Most Useless Kitchen Items and Utensils

[MichaelB]

How do you section a grapefruit without one, at least without losing most of the pulp?

The same way you section any citrus fruit!

Cut the rind, pith and "outer" membrane from the fruit. With a paring knive make "V" cuts along the edge of each membrane line, each section will drop out.

Takes just about a minute per fruit -- unless, of course, you also want to blanch or candy the rind. Then, you simply add a first step of removing just the colored part of the rind with a vegetable peeler.

[Squeat Mungry]

I'm still a big garlic press lover.  Call me crazy.

I'm with you, and I hate arguing about it.

You guys are crazy. A garlic press is worse than useless without a dishwasher. Or with a dishwasher that is sitting in its box in the closet. Besides, it's so easy to mince with the back of a french knife, ala Joanne Weir, and I almost always have other aromatics to mince, chop or whatever.

Crushes nicely in a mortar, too.

Squeat

PS Yes, I have a press. And it qualifies in my book.

Edited to include enough words.

Edited November 21, 2003 by Squeat Mungry (log)

[elyse]

I'm still a big garlic press lover.  Call me crazy.

I'm with you, and I hate arguing about it.

You guys are crazy. A garlic press is worse than useless without a dishwasher. Or with a dishwasher that is sitting in its box in the closet. Besides, it's so easy to mince with the back of a french knife, ala Joanne Weir, and I almost always have other aromatics to mince, chop or whatever.

Crushes nicely in a mortar, too.

Squeat

PS Yes, I have a press. And it qualifies in my book.

Edited to include enough words.

I've done both a lot, and I like the press better for fine garlic.

[Varmint]

Enough about garlic presses. Let's get back to truly useless utensils!

[Al_Dente]

Orangutan skinner.

[Mayhaw Man]

Mine is a garlic peeler. Little rubber $6 tube that a friend talked me into buying. It's so awkward. I just smash the garlic with my knife or something handy and heavy and get on with it.

And then there was the cheese slicer. Little Y shaped thing with a wire. Egads. Just cut your cheese with a knife! That one bit the dust long ago.

I actually like the little tube thing, but after I got it I realized that a rubber pad used for opening jars works just as well and is much easier to clean.

[bilrus]

Orangutan skinner.

But how do you get the skin off without the skinner?

[Varmint]

Orangutan skinner.

But how do you get the skin off without the skinner?

C'mon, you just use your generic primate skinner. The specific ones just don't make the process any easier at all.

[Cusina]

Does yours have the handy built in flow-bee vac for all that orange fur?

[fifi]

I dunno. That wire cheese slicer thing is pretty useful for slicing Velveeta.

How about those cold water coffee extractor things? You put a whole bunch of coffee grounds in this big thingy with cold water. Then you keep the extract in the fridge, put a spoonful of extract in your cup, add hot water. This is a very convenient way to make really nasty coffee.

I have every garlic gadget known to man. All but one are pretty useless. The one useful one is this wonderful sculptural stainless steel mushroom that you can use to bash the garlic cloves and then rub your hands with it under the faucet to get the smell off your hands. I wish I could remember where I got it so I could give them as gifts.

What I really want is one of those magic machines that you drop the head of garlic in one end and a perfect 1/16th inch dice comes out the other.

[iain]

One of those little choppy things - where you put the onion or whatever in the bottom and push up and down on the plunger thing - is probably the most useless kitchen gadget I own. I can chop an onion faster with a knife and the results are much more uniform and certainly less, um, juicy. I'm sure, though, that I'll be getting more useless kitchen crap come Christmas.

[fifi]

The most useless thing in my kitchen? A cast iron corn-bread mold shaped like fish. Attractive, yes; but heavy, difficult to clean, and cornbread baked in it doesn't actually look like fish.

OMG! I have one of those, too. I found it in this quirky hardware store in a little town in the Texas Hill Country. I had to have it. What is really dumb is that it only makes 5 "fish". I guess I should have bought two. How do you make batter for and then what do you do with 5 cornbread fish? Well, I guess from what you say I would have 2 pans that make cornbread that really don't look like fish. *heavy sigh*

I got one of those grapefruit cutter things that was on late night TV a few years ago. It has this corer and then these arc shaped cutters on the lid over a bowl. You core the fruit, jam it down on the cutters, turn the lid and, voila! Actually, the damn thing really works. The challenge is finding all of the pieces.

