The Gimmicky Kitchen Appliances You Definitely Don’t Need

Your kitchen should have the right tools. Welcome to A Guide to Gearing Up Your Kitchen, a series where I help you outfit the space with all the small appliances you need (and ditch the ones you don’t).

It may not come as a big surprise, but I’m a kitchen nerd. Every time I bring home a new knife or appliance requires that I use it immediately and talk at people about it until their ears shrivel up and die. But while a new air fryer or wok might deserve such excitement, not every kitchen tool deserves it. There are some tools out there vying for your precious counter space and they’re total duds. Here are some of my favorite absolutely unnecessary kitchen tools—if you spot one huddled away in the back of your kitchen cabinet, it might be time to say goodbye. 

Watch this video to hear me explain:

The automatic pan stirrer

Let’s start with my favorite absurd gadget: the automatic pan stirrer. This device is a battery-powered, vibrating, three-legged tool that is meant to spin in a pot or bowl and stir for you. How lovely! Now you can let a pot of beef stew simmer away while you go check on the game, right? Well, there are some issues.

I tested an auto-stirrer in a couple different food situations, and it fell grossly short of making cooking easier:

• It’s not effective for thicker substances. While this three-pronged vibrator was able to rotate in a pot of brothy soup, not even the highest setting would budge in a thin layer of beef chili. And between the two, the chili would be the one in most need of stirring to prevent any burning on the bottom. 

• It can’t be heated. Most brands of pan stirrers are plastic and can only stir warm liquids, which can be helpful for gravy off the heat, but not so much for when you’re actually cooking.

• It only offers one form of stirring. The stirrer only moves around one path in the pot. Any scraping of the bottom and sides you would do with a wooden spoon, a whisk, or a rubber spatula would still need to be done. 

• It’s more expensive. I’m a fan of wireless tools, but the amount of batteries this thing needs (four double As) to simply shake around my pan is a waste. My arm power is free.

• It’s loud. It’s a hard plastic device that chatters around the pan at three different intensities. Any notion of peace and quiet you’d like in the kitchen is violently tossed out the window.

This doesn’t even address the elephant in the kitchen—stirring isn’t hard! It’s one of the easiest, no-skill required parts of cooking. Indeed, some folks, including myself, find stirring a pot of comfort food to be rather therapeutic. There are very few dishes that require constant stirring and something like risotto would be too thick anyway. I’ll just stick with a spoon, thanks.

Credit: Aleneli / Shutterstock.com

An avocado slicer

Avocados have perplexed many eager eaters because of their soft flesh and secured pit. Someone out there decided that we all need a tool to split, pit, and slice an avocado. We don’t.

The avocado slicer is an oddly shaped plastic device with a sharp-ish blade on one end, and a rounded end with five or six thin plastic dividers that are meant to slice your fruit while you scoop. In the center of the device there might be a divot with metal prongs to twist out the pit, but not every one has that feature (the one in the picture above doesn’t seem to).

• The blade stinks. The plastic end meant to replace a knife is short, and is located exactly where the heel of your palm lands when you use the scooping end. Although somewhat dull, it’s still uncomfortable to have sharp plastic press into your hand.

• The scooping end leaves much to be desired. Besides the scoop end being one-size-fits-all (sorry, folks who have larger varieties of avocado), the “blades” that are meant to slice the meat are dull bands of plastic. Instead of getting clean slices of avocado, you end up with mashed up strips. That works for guacamole, but it’s certainly not as precise as a knife. 

Invest in an excellent knife instead:

While the pitting part of the tool (if yours comes with one) is actually pretty effective, overall the slicer pales in comparison to a chef’s knife or santoku. If your avocado is ripe (don’t strong arm your fruit if it’s not ready), you’ll be able to easily cut the avocado into segments, twist out (or pop out) the pit, and peel the skin off to get every bit of the precious green stuff. Then cut it in fine or thick slices with the same knife.

