A few handy kitchen gadgets can make the world of difference, making cooking easier, quicker and way more efficient. The right tools also help create the perfect texture and flavour. These are the blenders, mixers and tools that we can’t live without!
1. A professional chopper
Our favourite: Ninja Professional Chopper
This is the ultimate kitchen hero. It’s small, inexpensive, easy to clean, saves you time and adds huge flavour to all your cooking. It’s perfect for dressings, pesto, hummus, and perfectly thick, spoon-able smoothie bowls. It also chops veg in seconds too, meaning you can whip together a recipe like a mushroom lasagne or veggie bolognese with almost no prep time. The blade won’t make drinkable smoothies and it’s not strong enough to make recipes like nut butters, but for day-to-day cooking it’s ideal.
2. A high-speed blender
Our favourite: Nutribullet
Compact, reliable, and efficient, a good high-speedy blender makes sauces, dressings, and smoothies perfectly creamy. Plant-based sauces often need ingredients like cashews, sunflower seeds or tofu to turn into something silky smooth, which is why a high-speedy blender is so important versus a regular one, which often returns the recipe looking a lot lumpier and grainier. Just never put anything boiling hot in it, it has a reputation for exploding! We’d recommend using a simple stick blender for soups instead.
3. A strong food processor
Our favourite: Magimix
This isn’t a must by any means and it is a much bigger investment versus the blender and chopper. A blender needs a liquid in it, so it’s ideal for smoothies or sauces, but a food processor works without a liquid. It’s perfect for making tougher-duty recipes like energy balls or homemade nut butters, where you need a very strong blade that works without a liquid.
4. Great pots and pans
Our favourite: Our Place
Non-stick, toxin-free and absolutely beautiful, these are by far and away the best pans on the market.
5. Optional: A cold-press juicer
Our favourite: Housnat Slow Masticating Juicer
For a juicer it’s easy to clean, relatively small and easy to store and makes a great quality juice. It’s also pretty quiet!
Of course there are lots of great brands and whilst we’ve been lucky enough to try a huge array of tools and machines, we’ve not tried them all. If there’s anything else that you think we need to know about, please do let us know!
