Foodie Gift Guide: The Small Kitchen Tools I Actually Use
Following on from the bigger gadgets, here’s a quick run through the smaller tools that live in my drawers — the true backbone of my kitchen. Everything shown here can be found in Kitchen Essentials.
If you’re familiar with my videos, you’ll already know my truffle shaver, which has genuinely never touched a truffle in its life — I use it for garlic, two or three times a day. It’s made by Zyliss, as is my tomato peeler, a serrated-edge peeler that also works brilliantly on mangoes or anything with a soft skin.
My ginger grater is another daily essential, designed to catch all the juice as you grate so nothing goes to waste. I couldn’t cook without my infrared thermometer either — point it inside the oven and it reveals exactly where the hot spots are, or use it on a pan to check whether your oil is hot enough. Back in the supper club days, it also did double duty checking fridge temperatures.
For jugs, I’m a big fan of Oxo Good Grips — reliably well designed, and the small one is the one you’ve seen me use for batching cocktails. My mandolin is also Oxo — I used to own a large one, but the handheld version is brilliant (guard always included, please).
I always reach for Microplane graters: one fine for zesting lemons and limes, another for Parmesan or grating chocolate finely. A separate nutmeg grater gets regular use too. And you’ll have seen my dough scraper often — technically a baking tool, but I use it constantly for scraping chopped vegetables straight off the board and into the pan. Lastly, a genuinely clever double citrus juicer, with lemons squeezed from the bottom and limes from the top.
That’s everything in my drawers, really — aside from a few ladles and palette knives, this is the core of how I actually cook day to day.