12 Professional Kitchen Tools Every Home Chef Should Try

Don't get the wrong impression: I'm not someone with a pile of unnecessary, unusual kitchen gadgets hidden away in a cupboard gathering dust. There's plenty of professional kitchen equipment which has no place in a home kitchen, either because it's very task-specific (a shell-shaped silicone mold, for example) or it's too bulky to be worth the surface space for a home cook (like a chamber vacuum machine). There are also plenty of tools which seem useful at first but aren't worth the investment unless you're serious about using it regularly — hence the unopened pasta machine that my dad received for Christmas two years ago. 

As a chef with experience working in Michelin-starred restaurants, I've worked with a wide range of kitchen utensils and gadgets in professional kitchens. In this article, I'll share the 12 tools I think every home cook should consider owning. Some open new doors to culinary creativity, while others help you to cook more efficiently, or allow you to cook in a way that would otherwise be messy or overly complex. I'll explain what each item is and why I think it's worth using in your home kitchen, and I'll give an indication of how much each item typically costs. Even if you only add a few to your arsenal, they should allow you to step up your cooking game at home — or at least have fun trying out a new bit of kit.

If you're a passionate home cook, a stick immersion circulator can open doors to more precise cooking. The name may sound technical, but in essence this is a simple tool, and most models are refreshingly simple to operate. Functioning much like the filament inside a kettle, the stick heats water to a certain temperature, then holds it at that temperature, allowing you to cook a wide range of recipes using a technique known as sous vide.

Sous vide is especially well-known for cooking eggs and meat to absolute perfection, but its uses are truly wide-ranging and often unexpected. You can use it to infuse vegetables with aromatics, make yoghurt at home, prepare perfect crème brûlées, kick-start lacto-fermentations, and loads more. Plus, of course, you can cook steam to your exact preference of doneness, and prepare the most succulent, tender chicken breasts, all with minimal hassle. There are countless sous vide recipes online with precise timings and temperatures to cook almost anything you can think of.

Best of all, stick immersion circulators are more affordable than ever. You can get your hands on excellent home circulators for around $100. If you want to keep your costs to a minimum, a vacuum machine isn't strictly necessary. There's a technique called the water displacement method which allows you to cook sous vide using just a manually sealable plastic bag, a tall pot, and a stick immersion circulator.

For optimal sous vide cooking at home, it's worthwhile to consider investing in a basic external vacuum sealer machine as well as an immersion circulator. This lets you vacuum seal ingredients in food-safe plastic that's ready to cook sous vide, while avoiding the hassle of the water displacement method (and the risk of soggy ingredients). Moreover, a vacuum sealer's uses extend beyond sous vide cooking. Every home cook should own a vacuum sealer, as vacuum-sealing increases the shelf-life of fresh ingredients and allows you to compress them into neat rectangles perfect for storing in your fridge or freezer. You can use vacuum sealers for lacto-fermentation, too. Select a fruit or vegetable, add 2% of its weight in salt, and seal. The bag will inflate as fermentation happens: When it's full, snip a corner, release the carbon dioxide, and reseal until you're happy with the taste.

Unlike chamber vacuum machines, which are common in professional kitchens, an external vacuum machine is both more affordable and substantially smaller, making it optimal for the home chef. Very basic models cost as little as $30, but I'd recommend splurging a bit to get a more robust one. However, there are some drawbacks to consider: External vacuum machines are prone to breaking down and are particularly susceptible to liquid damage (mine has just stopped working at home, I suspect for this reason). This makes most models unsuitable for vacuum-sealing liquids, which can be limiting, though they will work fine for sealing liquids without creating a vacuum.

Few things are more deserving of the prefix "super" as the superbag. This simple bit of kit is more clever and useful than it may at first appear. A superbag is a sort of flexible, very fine, sieve. They are heat resistant, reusable, and affordable, starting at around $5 per bag. You might think it's an unnecessary tool if you already have a mesh sieve, but a superbag is a game changer because it's capable of filtering liquids much more thoroughly, resulting in crystal-clear stocks, sauces, and consommées worthy of a fine dining restaurant.

One popular use for superbags is to create your own nut milks at home by soaking the nuts of your choice in water, draining and blending them with cold water, and then allowing the milky liquid to drip-filter through the superbag. The superbag ensures the nut milk has a satisfyingly smooth color and consistency. You can also use a superbag for more complex culinary elaborations. I used one during my culinary training for seasoning and blending tomatoes by freezing the liquid into a block and allowing this to slowly thaw in a superbag. What dripped through was a flavor-packed, clear, yellow-green tomato water bursting with tomato flavor and aroma. One thing to note, however, is that the mesh thickness and size of superbags varies, so do some research to find the right product for your needs.

