It is easy to be bamboozled setting up a kitchen when we first move out of home or settle down with a partner. There is a notion that if you spend enough money on your kitchen kit, a life of effortless and delicious home-cooking stretches out in front of you. Stock your cupboards with enough Le Creuset to give yourself a hernia and you’ll cook and eat like Julia Child, right?
Well not exactly. Although the continuing popularity of kitchen equipment on wedding lists seems to show a long tradition of arming ourselves with posh kitchen things when marching into a new life stage. Le Creuset is among the top 10 most requested items on Arnott's wedding lists along with coffee machines, food mixers, knives, saucepans, cutlery and tableware. Kitchen equipment constitutes 65 per cent of the top 10 items people put on their wish lists, a spokeswoman for Arnotts said. The French pot manufacturer, which celebrated the 90th anniversary of its Cocotte casserole last year, now makes everything from espresso cups to potato peelers.
So what kitchen equipment is worth the investment? We’re okay for a Le Creuset potato peeler (for €22) but yes please to one of their casserole pots. Ours is volcanic orange and was a present from my mum. It sits permanently on the hob, partly because it’s used so often and we like the look of it but also because we’re lazy about putting it away. Soups, stews, stock, bolognese and Christmas puddings have all blipped and bubbled in it over the 14 years we’ve had it. Risottos have been overcooked and stuck to the insides. But it’s nothing that a pot scrub doesn’t solve.
Cheapo crepe pan
We still own a cheapo crepe pan bought for pancake Tuesday for a fiver nearly 20 years ago. The handle is wobbly and the bottom is paper thin but it still gets put into service when there’s a large batch of pancakes to be made; having been so seasoned over the years, its surface is composed more of oil than metal. I’ve bought and discarded branded (hello Jamie cookware) Teflon coated frying pans which promised to light up in the middle when it reached perfect cooking temperature. But the keeper has been a plain black cast-iron frying pan with no space-age tricks. Yes it’s heavy and the handle gets hot but it does the job. It’s a pan that gets better with age as years of fat form a non-stick seal, as long as it’s cleaned only with hot water, or an oiled piece of kitchen roll. Arnotts has an Anolon cast-iron skillet that looks similar and it’s half price at €49.95 in its sale.
Avoid knife blocks
In the knife department, a chef's knife, a bread knife and a small paring knife are all you really need, along with a good knife sharpener to keep them sharp. Avoid knife blocks with six or eight knives. At least four of them will remain Excalibur-like in their slots until they rust. Get yourself a wall-mounted knife magnet where they're easier to see and grab. Our Sabatier set is still doing its job. If you want to spend serious money on one brilliant knife, spend it on a six-inch chef's knife. It's the workhouse knife of any kitchen. One of these years I might splurge on the Rolls Royce of chef's knives: the Japanese Korin Deba, sold online at Korin.com. They start at about €200 apiece, not including the costs of a trip to A&E when you slice off a chunk of finger while using one.
For all our scorn of spiralisers as an evil tool of joyless clean eaters, I recently started using the blade attachment on my €35 Lurch Spirali model to slice, rather than spiralise vegetables. It turns a beef tomato into frilly see-through slices and takes an onion or a bulb of fennel to salad thinness pretty effortlessly. You can also get the kids to help chop stuff as it’s nowhere near as lethal as a mandolin.
My marriage predates the KitchenAid mixer craze hit so that's not in our kitchen arsenal. Instead, I use a metal-ended soup gun or hand blender to puree soups and sauces in the saucepan. There are cheaper options but Dualit does a nifty looking metal handmixer, essential so you can put it into hot saucepans to blend sauces, from Littlewoods Ireland for €82. The Ikea €10 potato ricer is a recent good addition to the kitchen drawer of things that are used regularly. In the spirit of baking day and Aunt Frances, I'm always on the mooch for a Mason and Cash mixing bowl , brown glazed porcelain outside, cream inside like an egg. Scraper not included.
The 10 most popular kitchen items on wedding lists - Nespresso coffee machines - DeLonghi bean to cup coffee machines - Kenwood Chef mixers - Henckels knife blocks - Fissler saucepans - Le Creuset cast ironware - Stellar cutlery - Newbridge cutlery - Denby tableware - Villeroy & Boch tableware
(in no particular order) Source: Arnotts
