The Essential Kitchen Tools Michael Symon Can't Live Without
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In order to maximize your success in the kitchen, it's important to have the right tools for the job. Imagine, for example, trying to snag a piece of fried chicken out of a screaming hot pot of oil with a fork. And rolling out a ball of freshly made dough with a particularly cylindrical rock you found outside of your house would be nearly impossible. If you need to mash a bowl full of boiled potatoes, using your fists would likely result in burns and bruises.
There are many kitchen gadgets that you should buy to help you on your culinary journey. The Los Angeles Times recommends that you have a set of knives, a large skillet, a plastic cutting board, tongs, and whisks, among other items. Food Network also includes tongs and a whisk in its list of essential utensils and suggests that you have a can opener — it seems that Los Angeles Times readers will have to open their cans without one. For celebrity chef Michael Symon, there are four tools that are absolute must-haves in the kitchen.
Michael Symon's four favorite tools
Food & Wine, when discussing an episode of Michael Symon's cooking show, "Symon's Dinners," quotes the celebrity chef, who said "A good chef's knife, a bench scraper, a good wooden spoon, and a microplane, and I'm off to the races." Throughout his decades as a professional chef, Symon has accrued a lot of kitchen gadgets and gizmos. As such, it's worth exploring why these four tools might top his list of essentials.
Misen co-founder Josh Moses, writing for HuffPost, tells us that a well-balanced knife — and keeping it sharp — is one of the best ways to ensure kitchen safety and cooking success. The right knife can help you avoid dangerous slips, and also ensure that your food is chopped evenly. To check for sharpness, Jacques Pépin tests his kitchen knives with tomatoes. If your knife can cleanly slice a tomato, without displacing its skin, it's sufficiently sharp.
Scraping food off of your cutting board can cause your knives to dull rapidly, per Southern Living. You should always use the back of the knife when moving chopped food. Alternatively, you could scrape the food using another one of Michael Symon's kitchen essentials.
Here's why you need a bench scraper
Michael Symon also extolled the virtues of having a bench scraper on hand in the kitchen (via Food & Wine). In a 2021 tweet, Symon told his fans that the model he uses is the Ateco scraper, which you can purchase on Amazon for just under five dollars. According to Epicurious, the bench scraper has many uses. As previously mentioned, you can move items from your cutting board with a bench scraper, and avoid dulling your knives. The tool can also be used to smash both garlic and potatoes or to easily slice a ball of dough into even sections.
Symon also needs a wooden spoon on hand. Slate explains the myriad benefits that a spoon made out of wood has over one made out of other materials. Wood is a poor conductor of heat, so you can use it to stir hot food without burning your hands. It doesn't scratch the surface of your cooking receptacles. Unlike plastic utensils, a wooden spoon won't melt down and contaminate your food.
Rounding out Michael Symon's list of kitchen essentials is the microplane. CookingLight tells us that a microplane is a long grating tool, which can be used to complete a variety of tasks, including zesting citrus fruits, grinding down spices, and of course, grating cheese.