5 Must Have Items For A Well Equipped Kitchen

Many young people find themselves moving out of home or their student accommodation over the summer.  Finally being grown up and living on your own means you might find that you’re equipping your own kitchen for the first time and cooking for yourself all the time. Now, while you were studying you might have picked up one or two stand out recipes but most people have a repertoire of three to five meals that they know how to cook. Unless you’re OCD or a really big fan of routine those few meals are going to get pretty boring pretty quickly.

The quickest and best way to learn how to cook is to simply get stuck in. It’s not necessary to be over-ambitious when you start, you just have to switch up things you already know how to do. By elaborating on things you already know how to do you’ll get the knack more naturally, you’ll know what to expect and you won’t get discouraged if it all turns to a sludgy mess in the bottom of a pan!

As well as needing good, fresh tasty ingredients stocking your kitchen with a few fundamental pieces of equipment is essential. Five things I wouldn’t be without are:

1. A really sharp knife and stone to keep it that way. Nothing is as frustrating as hammering at a tomato or onion with a blunt knife. It’s time consuming and you never get the results you want. I have an eight inch sushi knife which gets used for everything from slicing tomatoes very thin to cutting bread. It just glides through anything.

2. Non stick pans and wooden/silicon utensils. No-one has to suffer from pans which aren’t Teflon coated any longer, they’re just not worth it until you get to be a really good cook. The coating is delicate though so never put a metal spoon or fork in there, a small scratch will soon grow after the pan is washed a few times and then things start sticking. Not good.

3. A big wok. You don’t have to have a wok just for Chinese cookery, a big one can be used to boil joints, used for pot roasts and is great for making soups and reductions. Get one with a lid and you can use it to steam fish and vegetables, to smoke things if you’re feeling adventurous and even to cook stir fries.

4. A wire sieve. You can use this for everything from washing mussels and vegetables to straining boiled foods such as pasta and rice as well as dredging flour. Everything you’d use a colander for but with the added advantage of being suitable for even the smallest things that a colander might let through.

5. A good quality grater. Not an immediately obvious choice but being able to grate cheese for sauces and sandwiches as well as vegetables for salads and quick cooking in next to no time is a real bonus. If you get a box grater they’ll often have a slicer side and zester side for citrus fruit that can also be used for nutmeg.

Dan Cash is a feature writer who loves cooking and collecting  kitchen accessories. However, he’s typically lazy and doesn’t love the washing up. If he didn’t have an integrated dishwasher he’d live on take out and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.