Essential tools for your kitchen, Baking and otherwise
Our second kitchen in Toulouse at the Château de Labusquière where we host smaller workshops and have breakfast every morning.
The most asked question when I move into kitchens to cook for a week might be - “what’s in your toolbox!”
So! Here is a list of what I pack when I head anywhere to cook for anyone or anything. Besides my knives, these are my absolute essentials - enjoy!
(These are not links we financially benefit from, get them wherever you prefer - I have linked the ones I have or prefer)
Silpats / These beauties help with baking, save your pans and your cookies, and are durable and long lasting - well worth the investment!
Fish Spat / I use this as much as I use my wooden spoons. It is the perfect spatula for cooking and for baking. I somehow have five. I use every single one of them.
Non-reactive Rubber Spats / great for scraping the sides of your mixing bowl, for stirring any number of hot things, for candy making, for folding, for making omelettes - durable, long lasting and multi-purpose. Get as many sizes as you can! They all come in handy.
Parchment paper / I use this for so many things besides lining baking pans and sheets: poaching, funneling dry ingredeints, piping, en papillote cooking, rolling out cookie dough, lining work stations, pounding meat… I mean SO many things.
Twine / sometimes, a lotta times, you need to tie something up.
Bench Scrapers / for baking and for, well, scraping your bench.
Piping Bags / I know it’s not great for the environment, but I always have a roll of these on hand. Even if you’re not doing anything fancy that requires a steady hand, these are great for all kinds of things like piping deviled egg filling into the egg whites.
Scissors / a good, sharp and smallish pair of kitchen scissors are absolutes! I have multiple pairs of the same kind in case one pair gets dirty, that is how much I can’t live without them even for a moment while one is being washed.
Fish Tweezers / great for deboning pins from fish, but also great for when you need itty-bitty fingers that need to deal with impossible, tiny tasks and you have grown adult sized fingers that won’t do the job.
A Digital Meat and Candy Thermometer / sometimes you need to use more than your senses and it helps you learn what is the correct outcome so you can follow your instincts if you are ever without one.
Paring Knives / besides my chef knives, I always have an assortment of paring knives - they come in far handier than my big knives, honestly.
Rubber Bands / not something you need to buy, but I always keep produce elastics for future use and they always get used again and again.
A Small Notebook and a Pencil / it’s important to have something to write on in a kitchen - growing as a cook takes practice and practice is best if you document things (just accept that you will not remember what you did “that one time” and it will be lost to the cooking gods forever - unless you write it down!")