TTPMO: Kitchen unitaskers and the people who think they need them

I was in a reputable national-chain housewares store the other day, and in my search for a set of airtight containers in which to store my rice and beans, I found myself confronted by what can only be described as a Wall of Gadgets.

There's one of these in every reputable national-chain housewares store, and even in some not-so-reputable or not-so-national ones. They are in. They are hip. They are, by and large, a useless waste of space.

So yes, okay, everyone needs kitchen tools. You've got to have your wooden spoons, a nonstick spatula or two, a set of measuring cups. But the rest of it? I mean, have you seen the sort of crap they're trying to sell?

Take this thing, for example. It's an avocado pitter.

Don't ask me why someone would need a tool that is designed specifically for slicing an avocado. I don't know (though it is described as "sensational" on the website). But you can own one for the low low price of $14.95, and then it can sit in your drawer, unused and forgotten, until that one afternoon you decide to make guacamole, at which point you can't find it anyway because it's wedged in the back of the utility drawer, between the garlic press and the corn-on-the-cob holders.

Speaking of garlic presses, they're also on my list of "kitchen unitasker gadgets that everyone thinks you need but you really don't," and they provide the perfect opportunity to define what I mean by "unitasker." Here, have a look:

What makes this a unitasker, obviously, is that it does just one thing. It mashes garlic. (In fact, it mashes garlic into an unrecognizable paste that hardly can be said to resemble the original product, but that's another story.) And that's all she wrote.

But, you object, most things in the kitchen just do one thing. I mean, spoons are only for stirring, and knives are only for cutting --- aren't those unitaskers too? Well, no. Spoons are for stirring, but you can stir anything with a spoon. And knives are for cutting, but you can use them to cut a huge variety of things. Unitaskers are different: they only do one thing to one type of thing. Put differently, kitchen unitaskers match one verb with one noun. A garlic press is only for pressing, and it only presses garlic. You just can't use it for anything else. (Well, maybe Play-Dough.) An avocado pitter is only for pitting, and only for use with avocados, and you can't use it for anything else. Spoons and knives do have their own proprietary verbs (stir, cut), but you can match these with any number of nouns.

With that in mind, consider the peanut butter knife.

They're calling it a "multi-purpose spatula spreader," but we're not fooled. Any time you have to add the words "multi-purpose" to the name of a kitchen gadget, you've already lost the unitasker battle. This thing is sold under the pretense that it's all you'll ever need for making peanut butter sandwiches. You can spread your peanut butter and jam with the broad side, and then you can cut the sandwich with the serrated side. Ingenious! Except that you already have a butter knife and a regular knife in your kitchen, which do the job just as well, and these jokers are trying to get you to cough up an extra $40 just for the novelty factor. Thanks but no thanks, guys --- keep your unitasker (and your pyramid scheme) out of my kitchen.

And that's not all. There are little silicone cups you can use to poach eggs. There are apple slicers, and onion slicers, and egg slicers, and pineapple slicers, and mango slicers (note: these are all different tools). There's a little hand-held guillotine thingie that's designed only for snipping the lids off of soft-boiled eggs, which is currently at the top of the running for Most Useless Unitasker 2011. There's even something called The Bacon Genie, about which the less said, the better.

My point is not that these things are useless. I'm sure that they all do their respective single jobs very well. My point is that you just don't need them. Take the panini press, for example.

I bet it's great at turning out pressed sandwiches. (It's also great at being expensive and taking up lots of counter space when it's not in use, but that's another story.) And it would be great if you worked a little café or something where there's no stovetop. But you don't work at a little café, and you do have a stovetop, and you can get exactly the same effect by heating two frying pans and nesting them with the sandwich in between. (You do have two frying pans, don't you?)

To generalize, what really pisses me off about these dumb little single-use gadgets is that everything that you can do with them can be done without them. Need to mince herbs? You could get an herb mincer! Or you could just use your knife. Need to chop nuts? Yes, you could get a nut chopper! Or you could probably just use your knife. Need to cut the kernels off of an ear of corn? Don't look now --- there's a corn stripper! (Sounds deliciously dirty, doesn't it?) Or you could really just learn to use your damn knife. And while you're doing that, you could try tucking your fingers back so that your fingernails protect your knuckles from the blade, and throw out that stupid finger guard.

Now, don't get me wrong. I really like some of these gizmos. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I even own some of them. (Not the avocado pitter.) But what really pisses me off is the attitude that leads to their existence. It's the people who think that the more of these you have, the better cook you'll be. Whoever dies with the most, wins!

I can't currently find the words to express how insanely stupid this attitude is. But I did once, a few years ago, while on line at the omelette station at a friend's bridal shower. The cook was frying onions (badly, I should note) and chatting with the women ahead of me on line. "You know what makes a great cook?" he asked, and then answered his own question: "It's the tools. You see this frying pan? It's a great frying pan. It's really the tools that make the chef."

I didn't say what I was thinking, since I knew better than to start a row with some idiot CIA-dropout line cook working the brunch shift at a bridal shower. But if I weren't the meek, well-raised young lady that I am, I would have said, "Really? You think that if you can't cook, you'll get better if you have a better frying pan? You think that what makes Thomas Keller a culinary genius is that fact that he has the right knives? You think that there are kitchens full of two-star Michelin chefs moaning about how they could have gotten another star if only they'd used the right brand of food processor?"

Ugh.

As Alton Brown likes to say, there's only room for one unitasker in my kitchen, and this is it: