The Overlooked Kitchen Tools Ina Garten Replaces Yearly

Using fresh ingredients is just as important as cooking with quality cookware. Without one or the other, you put your dish at a disadvantage. After all, there's a reason people choose to cook their filet mignon in a cast iron skillet, or only use wooden spoons to stir pasta sauce (the acidity of the tomatoes reacts with metal utensils, per MyRecipes).

These are the same reasons any chef will tell you it's worth investing in kitchen tools that will last a long time. Alton Brown, for example, says these five types of knives are a must, while Scott Conant swears by the versatility of a potato masher. Kitchen essentials that are well-made will not only make the cooking process easier, if they're well-taken care of, they'll also never have to be replaced. Of course, there's always an exception. 

As Ina Garten pointed out to Food & Wine, there are two important tools she finds herself needing to replace year after year.

Some kitchen staples like cast-iron skillets, copper bottom pans, and dutch ovens stay in families for generations and remain in good condition no matter how old they are. But if you have a peeler or a zester that's been around for just as long, according to Ina Garten, it's hardly worth keeping. Garten shared to Bon Appétit that a microplane, the kind of zester with the ultra-fine grates, is one of her most used tools — but it's for that same reason, she told Food & Wine, that she ends up having to throw it out and buy a new one after about a year.

If you don't use a zester or peeler all that often, they might not require quite as quick of a turnaround, but Garten says they'll need to be replaced eventually. All peelers, she says, are cheap (to her standards, at least), but cheap or not, they'll get rusty or go dull after one too many uses. And when that time comes, there's no use keeping them.