons esp. since cook books go by specifying quantities such as in quarts and milliliters. Guessing these quantities without a measuring cup would be a disaster, so play safe and stop taxing your brains over it.
8. Spatula
Trying to turn over an omelet or a chapatti with a fork or spoon would mean using you fingers of the other hand as well for support. For any kind of flipping, a spatula would be a safe bet from saving you with either a burnt dish or scalded fingers. It’s also ideal for stirring vegetables in a pan instead of pricking and prodding with a spoon or fork. A wooden or a Teflon-coated spatula would be an excellent addition to your kitchen.
9. A four-sided grater
We all know that food should look presentable and the secret to presentable food lies in perfect squares and rectangles and well thinned slices of vegetables. You don’t have to learn new skills in welding the knife if you have this handy tool to do the business. Also, if you like your cheese, then this one’s definitely for you. Grated cheese is infinitely better than cheese crumbles with your fingers.
10. Mixing bowl
Not everything can be dumped into a pan and put to a boil. Some ingredients have to be mixed before putting it on the flame by coating the ingredients with oil or spices for better taste and aroma. The bowl is also great for tossing up a salad or whipping up cream or beating eggs. It also serves other purposes such as a fruit bowl or even a serving dish.
11. Food-processor
Whether it is grinding pastes (ginger-garlic) for curries or chutneys to add that chatpati flavor or whipping up a good health shake, this item is quite indispensable for an Indian kitchen.
12. Cooker
Yeah, so we’ve heard that food cooked slowly over a charcoal fire tastes awesome and mimicking it quickly over a pan on the stove doesn’t quite cut it, but who has the time to slog over the stove for 2-3 hrs? This is the rescuer that cooks meat in a jiffy and is our old friend for an emergency khichdi dinner.
(1).jpg)
.jpg)
(105).jpg)
.jpg)
(20).jpg)