A breakfast-sandwich maker

I always give so-called “uni-taskers” the benefit of the doubt. Mostly because they might be capable of way more than the label says it is. Take the waffle maker for example. Limiting its talent to waffles would be a sad under-use. It’s one of the most versatile cooking appliances you can have in your kitchen. The breakfast sandwich maker, however, is mostly a goofy tool. 

The breakfast sandwich maker is a very specific appliance, reminiscent of a waffle maker but with three-inch round plates, and multiple at that. The idea is that you can put each part of the sandwich into one of the plates to perfectly heat it. It looks cute in the pictures—a bit like a kid’s toy—but in practice, you’ve got an adult headache. 

• The plates are all round. You must use an English muffin, a round piece of ham or sausage, and other perfectly sized ingredients. 

• No runny yolks. You can add the egg with the yolk intact but once you press the plates shut you don’t have much of a choice. I hope you like a broken yolk.

• Extra clean-up. An efficient appliance will make your cooking faster or easier, and although assembling a sandwich in this way might be 30 seconds faster, you need to spend more time cleaning the cooking rings, plates, and release panel.

It’s hard to beat a good frying pan:

So far, I haven’t come across a better tool for making a breakfast sandwich than a frying pan. You can fry bacon, drop the bread in for a quick sizzle in the drippings (because fried bread is the best bread), and make your eggs in the same pan; as many as you like, and any style. 

Food chopper

The food chopper is meant to be a gadget that can do it all—dice, slice, grate, and even mash. But it ends up being another tool that’s more of an arm workout than if you’d just set up a cutting board.

• The blades are a gamble. The device comes with many different blades and graters, but they’re made of thin metal and only work under perfect circumstances. The fruit or veggie must be the right size to be pushed through, and not too hard. If you try smashing raw beets through the dicer, you’ll end up with a broken chopper pretty quickly.

• You might have to cut anyway. Again, the tool functions under the right circumstances. You can’t put a whole russet through the dicing blades; it’s too big. Mushrooms are soft and small enough to pop through, but bigger items need to be chopped into four or five pieces. If you’ve already started cutting with a knife, why not dice the rest of the potato?

• The clean-up sucks. Any time you save pressing mushrooms through this chopper is wasted deep cleaning the channels and grooves of the gadget. Over time, the blades will dull, and hard-to-reach corners will get gunky.

Since you’re dirtying a cutting board and knife, and putting in the elbow grease of forcing ingredients through a metal grid, you’re better off sticking with a knife and cutting board for the average meal. For bigger jobs, an appliance like a food processor is worth the money.

A highly-rated food processor deserves space in your kitchen:

Bagel slicer

The bagel slicer, also morbidly referred to as a bagel guillotine, is another fun little twist on what a knife can do. This chunky, two-part doodad has an inner section where you place a bagel. You push the second section, outfitted with a triangular blade, down over the bagel holder and the blade slices the bagel. It’s fine. Only fine.

• It’s a space-sucker. The gadget itself works, and I can see how it saves a person time if they’re cutting multiple bagels. But as a person with a small kitchen and limited storage space, I dislike how bulky it is. 

• The blade doesn’t last. Unlike a regular knife, the blade inside of the bagel cutter can’t be accessed for sharpening. After a year or so of use, the blade will dull and you’ll notice that the bagels are getting squished instead of sliced.

• One size only. Like the avocado slicer, this tool can’t be adjusted for the size of the item. Bagels that are very thin or small can lean and get sliced at an odd angle, and big, hefty New York City bagels? Fugghetaboudit, they don’t even fit inside the holder.

There are undoubtedly folks who have two left feet when it comes to cutting a bagel, and this device is their best friend. I get it, and I love this for you. But getting familiar with safe horizontal cuts isn’t terribly difficult or time-consuming.

When it comes to outfitting your kitchen and paring down the random gadgets you have, consider all of the tasks you can actually do with a knife instead. Basic cuts and knife care are easy to do with a bit of practice, and it’s worth it in the long run.