Want to Make Cooking Easier? Make Sure You Pick the Right Kitchen Tools

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If you’ve been struggling with meal prep and find that it takes too long to get dinner on the table, you may be using the wrong tools for the job. Although the right gear alone won’t instantly make you a great cook, it will set you up for success so you can work faster and more efficiently.

How do you know if your kitchenware is working against you? Common culprits that can slow you down or produce inferior results are knives, cutting boards, mixing bowls, whisks, spatulas, and cookware—essential tools in any kitchen. Often, it’s the size of the item that’s the issue. For instance, a small paring knife may be less intimidating for some cooks, but its blade is too short and narrow for chopping an onion as quickly as you can with an 8-inch chef’s knife. A tiny cutting board may be easier to clean than a big board, but it doesn’t give you enough space to chop effectively, and as a result you’ll end up sending bits of vegetable flying across the counter. Likewise, an 8-inch-diameter bowl is too narrow for you to whip cream without splattering it across your kitchen and tiring your arm out in the process.

The shape and the quality of materials also affect your cooking performance. A fish spatula—with its slightly flexible, beveled blade and its ergonomic shape—can flip an egg or pancake better than a rigid plastic spatula. A silicone whisk is flimsier than a metal one and clings to the sides of a bowl, making it harder to mix ingredients. And a thin single-ply pan will heat unevenly and can scorch your food, whereas a good-quality tri-ply pan (which has a layer of aluminium sandwiched between two layers of stainless steel) won’t. Remember, your tools should work for you, not the other way around.

In the above video, Wirecutter kitchen writers Lesley Stockton and Michael Sullivan demonstrate how the size, shape, and quality of your gear can affect your performance in the kitchen—and they offer a few simple ways to shave minutes off your meal-prep time.