[cibatta mondatta]

And I'm pretty curous about a shrimp deveiner.  Sounds like something useful.

I use my shimp deveiner (actually, I think of it as a shrimp sheller) a lot. We get fresh shrimp from the coast & I like to cook 'em with pasta, rice, whatever, where you really got to get the shells off. If you do it yourself you can make shrimp stock out of the shells and heads to go into the sauce. I can go through about 2lb of medium shimp in about 15 minutes. I'm afraid if I tried that with my chef's knife I wouldn't have any fingers left.

My most useless kitchen gadget has to be a pottery thingy that someone gave me to roast meat in - you're supposed to soak it in water, then cook like chicken in it to make it juicy. Pain in the butt, impossible to clean, and makes no difference as far as I could tell. Might make a nice planter...

Oh! Oh! and that tiny little press gadget that makes 1" round butter pats with an embossed flower on the top. Whoever came up with that thing really needed a life.

[DRColby]

I am badly left-handed. One time while visiting Boston I got carried away by the apperance of an expensive cheese knife. It had a special coating on - like a butter server, or fish knife - on the right-hand side. The cheese knife is little - if ever- used..... expensive and usless.

dave

[tommy]

not a "untensil", per say, but i have a lovely set of s/p shakers whose holes (just one for the pepper...or is that for the salt) are so small that no granule of either salt or pepper worthy of hitting my food would come close to fitting through.

i'm not even sure that was a sentence.

Edited November 21, 2003 by tommy (log)

[Schneier]

How do you section a grapefruit without one, at least without losing most of the pulp?

The same way you section any citrus fruit!

Cut the rind, pith and "outer" membrane from the fruit. With a paring knive make "V" cuts along the edge of each membrane line, each section will drop out.

Takes just about a minute per fruit -- unless, of course, you also want to blanch or candy the rind. Then, you simply add a first step of removing just the colored part of the rind with a vegetable peeler.

That doesn't work if I want to serve a sectioned half of grapefruit in the rind.

Bruce

[Schneier]

Orangutan skinner.

I use mine weekly.

[wnissen]

By far, absolutely hands down, the most worthless kitchen gadget is the oxo herb mincer. The damn thing simply will not cut herbs!!! I continue to be astonished that OXO would produce a product that does not work, and that Williams-Sonoma would be clueless enough to carry it.

Walt

[tommy]

By far, absolutely hands down, the most worthless kitchen gadget is the oxo herb mincer. The damn thing simply will not cut herbs!!! I continue to be astonished that OXO would produce a product that does not work, and that Williams-Sonoma would be clueless enough to carry it.

always remember, Williams Sonoma will take just about anything back, even if you don't have a receipt in most cases.

[hjshorter]

I have tons of useless gadgets, given to me by well-meaning relatives who know that we love to cook. By far the most useless item given to me are the little shaped bread tube things from Pampered Chef - you put packaged bread dough in them, and slice the baked loaves for canapes. I never even cracked open the box they came in.

[wnissen]

always remember, Williams Sonoma will take just about anything back, even if you don't have a receipt in most cases.

Yes, I do give them credit for that. I still had the receipt, and that piece of crap went back the next day. They took it back even though I had bent the blades in my increasingly desperate attempts to get it to actually cut all the way through a parsely leaf. :)

Walt

[woodburner]

Miracle Thaw.

Space Age material

Thaws frozen foods in half the time.

Space Age, my butt.

It hit the recycle bin after one attempted use.

What a piece of shit.

woodburner

[Nick]

i'm not even sure that was a sentence.

That's okay Tommy. We understand.

[Malawry]

My mother, who I love very much, gave me a fish cooking guide...you hold it up against your fish to see how thick it is and there's a list of cooking times for each degree of thickness. I usually just stick my hand in the oven and touch the fish to see if it's squishy. I almost never overcook my fish.

[elyse]

What I really want is one of those magic machines that you drop the head of garlic in one end and a perfect 1/16th inch dice comes out the other.

I think it's called a Jinmyo.