Five Most Important Kitchenware Items

Every time I go to a kitchenware convention or talk to people on our web site's message board I invariably get asked one question time and time again and so I thought I would write a quick little article about it today so that I don't have to keep repeating myself for the rest of my life! The question is, what are the five most important kitchenware items that every kitchen should have.

This is a tricky question because everybody's kitchen is different, and everybody uses theirs differently. Large families may cook very big meals day after day, requiring different tools then, say, a single professional person who usually eats out most nights of the week and doesn't really cook even when they are home.

But I think we can imagine a sort of middle ground between those two extremes. Maybe, a new family starting out with one kid and another one on the way who have just moved into their first new house and need to outfit their new kitchen appropriately. What do they focus on first, especially if price is an object?

In my opinion, these are the five things that no kitchen should be without:

-Large Chef's Knife
-Large 12-14 inch skillet
-Cutting Board
-Large Cake Pan
-Coffee Machine
-Various Small Tools

Okay, so I added a sixth item, I tried to slip it in there unnoticed, but everybody has a drawer full of odd tools such as a corkscrew and corn on the cob holders and weird little things like this that you accumulate over the years so I though I'd toss that in just for fun.

No kitchen can be without a large chefs knife. You need it to chop everything from meat to vegetables to anything else. You might also use it to fix your child's toy in a pinch or to ward off a burglar. Okay that last one is only sort of true... but you get the idea.

Besides a chef's knife, the only other truly indispensable item is a skillet, and a large one at that. You can really get by with nothing else but a knife and a skillet if you put your mind to it.

A cutting board is essential but you can probably get by without it if you don't mind ruining your knife, and a large cake pan is just sort of a catchall item to cook various different things in.

Of course the most important item in a kitchen is the coffee machine because without that, the world simply stops turning. No further discussion is needed on that one.

So that is my official list of the five most important items that no kitchen can do without. As long as you've got a quality chefs knife and a big skillet, the rest of the kitchen will fall into place without too much more work. On the other hand, if you don't pick up a nice pair of these two things, you will struggle to get anything accomplished whatsoever in your kitchen.