Kitchen gadgets can range from kitsch to cool, though only a few are practical enough to warrant a place in your kitchen. If you talk to professional chefs about equipment you can take home, the answers usually boil down to high quality equipment that takes practice and skill to master.
At the other end of the spectrum are things like the Kitchen Goose. The Kitchen Goose is particularly cool, and the end result – a boiled egg that’s been scrambled inside the shell – is something a lot of people will want, if not for the utility, then just to show off.
There are a lot of products that fall in the middle ground – they are useful for making the food you’d eat every day, but don’t require you to know your way around the kitchen. Here are our favourites.
1. Black and Decker EG100 Egg Cooker
The most basic food everyone should be able to make is eggs. You can make a lot of different types of eggs extremely easily without any specialised equipment, but if you like poached eggs, then you need to follow complex techniques such as making pouches out of cling film, or making a “vortex” inside the pan.
That takes a fair bit of practice, and will involve a lot of wasted eggs. Or, you could go with this egg cooker, which is available online at Rs. 1,747. The cooker looks a little like a set of idli pans, and it works in a pretty similar manner. You fill the bottom with water, crack eggs into the pans, and then just plug it into the wall. The water gets heated and the steam circulates around the eggs, poaching them. The only cooking you need to do, is crack the eggs, and then scoop them out once cooked – that sounds simple enough for almost everyone.
2. Morphy Richards HBCD Hand Blender
Even hopeless bachelors probably have a small “mixie” in their kitchens, but immersion blenders are super useful in a number of situations. And this one, from Morphy Richards, is available online at Rs. 2,795.
That sounds a little expensive, but the blender comes with attachments that make it useful if you want to chop vegetables, blend soups, whip up a milkshake or prepare cake dough. All this can be done by hand, of course, but the blender makes it simpler, and the advantage of an immersion blender is that you can use it in the vessel you’re cooking in. For a soup, you might otherwise have to transfer hot liquids into your mixer, then get them back into the pot without burning yourself – the immersion blender makes all this very simple and safe.
3. Morphy Richards SM3006 Toast, Waffle and Grill Sandwich Maker
A waffle iron is great to have in the house for when the craving hits you, but they aren’t very useful at other times. That’s why we love this particular waffle maker – its hot plates are removable, and you can use it as a toast maker, or a grill instead. And when you want waffles, just slip the right plates in place, pour in the batter, and let it cook.
Waffle batter is really easy to make as well, and with this, you can have waffles at home, whenever you want. Available online at Rs. 2,999 this is a lot of money if you’re only buying it for waffles, but considering how many other things you can make using the removable plates, it’s actually a pretty reasonable buy.
4. RSVP Onion Goggles
We were a little torn about whether or not the Onion Goggles belonged on this list. They’re available online at Rs. 2,817, which is a pretty hefty price for such a basic piece of equipment. The goggles just provide a tight seal around your eyes, so you can cut onions without your eyes watering. They can’t be worn with spectacles either, so they’re pretty useless if your eyesight is bad enough to require glasses while chopping onions.
If you’re really sensitive to the onion vapours though, these goggles will be very useful, and on Amazon users reviews you’ll find mentions of people using them while riding motorcycles and other situations where you might have dust particles entering your eyes. They’re effective, but you have to decide if that’s worth spending this much money.
5. Kenwood Ice Cream Maker KE-IM200
If you’re looking for a high-end, professional quality ice-cream maker, then you’re going to have to spend a lot of money in India – many of the top rated models cost around Rs. 20,000 or more. A few years ago though, we were introduced to the Kenwood Ice Cream maker, which is available online at Rs. 5,760.
This is a pretty basic ice-cream maker that’s small enough to fit into any kitchen, which is a plus. All you need to do is fill it with the ingredients and press the On button. It works automatically, and you can pop open the lid and add more ingredients once the ice-cream has started to set as well, giving you about 1 litre of ice cream in under an hour.
You do need to place the freezer bowl in your fridge’s freezer a day in advance, so it’s not useful if you get a last minute craving. Another problem is that the relatively small size of the ice cream maker means that cleaning it is a challenge. Despite these negatives, we’ve found this particular ice cream maker to be the perfect kitchen gadget for weekends.
6. Philips Airfryer
The Airfryer – Philips claims – lets you “fry” food without oil. That’s a little misleading, as the device is actually a fan driven oven. The result is something that some may find dry and bland, instead of the rich flavours of genuinely fried food. But that doesn’t mean that you should write off the Airfryer.
Brushing a little oil onto the food you want to cook really helps, and if you’re living on your own and find yourself preparing a lot of ready-to-eat items, then the Airfryer allows you to make them very easily. It’s also much more convenient than standing over a karhai filled with hot oil – you just need to switch it on, set the timer, and come back later to collect your food.
If you’re not too comfortable in the kitchen, deep frying can be really intimidating, and the Airfryer (which is available online at Rs. 10,840) makes it simple. It is expensive, but you’ll be making samosas, French fries, and chicken nuggets without any difficulty.
Bonus
Aside from these six devices, there are two really cool gadgets which we couldn’t in good faith recommend, but thought you might want to know about. The Breakfast Sandwich maker by Hamilton Beach is a very cool way to make an egg muffin, but it’s expensive, – you can get it online at Rs. 8,990 – and very limited in how you can use it. Also, unlike other products in this list, we haven’t used one ourselves, but comments on Amazon suggest that it is very difficult to clean.
Another really cool product that we can’t really recommend, is the Rotimatic, which is up for pre-order, and is expected to be delivered in 2015. The Rotimatic an automatic roti maker – unlike other roti makers where you have to prepare the dough yourself, and then just put it in a press to be cooked, the Rotimatic has containers where you keep flour, water and oil, and it automatically kneads the dough, portions it, and prepares your rotis. It’s actually really brilliant, but the pre-order – which is already sold out, was priced at $599. The Rotimatic will retail for $999, which is simply crazy.
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