Go Go Gadgets: 30 Handy Kitchen Gadget Tips

Kitchen Utensils

1. Use an egg slicer to make uniform slices of more than just hard boiled eggs: You can slice fresh mushrooms, soft fruits (such as strawberries, kiwis, bananas), olives, soft deli cheeses and more. Very handy tool for garnishes!
2. Use a pizza cutter to quickly slice everything from pizzas, fudge, pancakes, french toast, chicken strips and more. If you have small kids, this is a great time saver when cutting up food!
3. Melon ballers are great for making balls of melon, but also for coring fruits like pears and apples, hulling strawberries, seeding tomatoes, making mini-meatballs and and balls of herbed butter. They’re also handy for hollowing out cherry tomatoes. Another tip: make perfect thumbprint cookies by pressing the melon baller in each cookie before baking.
4. Clean the seeds and membranes from peppers with a serrated grapefruit spoon, cleans them up nicely! Also useful for removing seeds from squash, melons, tomatoes and fruits.
5. Greasing muffin tins, bundt & cake pans is a breeze with a pastry brush first dipped in melted butter or shortening. A pastry brush also makes cleaning graters quick work–just brush off the bits clinging to the grater before washing.
6. Use a pastry tube and decorative tip for more than just decorating pastry, try making fancy butter pats for baked potatoes, pancakes, rolls or filling deviled eggs decoratively.
7. Keep a sewing gauge ruler in the kitchen drawer, they’re handy for measuring the thickness of pastry and cookie doughs.
8. Use a small funnel for separating eggs.
9. Use your blender to grind coffee beans and spices, see Tip: Use Mason Jars With Your Blender.
10. Use ice cream scoops to scoop out batter for perfectly even sized muffins (see 10 Tips For Baking Muffins), filling tarts or use a smaller scoop for cookie dough. A spring loaded icecream scoop measures 1/4 cup shortening and it comes out cleanly and easily.
11. Keep a pair of scissors aside to use just for food, you can quickly snip fresh herbs (saves on chopping), fresh rhubarb, green onions and other fresh vegetables as well as trim fat off meats and snip bacon along the edges so it won’t curl.
12. Use a vegetable peeler to make chocolate curls and cut easy strips of zest from citrus fruits.
13. Keep wooden chopsticks in pantry canisters, they’re great for leveling off measured items like flour and sugar.
14. Use a turkey baster to squeeze pancake batter onto a hot griddle for perfectly sized pancakes. An empty ketchup bottle does the trick too.
15. Use a potato masher to press rice krispy treats and puffwheat cake into the pan, just give it a light spray of non-stick spray first. You can also use it to quickly mash ground beef while it’s browning.
16. Muffin tins are useful for more than just baking muffins & cupcakes, you can also make large ice cubes for punch, freeze portions of homemade stock, freeze fresh lemon juice for cooking, make mini-meatloaves and cook stuffed food such as peppers.
17. Use ice cube trays to freeze leftover wine, homemade stock and fresh lemon juices. Freeze then pop them out and seal in a freezer bag. These little cubes are perfect for cooking.
18. Use a rock to crush garlic, crush ice and other jobs.
19. Forget pump spray bottles for cooking oil–they never last long. Instead, use an old fashioned condiments squeeze bottle with a tip. Squirt out just the amount you need with no trouble. Find them at the dollar store for less than a buck.
20. Try using a shoe horn to shuck corn.
21. Here’s a clever–and quick–way to skin a kiwi: Trim both ends of the fruit; ease a tablespoon between the flesh and the peel. Turn the kiwi, pressing the back of the spoon against the peel as you go. The fruit should slide right out in one piece–ready for slicing (Source).
22. Remove the smell of garlic from hands by rubbing your fingers over a stainless steel spoon or the sink tap.
23. Save those plastic reward cards and use them as pot scrubbers.
24. Keep an unused toothbrush in the kitchen to scrub things like fresh mushrooms and corn on the cob to remove the silk. It comes in very handy!
25. Save non-stick spray can caps as cookie cutters–cut cookie dough pops right out with a slight squeeze.
26. Strawberry Tip: Wash freshly picked strawberries & then take a wide plastic straw and insert it at the bottom of a strawberry–then push the stem out.
27. DIY Non-Slip Bowls: No need to buy expensive mixing bowls with rubber bottoms–just set a bowl on top of a damp cloth and no more worries about it sliding around while you’re mixing something. You can also use this trick to keep cutting boards from sliding.
28. Open Tight Lid Jars: If tapping around the lid with a knife won’t loosen a jar lid, try putting on a pair of latex gloves then twisting the lid off. This gives a good grip that won’t slip. Another helper: cut a square of leftover nonslip shelf liner and keep that on hand to unscrew lids.
29. Use a steamer basket to cook potatoes for mashing (instead of boiling them). The flavor is much better and you never have to worry about your potatoes being watery.
30. Place raw fish on a coffee filter before steaming it and you can lift out the cooked fish in one piece, the fish won’t fall apart into pieces this way.

Some of these tips were sent in by readers or previously mentioned on Tipnut via the following pages:

• 50 Quick Tips For The Kitchen
• Kitchen Tip Quickies
• More Kitchen Tip Quickies
• 14 Kitchen Tip Quickies
• 20 Handy Quick Tips For The Kitchen
• 15 Kitchen Tip Quickies

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