Essential Cooking Equipment

Good kitchen equipment makes a difference between an enjoyable cooking experience and a stressful one. Obviously, it won’t save you from hopeless user error, but bad pots can burn food, dull knives are ineffective and hazardous, and it all amounts to more frustration and a worse end-product.

It’s hard enough to succeed in the kitchen, and the wrong tools just make it harder. They should support you, not drag you down. In other words, having proper equipment won’t save you from yourself, but they allow you to focus your attention on trying to.

necessary to function

1. three sharp knives

Here’s a test to see if your knife is dull. Try cutting a tomato into slices. Halfway through it if you’re sawing back and forth at the skin, crushing it, while it gushes innards onto your cutting board, then it’s time to re-access your knife.

If your knife sucks, chopping is miserable. By “suck” I mainly mean dull, which makes expensive knives that haven’t been sharpened in a decade suck too. But a knife that’s feather-light, lead-heavy, dulls quickly, or has jagged serrations is no good either. Those obnoxiously colorful ceramic knives that come out of the box razor sharp lose their edge rapidly. High-end knife brands like Henkel and Wustof are fine, but they’re heavy and overpriced and best for a wedding registry.

The most essential knife you need is a chef’s knife. I have owned and tried every knife mentioned here, and my favorite is the humble plastic-handled Victorinox ($35) or Mercer chef’s knife ($8).

After that, I recommend a smaller paring knife for cutting fruit. In China, this is actually called a “fruit knife”.

Victorinox or Mercer Chef’s Knife
Paring knife
Small serrated
Knife Sharpener or Whetstone. For the love of God, keep your knives sharp

2. two pots and one pan

With these three pots, you can cook pretty much every recipe out there.

Enameled cast-iron pots have the same inner material as cast-iron but are glazed and fired. The resulting enamel coating relieves you from having to worry about rust or maintaining the seasoning- a thin layer of polymerized oil that makes bare cast iron non-stick. Black cast iron is charming but not too practical because it’s so damn high-maintenance. Enameled cast iron on the other hand has the same heat retention, sturdiness, beauty, and versatility as cast iron. And you don’t need to baby it. It stews, soups, pastas, oven braises, stove braises, bakes bread, pasta sauces, stir fries, etc.

Non-stick skillets get a lot of shade but why? They make life and eggs so much easier. As long as you avoid abusing it with metal utensils and replace it once the lining flakes off (which shouldn’t happen if you don’t use metal utensils), it’s fine. Get an eco-friendly one if you’re worried about teflon poisoning.

A small saucepan handles smaller quantities of liquid dishes like oatmeal, re-heating soup, melting butter, etc.

1. Enameled Cast-Iron Dutch Oven, 5-6qt
- Lodge, Amazon Basics, and Chinese brands are all viable options. No need to shell out $hundreds$ on a French brand name.
2. Non-stick Skillet, 10”
- T-Fal or Greenpan
3. Saucepan, 1.5 qt
- Cuisinart or Amazon brand.

3. two cutting boards

You need at least two cutting boards; one for onions/garlic/fish/meat, and the other for fruits, vegetables, and anything eaten raw. Obvious hygienic reasons aside, if you use the same board for onions and fruit, your fruit will taste like onions.

The meat/onion cutting board should be plastic since it doesn’t absorb scents like wood. You can mark one side with a sharpie to know it’s the raw-meat-only side. Large cutting boards around 12″x18″ are desirable- they allow you to work faster since you don’t need to herd food bits from rolling onto the floor.

A juice groove is nice, but not absolutely necessary. How many times a year do you actually carve oozing meat on a cutting board?

Plastic cutting board
Bamboo or wood cutting board

4. tools and gadgets

Tongs – having the dexterity to pick up and maneuver your food rather than flopping it around with a spatula feels like growing a set of opposable thumbs if you didn’t already have them.
Glass mixing and condiment bowls – No need to throw out your bowls if they aren’t glass, it’s just an added convenience that they’re microwaveable. The small sizes hold prepared ingredients waiting their turn to be used.
Measuring spoons and cups
The best peeler – cheap and never dulls

5. ovenware

Ovenware needs vary person to person, so look at the sample dishes and decide if it’s necessary for you.

13” x 18” Large sheet pan – cookies, roasted vegetables, toasted nuts
9” x13” glass or ceramic roasting dish – baked enchiladas, baked pastas like ziti or mac and cheese, baked chicken or fish
8” Square glass or ceramic baking dish – brownies, brown rice, or anything in the list above in a smaller serving size
Light-Colored Loaf Pan – banana bread, any other loaf-shaped bread. Dark-colored loaf pans conduct heat too quickly.
Muffin Pan – muffins… but also mini anything (meal-prep frittatas, breakfast cups, cupcakes, pies)

Extremely Nice Stuff to have Around

possible to get by without, but makes life a lot easier

1. Tools

Silicon Spatula – for scraping every last bit of batter and jarred stuffs
Microplane Zester – how do you get fine lemon zest without a lemon zester? also good for grating cheese, garlic, and ginger.
Garlic Press – makes cooking with garlic less of a pain
Citrus Squeezer – increases lemon/lime juice yields considerably.
Whisk – a fork kind of works but not really
Potato masher – a fork kind of works but not really…at all

2. Gadgets/Appliances

Food scale – the only way to guarantee consistency in baking, makes recipes easier to scale up and down, and always comes in handy when weighing ingredients for recipes that call for weight instead of volume.
Blender
Mini food processor – makes better pesto, romesco, hummus, and salad dressings than a blender, and more affordable than a full-size.
Toaster Oven – I’m firmly opposed to vertically oriented toasters because they’re only good for one thing- toast. Some can barely even accommodate a bagel. Pathetic. A good toaster oven functions as a mini oven. You can roast chickens, vegetables, bake pies, anything! I use a toaster oven as a full-time oven in Beijing and have grown to love how quickly it preheats and bakes without warming up my entire apartment.