Power tools aren’t just for the garage! We’re going to talk about the powered kitchen tools that make your life easier. I’m going to discuss my top 5 power tools that I think are worth the space on your kitchen counter or in your cuboards and in brief, why. Some of these will get their own articles in the future, because so much can be done with them that frankly trying to sum up five of them in one spot would be a disservice.
1: The Stand Mixer
What is it: Okay, the vaunted stand mixer. One of the most versatile power tools in the kitchen! My preferred brand is the KitchenAid which makes a solid product. You can find their mixers still functioning from decades ago. In fact, I’m still running the one I inherited from my Grandmother back in the mid 00’s that she’d had since the late 90’s and it still works great. This thing does just what it says on the tin. It’s a power mixer, but can be so much more. The mixer itself should have variable speeds, a removable bowl, a whisk, a paddle and a hook and ideally will have a utility port.
Why: Mix anything you need without doing it yourself. Like having an assistant in the kitchen for mixing things! This sounds silly, but when you think about how much time, strength and patience it takes to freshly whip cream, temper eggs or knead bread dough, it become pretty apparent. Plus that utility port will add versatility that we’ll talk about in a moment, but first lets talk about what every mixer should have, even if it doesn’t have a utility port:
The whisk is for anything soft and needing lots of air. Freshly whipping cream, turning egg whites into meringue, tempering eggs into cream and much more! The whisk attachment does it all! Anything you’d use a whisk on but think to yourself “I don’t have the time, wrist strength or simply don’t hate myself enough to make this because…yeesh”, this thing will save you from the Carpel Tunnel you can already feel coming.
The paddle is for mixing thicker things. Think cookie dough, creaming sugar and butter, turning mashed potatoes into gnocchi dough and so forth. This is where it’s at. This will be more sturdy than the whisk, but also get you less air.
Lastly, there’s the dough hook. Does kneading your own bread sound boring? Tedious? Let the machine do it for you! There’s not much more to this attachment, but once you use it, if you’re a bread lover it’ll quickly become your favorite.
But now that utility port! The KitchenAid Stand Mixer comes with several attachments of varying levels of useful, but my favorites include the pasta extruder (for things like macaroni), pasta roller/cutter (for any kind of sheet or flat pasta), meat grinder and grain mill! There’s even attachments to convert this into a food processor! Mind you, it’s not the BEST food processor, but it works!
PRICE: These can get expensive. As I said earlier, they’re typically made to last. Usually these will be sold for 400-800 dollars, but can be found on sale regularly or on a secondary market for between 40-60% off. Keep an eye out for sales on the attachments too, if you get a KitchenAid as they can also get pretty spendy.
2: The Food Processor
What is it: These things are like a blender on steroids! The “bowl” should be straight sided, just larger than the blades and come with a lid that has a port for feeding more food into. These will hopefully have multiple blades or attachments and should come with a pulse feature. Ideally it should come with the standard blades, a slicer and a shredder. These last two will be attachments that lift the cutting surface to the top of the bowl and slice or shred things as you push them through the feed tube, like a powered mandolin slicer or grater!
Why: If you don’t need precision in your cutting, you just need a lot of veg rough chopped for a mirepoix, a stir fry, stuffing or something? Blades! Need a LOT of cheese shredded quick! Get out that shredder! Want to slice a LOT of veg on a mandolin but don’t want to USE a mandolin? We got you! Also, while not as good, it’s fine for pureeing soups, emulsifying sauces or making smoothies if you don’t have a blender or happen to already have this out and don’t want to clean another appliance.
But if I had to pick one thing to sell this thing with, it would be anything you need to crumb your flour and butter together. It works better than a mixer or a blender! This includes pie crust, but most importantly: Biscuits! You can freeze your butter, shred it, transfer it out for a moment, replace with the blades, add your flour, pulse together until combined and crumbly and then finish out your recipe right there in the Food Processor. It works a treat, makes cleanup easier and because you’re not touching your butter to warm it up, it’s nearly fool proof!
Price: These can range from pretty cheap to moderately expensive. Hamilton Beach makes a perfectly serviceable one for around 55 dollars, but my favorite is the Cuisinart which vends for closer to 135 dollars.
3: Kitchen Scale
What is it: It’s a scale. Not what you were expecting when I said “power tool” is it?!? It give you the weight of things. Ideally it should have multiple units you can select, the ability to “tare” or “zero out” so you can reset your weight to account for your bowl or your next measure. You’re looking for something that can weigh something as small as a few grams of salt and something that has a capacity of upwards of 10-12 lbs. That sounds like a lot, but when you account for the fact that you’ve probably got a bowl on there as well, that can really layer on the weight. Consider how heavy your glass mixing bowl might be.
Why: From baking to myth busting, these things are the definition of precision. The best baking recipes give you values by weight and this is with good reason. 1 cup of flour, even assuming your measuring cup is EXACTLY one cup, that doesn’t account for how hard you pressed your flour in, the fineness of the grind or any other factors. Meanwhile, 50 grams of flour will be 50 grams of flour no matter how you scoop, pour, etc your flour. It’s also ideal for making sure your buns are the same size. Do you have 1120 grams of dough and want to make 6 identical buns? A quick glance at a calculator app on your phone says you need around 185 grams of dough per bun!
