Christmas gift ideas for the home cook
Cooking, let alone being culinary, needs good tools — here are 11 of the best on the market.
We’re a country of droughts and flooding rains. And in these days of ever-present disasters you often have minutes, not hours, to get sorted. It’s time for some serious prioritising once you have the passport and the jewellery. Naturally, this means cooking stuff.
All sorts of things come along for appraisal here in The Australian test kitchen. And many ultimately find their way into a cupboard marked “surplus to needs”. In the age of Marie Kondo, we’re all about decluttering, not acquisition for its own sake.
Yet, inevitably, there are things we can’t live without. Things I’d replace on insurance if that flood did come through my home.
Things you might want to give someone, or yourself, this Christmas if food and kitchen activity ring your bells.
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1. Sunbeam MultiMincer
$229 (but check for online sales)
Celebrity chef Neil Perry has taught me a few things and some of them are actually useful. One enduring lesson: never buy minced meat. Grind it to order at home. It’s like coffee, right? You don’t grind your beans, then wait for oxidisation and the essence to dissipate, and neither should you do so with meat when mincing it is so easy. And if you ever felt like making sausages — which is fun — this is a reasonably priced machine that goes the distance on that score, too. Your burgers will thank you.
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2. KitchenAid KSM 150 stand mixer (Red)
$899 (seen for $399 online)
I would own a KitchenAid stand mixer for the sheer pleasure of picking it up, putting it down and admiring the timeless, solid American workmanship of the thing. It’s quite good at mixing, too.
The dough hook for pasta, breads and the like; the whisk for egg whites (hello, pavlova) and the other attachment for cakes and scones. The next step is to start accessorising and what I really want for Christmas — darling — is the pasta-making attachment. To begin with anyway. Choose your colour wisely; these things last a very, very long time.
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3. Everdure by Heston Blumenthal Fusion
$925 including pedestal stand (but check for online sales)
Get out your cliche detector, but once you’re used to grilling over charcoal you won’t want to do your outdoor cooking any other way. And the Heston makes charcoal cooking easy. The electric element that gets the charcoal going is the key; lighting it any other way is a schlep. Charcoal is not the path of least resistance: it is dirty, and organic fuel barbecues need plenty of cleaning, which is messy. And, while the Heston design is brilliant, they’re fairly cheaply constructed and certain parts wear out. But I couldn’t live without it.
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4. Roccbox pizza oven
$899 delivered, online only
No single cooking device has given me, my family and friends more pleasure than this outrageously functional outdoor oven.
But, then, I love making pizza from scratch almost as much as I love eating it. It really makes sense only if you whip up your own dough, which is a doddle.
Used solely on gas, the little igloo-shaped, stone-lined cooking space gets to 450C with ease to make brilliant, char-blistered pizza, pide, calzone in a thrice. I’ve used it for meats, fish, vegetables. And you can run it on wood but, frankly, why would you bother? A triumph of industrial design.
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5. Amazon Echo Dot Gen 3
$79 (check for online sales)
Left field this one, but stay with me. You’re up your elbows in flour/butter/fish guts and suddenly your recipe calls for “three US pints of fish stock”. Holy moly.
“Hey Alexa …” (it’s 1419.53ml, by the way). Siri can do this too, of course, but the Dot will play music (it’s a smart speaker) and music is an important part of any recipe. Very useful in the kitchen, and they sound pretty good for their size.
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6. Breville SuperQ Blender
$999.95 (seen online for $830, delivered)
It turns grass into lawn, almost. Super powerful and super quiet, this is one hell of a smart blender with programs for all sorts of pastes and smoothies from occasional pulse to Tesla-like high-speed record runs.
It comes with a smoothie bullet and a battery-operated vacuum pump for extracting air from certain mixtures.
For some things it replaces a food processor altogether. A great Australian-designed product and company.
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7. Philips HD2178/72 Premium All-in-One Multi Cooker $349
You’re supposed to be able to make yoghurt with this thing. I must be doing something wrong.
But that’s a minor quibble with what just may be the most useful device a flat-dweller could ask for: a one-stop-shop for slow cooking, saute work and, most important for the poor planners among us, pressure cooking. It really does allow you to do in 30 minutes what would conventionally take two hours. Plus you can bake in it, cook rice — a space-saving marvel.
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8. Zyliss silicone garlic peeler $4.99
It’s made of silicone. Long, smooth and cylindrical. And available in a variety of flesh tones. It has ridges on the inside. I know exactly what you’re thinking: a garlic peeler.
Let’s face it: garlic is an essential food group unto itself and peeling garlic cloves can be awkward and makes your fingers smell terrible. There’s an alternative to the manual method. Insert, roll on a firm surface with your palm et voila. Once you’ve used one of these things you’ll never look back.
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9. Dreamfarm Garject garlic press $59.95
Garlic often needs a damn good crushing. This is how you do it. Insert a whole unpeeled clove, squeeze to crush, extract extruded flesh, fold levers backwards to engage the little plastic tab that cleans out the holes and then …
Flick a second tab to discard the skin. It could have been a great idea that only partially worked, but I’ve owned one of these for at least 15 years; they are indispensable. And almost unbreakable. If there’s a better garlic press on the market, I’d like to see it.
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10. The Silver Spoon Classic cookbook $55
It is an unassailable rule of food enthusiasm that one cannot have too many books about Italian food. There is always room for another.
However, unless you want to prepare food like Massimo Bottura’s intellectually-flavoured tucker at Osteria de Francescana, you probably really only need one, and it’s called The Silver Spoon. No big name chef, no fancy restaurant, Il Cucchiaio d’Argento, as it was originally published in 1950, is basically the user manual for Italian home cooking, from Palermo to Parma, Liguria to Lecce.
Ego-free, beautifully designed, utterly reliable and highly motivational. If I could eat only one style of food forever, this would be it, and if I could have just one book …
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11. Victorinox 20cm Fibrox Chef’s Knife $89.95
This isn’t the best chef’s knife money can buy: people can spend thousands on custom-made knives. But it is quite possibly the best value-for-money knife on the market. Treat a good, basic European knife properly and it will perform much better than a neglected Japanese superstar.
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