Fine dining chefs plating intricate dishes with the kind of tweezers you'd expect to see in an operating theatre is as familiar as it is ridiculous. Culinary tweezers are used throughout the fine dining world for their precision, and yes, they can look a bit silly. But they're more useful than you might expect. 

For the home cook, tweezers are less relevant for plating (unless a precise fine dining style is what you're going for), but they are great for keeping your hands and fingers mess- and contamination-free when you're in the middle of cooking. You can use culinary tweezers to easily flip meat in a pan with total control, but in a pinch they also double up as a versatile tool of tools. Use them to pierce plastic food packaging for quick access, poke holes in plastic wrap to allow warm air to escape, retrieve pickles from a jar filled with pickling liquid, or as a wedge to pop a tight plastic cap off a sauce bottle. You can also use them to stir pasta as it cooks in boiling water to ensure even cooking or to peel skins from cooked vegetables, as you might when peeling eggplant to make baba ganoush or roasted red peppers for an escalivada. The options are limitless: Just remember to clean them in between uses. Culinary tweezers start at around $10 – I love my six inch offset pair with serrated tips for grip.

If your parents or grandparents were avid home bakers, it's not unlikely that they had a reusable piping bag somewhere in the kitchen. As mass-produced confectionery has become so much more affordable and available, it has become less common to see a piping bag in a home kitchen unless it's been purchased for a specific use. However, reusable piping bags are a worthwhile tool to have on hand. They are affordable, starting at little over $5 for a set of two with an assortment of tips and other accessories, and with a small commitment to keeping them clean and dry after each use, a single piping bag can last for months, or even years.

Piping bags aren't just great for piping pastry fillings and toppings. They can really help to elevate your home cooking, allowing you to artfully pipe mashed potato onto a shepherd's or cottage pie, or to deftly pipe gel or purée dots for fine dining-level plating. Ideally, get your hands on a set with bags of varying sizes, as there's nothing worse than discovering your piping bag is too small when you're midway through filling it with something! Also, to make the most of a reusable piping bag kit, it's worth testing out different tips with a test filling to see the results, as it's not always clear what effect each tip will have just by looking at it.

A mandoline is a handheld slicer, generally used to cut thin, carpaccio-like slices of vegetables and fruits. There are many uses for a mandoline slicer, and there are also different types of slicers. A Japanese mandoline differs from more typical French or European versions, as they're generally more lightweight and have blades which can easily be removed and swapped, making it easy to maintain. This also makes it more versatile than just plain slicing: You can swap in a crinkle-cutter blade to slice potatoes into waffle fries or a julienne setting for thin strips of carrot or other vegetables. However, what makes a mandoline particularly useful is how quickly you can slice vegetables and how perfectly consistent the results will be. Don't just take my word for it: Chef Marcus Samuelsson of Red Rooster Harlem is a fan of this Japanese kitchen gadget, too.

I like Japanese mandolines because, unlike with bulkier models, they're relatively easy to position for stable slicing. This is crucial because mandolines are absolutely notorious for cutting off fingertips — it's happened to me and to most chefs I know! Japanese mandolines will usually come with a finger guard, but this can still slip if you don't pay attention, so you may wish to buy a cut-proof glove made of chainmail or tough fabric for extra reassurance. Japanese mandolines start at around $30 – well worth it for the time saved and professional looking results.

Some of the best kitchen tools don't involve newfangled technology but have proven their worth over thousands of years of human usage. The mortar and pestle is a perfect example of this. A combination of weighted mashing stick — the pestle — and a weighted bowl with an abrasive interior — the mortar — this ancient tool dates back to at least 35000 BC in Southeast Asia, and it is still commonly used today for food preparations in a variety of cuisines around the world, from Thailand and India to South America and Africa.

Everything you need to know about the mortar and pestle is that it is invaluable for grinding spices to release their aromatic flavors and for making a variety of sauces and dips, such as traditional aioli, which is made by grinding garlic, salt, and lemon juice into a paste, then slowly adding oil, drop by drop, until a thick emulsion is formed. It's worth investing in a relatively large and sturdy stone mortar and pestle. This will take up space on your kitchen counter but will ensure the pestle is heavy enough to apply heavy force, so the mortar won't move around as you grind and has a wide enough bowl to allow for more substantial preparations. Also, a good quality mortar and pestle can be an attractive kitchen feature in itself. Prices vary, with large granite options starting at around $35, but if you keep your mortar and pestle seasoned and well-maintained, it will last a lifetime.

