Clear Out Your Kitchen: Get Rid of These Kitchen Tools That Only Do One Task

Every home cook loves the idea of having a kitchen gadget for literally everything. Yet a lot of these kitchen gadgets are sort of “one hit wonders.” They are designed to do only one thing each. As amazing and as useful as those individual tasks accomplished are, these tools will otherwise sit in your kitchen drawers for months, possibly years before you ever pull them out to use again. Here are a few tools and gadgets you can do without, and what you can substitute in their place.

Cherry Pitter

Sweet cherries are a treat at the end of every summer, and only at the end of summer. There is no other time of year when cherries are available in most states. A cherry pitter is nice to have if you intend to pit cherries for a recipe, but useless if you’re just going to eat the cherries as-is.

Decide how often your cherry pitter really does anything for you, and then send it packing. Eating the cherries is a careful task of eating around the pits, but if you eat olives with pits, it’s the same thing. If you need cherries for a recipe, buy them without pits in a jar or canned.

Egg Separators and Microwave Egg Boilers

It doesn’t take much to figure out how to pour a yolk back and forth between its two halves of shell to get the white to separate from the yolk. An egg separator is just for people that are either too creeped out by eggs or too inexperienced to manage this cooking task on their own.

As for the microwave egg boiler, really? Boiling eggs in a pot on the stove takes just a few minutes. In fact, in the same amount of time you boil an egg in the microwave, you could have boiled an egg on the stove. Unless you don’t have a stove or it’s completely defunct, the microwave egg boiler is pointless.

Garlic Press

It sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Like only a thing a professional chef would use, the garlic press impresses but is used less often than a cherry pitter. Very few recipes call for fresh-pressed garlic, and you can accomplish that by buying it in a jar or quickly dicing it yourself with a very sharp kitchen knife.