If you like to consider yourself something of a keen chef, then you need to make sure that you are properly happy with your kitchen. Indeed, you might feel that your kitchen is actually the most important room in the home and that it is somehow your creative space.
The better suited it is to ensure that you can cook what you want to cook, the more likely you are to enjoy cooking, to produce food that you and everyone around you will love, and to improve your cooking skills greatly as well.
In this article, we are going to take a look at some of the essentials that you should fit out your kitchen with if you want to cook better meals at home, especially if you already consider yourself a decent home cook.
Spice Rack
Let’s start with some of the classics. If you have not yet got a spice rack in your kitchen, you might want to think about finding one – as this is actually one of the most useful things that a good home cook can have.
Any decent cook knows just how important herbs and spices are to the culmination of a beautiful meal – and you need to make sure that you have those ingredients easily to hand when you are cooking, as that way you are much more likely to use them, and you won’t have to go away from the stove in order to rifle through your cupboards trying to find them.
A decent spice rack is therefore a simple and elegant thing, and it is something that you will find changes your cooking life in a surprisingly profound way.
Griddle
Barbequed foods are amazing, but you can’t always get out there and put the BBQ on whenever you need to just for one element of a dish. However, if you want to produce the same kind of taste and effect as a BBQ in your kitchen, then you can easily do so by treating yourself to a good quality griddle.
Many people still don’t know what a griddle actually is. It’s very simple – it’s just a thick, bottom-heavy pan that has grill lines in it so that you can fry and grill something at the same time. Usually, they are made of cast iron, so you can also put them under the grill or in the oven as well.
This is a versatile and fascinating tool and something that a home cook should absolutely look into getting for your kitchen at your earliest opportunity.
Coffee Machine
Who doesn’t love a coffee in the morning? Most of us need a good cup of coffee to get going most days, and there are few things more joyful than being able to produce a great cup of coffee easily in your own kitchen.
There are many tools that the keen cook usually has – it could be a percolator for the stove, for instance, or an old-style cafetiere. But if you really want to take your coffee seriously, you might want to think about getting hold of a coffee machine.
The best coffee machines have a variety of settings and options, so you can choose to create a latte, a flat white, a mocha, or whatever you fancy. That is something that most people would absolutely love to have in their kitchen. If it sounds like something you fancy, don’t hesitate to go out and find one today.
Pan Rack
When it comes to trying to store things in your kitchen as successfully as possible, there are a lot of things that you always have to consider. One of the most difficult concerns here is where to store your pans, as these are always going to be a little too bulky for most cupboards, and also you want to be able to grab them whenever possible from where you are standing by the stove.
For that reason, many keen home cooks install a pan rack above the cooking area, or nearby it. This is great because you can get hold of any pan that you might need at a moment’s notice, and it is really one of the best ways to store the pans you already own. Make sure you install one of these today if you want to make better use of your kitchen.
Food Processor
These days there is really no good reason not to have a food processor, as it is a tool that you can use for so many diverse kinds of meals, and you are never going to run out of ways in which you can use it.
It can be as simple as wanting to mix a few ingredients up very fast, or it might be that you are trying to concoct a curry paste from scratch and you want to make it easier. Having a food processor just saves so much time, and never at the expense of flavour – in fact, it often improves the dishes you create surprisingly well.
Find yourself a good quality food processor if you really want to be able to cut out time without cutting corners in terms of the flavour of food.
Pestle & Mortar
Sometimes the oldest tools are still the best for the job for any home cook. That is absolutely the case when it comes to pestle and mortar, and this is something that any kitchen should have just for those occasions when there is really nothing else to go for.
A good pestle and mortar can be the quickest possible way to break up ingredients and concoct small beauties, and it is something that is absolutely worth thinking about finding for that reason. It is also one of those chef-like things which will really make you feel as though you are a professional, which is a great thing to be able to do in your own kitchen at home.
As long as you have all of these things, you will feel much more able to produce great meals in your own kitchen, and much quicker than before.
