10 Must-Have Kitchen Essentials For Your Home
No matter what your cooking skill level is, having the essential kitchen tools and equipment can make your life easier and let you dish out tasty and exciting food time and time again (no pun intended).
From the outset, we suggest investing in good-quality, safe, and durable products that you can definitely rely on. Now, here is a checklist of the important kitchenware you need to have!
Preparation Kitchen Tools
You can’t start cooking without these preparation kitchen tools. Here are some of the ones you should get first:
1) Can Opener
A can opener bites open your favourite canned goods like beans, mushroom soup, and sweet desserts like preserved pineapples and lychees.
Unlike before, you can find multipurpose can openers that can pull tabs and caps, open jar covers, and twist screw tops, besides opening cans, which makes it all the more needed in the kitchen!
2) Chef’s Knife
A chef’s knife can dice, chop, and cut almost any food from vegetables to fish.
It comes in 20, 23, and 25cm sizes. You get the smaller one for cutting small and large food alike suitable for almost everyone, or the larger one for more strength and slicing bigger pieces.
People starting out can get an affordable but smooth-cutting chef’s knife. Remember to sharpen it occasionally to maintain it; but if the blade remains dull, you can just replace it with a new one.
3) Cutting Board
To be able to use your knife in the first place, you’d need a trusty cutting board. There are a huge variety of cutting boards available differing in function and size.
Make sure that the one you pick can fit in your kitchen sink. Also, you may want to get one that is light, such as a wood cutting board, or one that has handles on the sides so you can lift it easily.
Cooking Equipment
Ready to cook? Let’s now see the fundamental cooking equipment so you won’t need to always order at a restaurant:
4) Stainless Steel Skillet
A skillet performs different kinds of cooking. It lets you fry, sauté, brown, and sear vegetables, meat, poultry, and fish.
Being a great conductor of heat, stainless versions are especially great and fast at sautéing and searing food. Furthermore, you can roast food on a stainless skillet and place it inside the oven.
5) Sauté Pan
As opposed to a skillet, a sauté pan has higher sides and a flatter, more controllable base that makes it ideal for braising and sautéing food. You would want to cook some soups and sauces with this cookware.
6) Saucepan
A saucepan has straight and deep sides designed for sauces and soups. With its long and raised handle, you can pour liquids without difficulty into a bowl or any other container.
They come in small, medium, and large sizes. You should pick the one that will suit your sauce-making needs and family size.
Cooking Utensils
Having seen the basic cookware in the kitchen, let’s move on to the cooking utensils that pair with them:
7) Spatula
A spatula is the skillet’s sidekick. The tool is wide, soft, and flexible allowing you to lift, spread, and flip different sorts of food.
The best part is that it gets your pancakes, eggs, French toast, or other food cooked just the way you want them.
Furthermore, spatulas can have wonderful features like a silicone spatula and stainless steel handle, giving it high heat resistance.
8) Ladle
A ladle is a round and deep spoon used for scooping soup, sauce, and stew. It’s deep enough to need just a few scoops to fill a bowl unlike with using only a flat spoon.
It also has silicone and stainless steel models which won’t scratch your cookware and won’t melt under intense heat, say, if you leave it in the pot or put it in the dishwasher.
Appliances
Of course, you also need kitchen appliances to make great food. Among what you should have are the following:
9) Rice Cooker
As rice is the staple food in Malaysia, you should certainly get a rice cooker.
A rice cooker can be used not only to cook rice but also to make oatmeal, risotto, poach eggs, slow-cook beans and stews, and steam veggies. That makes it a very handy kitchen appliance!
10) Induction Cooktops
With its minimalist look and space-saving form factor, induction cooktops are perfect for small kitchens.
Induction cooktops heat food by the process of electrical induction. This is where an electric current transfers heat directly under the pan or pots rather than coming from a burner on conventional stovetops.
Induction cooktops are safe to use despite using electromagnetic fields to cook food. It also does not use gas so you won’t have to order one for your home every time it runs out, which will help you save money.