Our Food Editor’s Essential Kitchen Tools

I love a pan that can handle a lot of different uses. A straight-sided stainless steel one is perfect for braising, roasting, frying, baking, poaching, and sautéing. Be sure to get one with at least 2½-inch-high sides for the most versatility.

Efficiency is the name of the game when it comes to the kitchen. Tools that do double duty, like this blender/food processor hybrid, are likely to get used more often—saving valuable pantry space and speeding up prep time.

This handy tool is ideal if you make a lot of dough from scratch, whether for super-flaky piecrust or sky-high buttermilk biscuits. Blending butter or shortening into a dry mixture with a pastry blender, instead of your fingers or two butter knives, allows the butter to remain cold before hitting a hot oven, giving you the flaky layers you’re after.

Help your knives last longer by turning to this trusty standby: Instead of using the blade of your knife to lift ingredients from your cutting board, scoop them up with one of these. It will protect your blades from dulling—plus, it just plain works better. It’s also great for hot-handed bakers who are constantly needing to scrape up and lift a lot of sticky dough.

Cooking meat perfectly every time takes a lot of practice, even when you know your way around a kitchen. I like to put my doubts to rest and just use a thermometer. Bonus points if it doubles as a carving fork, like this one.

There are three things you need to do to keep your nuts and spices operating at peak flavor: Buy them whole, store them in the freezer, and toast and grind them yourself. Tip: Avoid using the same grinder for spices and whole coffee beans, as the aromas will transfer, and that won’t lead to a tasty brew (unless black-pepper coffee is your thing).

Nothing makes prep grind to a screeching halt like a rigid, rusted can opener. Get one with a large, easy-to-use knob and a stainless steel blade. And if you haven’t guessed the theme of my favorites by now, I’ll just say it: Multifunction tools are everything. A good can opener should absolutely come with a built-in bottle opener.

A stand mixer opens up a world of possibilities, allowing you to learn new techniques and take your cooking to the next level. Bread dough, cookies, cakes, and meringues are all a given, but the real fun starts when you get into the attachments that let you grind meat and make your own pasta.

This slow cooker is the king of hands-off cooking. At Delish, we’ve slow-cooked everything from pepperoni pizza to salted-caramel monkey bread to chili mac and cheese and beyond. There is (almost) nothing this machine can’t do. Letting time do all the hard work is a great way to pack in tons of flavor.

This is my kitchen’s holy grail. A scale increases accuracy, cuts down on prep and cleanup time, helps determine portion size, and makes international recipes with metric measurements more accessible. In sum, this tool will immediately make you feel like a pro chef.