A tamis is another kitchen tool with a history dating back centuries. Originating in the Middle Ages, a tamis sieve or tamis drum is made up of a metal cylindrical edge, a bit like the sides of a circular cake tin, with fine metal mesh covering the middle. It has a range of functions in the kitchen, and works by passing soft foods through the mesh to make them smooth. While you can get your hands on a tamis drum for as little as $10, the quality of materials used to make them has a big difference on longevity, so it's worth investing a little more for a quality one that will stand the test of time.

One specific use for a tamis that produces game-changing results is making pomme purée, which is an unconventional way to make ultra-creamy mashed potatoes with no lumps whatsoever. You just can't get the same results using a handheld potato masher. However, a tamis also has plenty of other uses: It's great for sifting and aerating flour or other fine powders, and for making any purée you can think of into a professional grade, texturally consistent delight. You can also use it to refine sauces, with the tamis filtering out any undesirable lumps or sediment.

If there's one tool I use in the kitchen more than any other, it's a heat-resistant rubber spatula. With the right design and flexibility, a rubber spatula can be so versatile that it becomes a go-to utensil for almost anything, from stirring sauces to flipping proteins or scrambling eggs. Thanks to the rubber end it won't scratch your pans like metal utensils do, and it will bend and flex to perfectly scrape food residue from pots, pans, and hard to reach places like the inside of your blender. This makes it easier to release any food stuck to the bottom of pots during cooking, and it also allows you to get everything out of the pot, keeping food waste to a minimum and leaving you with a much easier washing up job afterward.

My preferred types of rubber spatulas have heat-resistant but flexible rubber or silicone tips permanently fixed into metal or plastic handles. This makes them durable and easy to wash, while allowing enough bend from the tip to fit into the curves and corners of your cookware. Best of all, you needn't break the bank to get a reliable spatula: You can get a set of four for around $10 online.

An offset spatula is another inexpensive and useful kitchen tool. You can get one online for just a few dollars, but seemingly small differences in design make a big difference in function: I opt for a brand called Triangle, which sells German-made offset spatulas with a perfect offset angle. Their small 3.5-inch model costs around $20.

Offset spatulas are versatile cooking tools. They're ideal for spreading thick cake toppings or purées to create even surfaces, with the metal end providing an angle that allows you to work inside a pan or container with ease. However, they're not just a glorified butter knife: Offset spatulas also work well for flipping items in a pan or taking up small samples of sauces and other food to taste as you cook. If I'm using an offset spatula to taste something at home, I'll drop a small dollop onto the back of my hand to taste it, preventing the need to wash the spatula after I've sampled the food.

There's a time and a place for parchment paper, but if you're looking to reduce unnecessary waste, while improving your cooking when it comes to baking and dehydrating ingredients, a silicone baking mat is the way to go. Silpat is the industry standard for silicone baking mats, and their mats cost around $30 each. This might seem like an expensive alternative to parchment paper, but the mat is reusable. Take a bit of care to avoid ripping it, and your baking mat will last for years, reducing the need to use parchment paper for lining baking trays, so you can save it for jobs where it's essential, like making parchment paper cartouches.

What's more, silicone baking mats are non-stick and easy to clean, making them a hassle-free alternative to parchment paper, which can tear and crinkle easily. They're also great for sugar work – making candy brittle, for instance – or for oven-baked tuiles, as there's no risk of them burning in the oven as the molten sugar reaches high temperatures.

You might only think of squeeze bottles as dispensers of tomato ketchup or mayonnaise on the table of a diner, but they're an essential item in most professional kitchens and there's no reason why they can't be similarly useful at home. Wonderfully inexpensive, food safe squeeze bottles can cost as little as $3 each and give you ultimate control when applying sauces, dressings, or oils during cooking and plating. 

You can also use them with sauces that need to be poured warm by placing your squeeze bottle filled with sauce into a pot of water set on your cooker's lowest heat setting. Just make sure you find one made from heat-resistant plastic if you're planning to use it with hot sauces, otherwise there's a chance the base will melt. If you're feeling experimental, a squeeze bottle with a small nozzle can also be used for making faux caviar by dripping a flavored liquid boiled with agar agar from the bottle into cold oil, forming tiny caviar-like flavored balls.