10 kitchen gadgets you really don’t need – from garlic presses to spiralizers
The average household has more than £300 worth of unused cookery kit. Here, experts offer tips on how to make bread, ice-cream and other delicious foods without fancy contraptions
J acob Kenedy’s home kitchen is full of things he rarely uses: a sushi mat, a coconut grater, a pestle and mortar, even a borrowed turbotière (a kite-shaped pan specifically for poaching turbot). “I’m the worst,” confesses the chef-owner at Bocca di Lupo in central London. “I buy gadgets all the time. I’m a kleptomaniac of other cuisines; I’ve an enormous kitchen island full of crap.”
Kenedy is not alone. In a survey last year, tapwarehouse.com found that 41% of tagine owners had never used theirs. Spiralizers, waffle-irons and juicers are all gathering dust, too, with the average household home to £311 of unused kitchen equipment.
Not all neglected kit is useless – some items are underappreciated. You can cook north African tagine dishes in a lidded casserole pot, but Tarik Abdeladim, the owner of the York restaurant Los Moros, insists a tagine’s cone “enables flavoured steam to slide back into the sauce”, intensifying the dish. He adds: “Traditionally, Berber households have different tagines for fish or chicken. They believe the clay gets seasoned over time, enhancing the flavour.”
