The Worst Place To Buy Kitchen Tools Is Any Grocery Chain

The only greater annoyance than a kitchen utensil breaking in the middle of your cook is not having another tool in the house to do the same job. Your local grocery store might have what you need in this kind of culinary emergency, but in any other situation, you should buy kitchen tools elsewhere.

Grocery stores generally have a limited selection of kitchen tools, like utensils and cookware. And what they do have tends to be of lower quality than what you'd find at a kitchen supply store or even a department store. And although the price may be lower than a brand-name equivalent, when you consider what you're getting, it's actually not worth it.

For example, Kroger sells a generic brand can opener for $8.99, which reviews indicate is so poorly made it might fall apart during use, if it will even work at all. By comparison, Amazon has a better-reviewed manual can opener for just a dollar more — but it takes time to be delivered. And, as always, many people seek "buy it for life"-quality kitchen tools big and small — a level of quality you will never see at a grocery store.

Picking high-quality kitchen tools also means choosing healthier ones. Long term use of plastic kitchen tools, like the fodder in grocery aisles, are linked to a wide range of health and developmental problems. Tools made of stainless steel or wood are safer choices to keep chemicals from leaching into your food and are typically made to last. That's why one of the old-school kitchen tools celebrity chefs swear by is the humble wooden spoon (championed by none other than Giada de Laurentiis).

You should also avoid gimmicky kitchen tools that have limited uses. For instance, one of the common kitchen tools that chefs never use is a garlic press. Anything it can do can be done with more useful kitchen tools, like a microplane or a good knife.

Speaking of, it's worth splurging on good kitchen knives. Their higher-quality blades will remain sharp and be able to be resharpened for longer than the junk you might see at a grocery store. And you don't have to bother with a full knife block either; expert chefs say you really only need four knives: a chef's knife, a paring knife, a steak knife, and a bread knife. Between the four of them, there's virtually no kitchen task that can't be done — so you really should get the best possible.