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Unusual & mysterious kitchen gadgets


andiesenji

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18 minutes ago, Norm Matthews said:

Yes. Cookie dough portioner.  Squeeze the handle so that the protrusion is on the other side of the slot, scoop the dough on to it then hold over a cookie sheet and release.  I suppose you could say it is a precursor of the (ice cream scoop-type) portioner.

 

also called 'dishers'.

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17 hours ago, gfweb said:

Not sure what they accomplish in cooking a burger.

Here are some photos of a bacon press that I was given some time ago as a gift. I only use it now as a panini press when I am making only one sandwich. It rusts like crazy and I can't figure out how to temper it as it has a wooden handle. It's quite small and only weighs 26 ounces. Several restaurants that I worked in had them and they were used only for bacon. Anyone caught using them to mash the juice out of a hamburger would have been promptly shown to the door.

20170913_072106(1).jpg

20170913_072402(1).jpg

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46 minutes ago, Norm Matthews said:

Yes. Cookie dough portioner.  Squeeze the handle so that the protrusion is on the other side of the slot, scoop the dough on to it then hold over a cookie sheet and release.  I suppose you could say it is a precursor of the (ice cream scoop-type) portioner.

 

Actually the ice cream scoop was invented long before this cookie dough "dropper" and it fact, it is celebrated in Black History Month each year that a Mr. Cralie invented the ice cream scoop in 1897.  I used to collect them and had several early ones from the "teens" and '20s. 

I sold them several years ago to a franchisee of an ice cream company whose name I can't recall.  

The Cookie Dough Dropper first appeared in the late 1940s and was a popular dime store item, I have one somewhere in my junk, still on the original card, priced at 19¢.  

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"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!" Terry Pratchett

 

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28 minutes ago, IowaDee said:

Bet it involves seafood though

No, I bought it in my favorite Chinese restaurant supply store. On the package, it was called a microwave grabber. I wish that I had saved the package with the directions. It was hilarious. It is supposedly used to take hot dishes out of the microwave. I use it to take inner pans out of my instant pot. it's got a grip like a bulldog and won't let go of even the heaviest pan.

Edited by Tropicalsenior
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27 minutes ago, lindag said:

I think you might actually be able to change a tire with it.

You might be onto something there. I think I'll buy another one when I go to the Chinese store just to keep in the car. The last time that I went to the Bridgestone tire shop to get a squished valve repaired, they didn't have a socket that fit the lug nuts on my car. I had to drive five miles to my mechanic, borrow his, take it to the shop, and then drive five miles back to return it, then ten miles home. The clincher was that, unbeknownst to me, there was one laying right on the spare tire in the bottom of the trunk. I'm sure that little gadget would have chewed them right off.Oh well, everything in Costa Rica is an adventure.

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1 hour ago, gfweb said:

A confession extractor?

 

Is it safe? (Not for the faint of heart.)

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"There is no sincerer love than the love of food."  -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Act 1

 

"Imagine all the food you have eaten in your life and consider that you are simply some of that food, rearranged."  -Max Tegmark, physicist

 

Gene Weingarten, writing in the Washington Post about online news stories and the accompanying readers' comments: "I basically like 'comments,' though they can seem a little jarring: spit-flecked rants that are appended to a product that at least tries for a measure of objectivity and dignity. It's as though when you order a sirloin steak, it comes with a side of maggots."

 

"...in the mid-’90s when the internet was coming...there was a tendency to assume that when all the world’s knowledge comes online, everyone will flock to it. It turns out that if you give everyone access to the Library of Congress, what they do is watch videos on TikTok."  -Neil Stephenson, author, in The Atlantic

 

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual." -Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer

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14 hours ago, cakewalk said:

 Tyranasaurus Rex

 

You beat me to it! I was going to say abstract rendition of a T-Rex. It certainly reminded me of one too. I wouldn't want to meet up with either a T-Rex or a mean person behind that pot grabber tool. *Shiver*

 

BTW I wish more things were over engineered these days instead of woefully the opposite.

> ^ . . ^ <

 

 

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19 hours ago, Tropicalsenior said:

This is one of my favorite gadgets. Does anyone know what it is?

20170913_075153.jpg

 

I was too late to chime in. I have two gadgets that serve the same function: grabbing hot things from the oven.  The shinier one is for pizza pans, the other for more general grabbing of hot things.

20170914_040816.jpg

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20 hours ago, andiesenji said:

Actually the ice cream scoop was invented long before this cookie dough "dropper" and it fact, it is celebrated in Black History Month each year that a Mr. Cralie invented the ice cream scoop in 1897.  I used to collect them and had several early ones from the "teens" and '20s. 

I sold them several years ago to a franchisee of an ice cream company whose name I can't recall.  

The Cookie Dough Dropper first appeared in the late 1940s and was a popular dime store item, I have one somewhere in my junk, still on the original card, priced at 19¢.  

 

I apologize for being unclear. I did not mean to imply that this gadget predated the ice cream scoop. I meant that I supposed it was a precursor to the cookie sized scoop many people use today.

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20 hours ago, Tropicalsenior said:

Oh well, everything in Costa Rica is an adventure.

 

I stayed in Playa Junquilla for two weeks a few years back and, yes, it was adventurous.

We managed to get a flat tire (some of the roads are pretty rough), and it was tricky to even find a place to have it changed.

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