But that’s not all. Are you reading through my blog and hear me say something you don’t agree with or believe? Like when I tell you later that searing your steak DOESN’T lock in the juices!! HOW DARE I! Well now you can attempt to prove me wrong by weighing your steak, searing it and cooking it and then weighing it again against the steak you weighed, cooked in the oven and then seared and reweighed!
how much: This varies a lot, but they’re usually pretty cheap. They can be as cheap as 20 dollars like the perfectly functional Escali which sells for around 25 dollars on Amazon at time of writing to the Oxo Good Grips with Pull Out Display which vends for about 50 dollars. Do you need the pull out display, which will let you see the values around a large bowl? Maybe, maybe not. If you do a lot of baking in large bowls, it might prove VERY useful! But that’s for you to decide
4: Electric Pressure Cooker
What is it: It’s a pot shaped vessel with a locking lid that gets hot. The point of this is that when you put liquid inside, the locked lid prevents the expanding air and vapor from expanding and instead increases the pressure. This enables the liquids and the vapor to get hotter than they would on a stovetop where temperatures have a maximum as regulated by boiling points. Moreover a good one will a range of additional features allowing it to double as a rice cooker, a crock pot, a saute pan and more.
Why: Seriously, these things are great. I used to keep an Instant Pot brand one at work and I could cook soups, stews, chilis, chicken and dumplings, roasts, stir frys and more in this thing. And that was before they added the rice cooker feature to it! The Pressure Cooking feature makes brazing quicker and easier and allows you to just…walk away. It’s just as good as roasting in the oven but as it’s all timed and includes a warming feature, you can put your meat in to cook, go do more chores and come back to pullable meats, tender roasts or well infused broths. I use mine regularly for making home made vegetable, chicken or pork broth pretty regularly and it gets used at least weekly to cook rice.
How Much: Instant Pot brand tends to sell between 120-150 dollars depending on the size, but you can also find them on sale regularly for around 100 dollars or less. Other brands range in price from 80-250 dollars. Some of the more expensive tend to also include Air Fryer Lids and I cannot say that I’ve ever used one I liked, but then again, I think Air Fryers are over rated anyway, so your mileage may very.
5: Sous Vide:
What is it: It’s a fancy, French word for a hot water circulator. These things were considered to be for the high end home chef for a long time but I’m here to dispel that myth. The modern Sous Vide wand will come with an app and a website full of recipes! The whole point of a sous vide is that it takes a vessel of water and maintains a temperature on that water so that the food, submerged in a bag, can slowly cook to the exact same temperature of the water.
Why: There’s lots of reasons why, but my favorite is that you can just…walk away from them. Do you have time but need to save effort to spend elsewhere? For instance, do you need to make dinner but also do laundry, mow the back yard and make sides to go with dinner? The sous vide can help you achieve great results with minimal effort. Well, drop your pork chops, already salted with a couple sprigs of thyme and some pepper in the sous vide 2-3 hours before dinner, go start a load of laundry, go mow the lawn, take a shower, move the laundry, start a new load with your grass covered clothes, go to the kitchen and make your sides and then right before dinner is ready, pull those pork chops out of the water, open the bag and slap those things onto a smoking hot, oiled pan just long enough to get a good sear on both sides, maybe 1-2 minutes and boom! Perfectly cooked, ridiculously juicy pork chops that took you 5 minutes of effort on the front end and 5 minutes of effort right before serving. Best yet, since your center will not be overly hot, no need to rest them for 10 minutes! There’s those 10 minutes saved back!
This isn’t even my FAVORITE use for a sous vide! The best part of a sous vide is that it make custards like Crème Brule a snap. You can’t overcook them in a sous vide. Never again fight with a Baine Marie in the oven, sloshing hot water, curdling your custards or anything of the sort. Just fill jam jars with custard, seal, drop into your sous vide water! Come back in 3-5 hours…or tomorrow, who cares?
How much: Not as much as you’d think anymore! Anova makes a few models that range from 80-200 dollars. Personally, I have the Precision Cooker 2.0 with Wifi that has a 220 dollar price tag but tends to sell for 130 dollars, but I have a friend with the Nano which is smaller and takes more time to come to temp, but cuts your price of entry to 150 dollars, but is regularly on sale for right around 100!
“But don’t I need a heat proof vessel?” You probably already have one! Any decent size beverage cooler will do. One of those smaller ones with the overhand handle are great. Fill it half full of water and then clip your sous vide wand to a pot, large glass or something else that you can fit in there that submerges the metal part of the wand and then close the lid as much as you can. Done!
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Blender:
Blenders are great, don’t get me wrong and if you’re regularly making smoothies, large batches of soups or so forth I’d advise getting one. I just don’t add them to the list because a food processor will do ~80% of what a blender can do whereas a blender can’t do most of what a food processor can do. If you get a blender, there’s a couple of shopping guides to follow depending on what you intend to do. If you’re making a lot of smoothies something like the Ninja with it’s layered blades can be really useful for breaking ice and mixing your smoothie, but if you’re making soup or emulsifying sauces, something with a blade pack at the bottom that creates a nice vortex will do you better.
Waffle Iron:
Waffle irons make waffles or waffle shaped object and while waffles are GREAT, that’s about all they do. Ever make a hashbrown waffle? Cooked cinnamon rolls into a waffle? Amazing! But ultimately, they’re a single use item. Some fancier ones double as a panini press, but that’s again such a niche use that it doesn’t warrant calling “essential”