Skip to main content

Cooking After Retirement

2 Kitchen Essentials

So the bad news is that there is an enormous number of kitchen gadgets, utensils, dishes, bowls and table top appliances out there eager to drain your wallet. The good news? You don’t need most of them. Beyond the items found in every kitchen (stove, refrigerator, mixing bowls, etc.) there are only a few items that will make your life easier, and in fact you can cook perfectly adequately without them. Here are a few that I use on a regular basis.

2.1 Bread Making

The following can be done without, but I consider them to be all but essential.

  1. A stand mixer. The two cookbooks I recommend in the Bread section have different takes on this. Reinhart calls for using one in almost every recipe, while I’m pretty sure that Robertson (Tartine Bread) doesn’t even mention them. I happen to use one wherever possible, even when the recipe doesn’t call for it (and will do do so throughout the recipes). Ours is a Viking that, as far as I can tell, is no longer being manufactured (although you may find a used one available on ebay or some similar site). The much more common ones, of course, are those of Kitchenaid, definitely fine machines. They come in two sizes , 4 qt. and 5.5 qt. I received one of the former as a wedding present 40 years ago, and it served all of my needs at the time just fine (indeed, it is now at my lakefront cottage in the Finger Lakes and still going strong). Were I to buy one today (or if our Viking dies), I would probably go with the larger one.
  2. A kitchen scale. Most breadmakers will recommend that weight be used to measure ingredients. This is particularly important for flour, since even different bags of the same brand can have different densities. It is also useful for weighing other ingredients as well. You can get a decent electronic one for around $25.
  3. For Essential Tartine Bread, proofing baskets are a must. I use oval ones, which were used to shape the loaves shown above.
  4. Also for tartine bread, a dutch oven or a covered roasting pan is required. By doing the inital bake in one with the cover on, you get the high humidity environment that commercial bakers get by injecting steam into the baking oven.
  5. A pizza stone or steel is useful for baking rolls and freestanding loaves in addition to pizza. Do get a heavy duty one - the more inexpensive round ones sold at grocery and department stores do not stand up to the high heat used in some of these recipes.
  6. For making essential tartine bread you will need a dutch oven or an oven roaster, one which can be inverted for cooking.
  7. You will need to cut the dough with a knife during the shaping process. If you have a large (8-10 inch) chef’s knife, that will work fine, however a bench knife is useful not only for cutting but also for manipulating dough pieces. We already had a pizza knife that serves these purposes well.

2.2 Grilling

Of course, you will need the basic grilling tools - spatula, fork, tongs and heavy oven mitts. And a cleaning brush. Beyond those I would recommend a grilling basket and a fish grilling mesh. In both cases, be sure you get ones with removable handles, since they won’t fit inside a closed Green Egg with the handles on. An example of a grilling basket is this one from Williams Sonoma.

2.3 Indoor Cooking

In general, all you need here is a decent selection of pots, pans and bowls. However, I do recommend considering the following:

  1. An immersion blender. I never really thought about one of these until I heard an NPR piece on possible Christmas gifts for the cooks in one’s life. I immediately thought of my younger son John, so I got him one and he liked it. I subsequently purchased one for myself, a Braun, that is not only a blender but can also be a small chopper, useful for things like grating hard cheese and mincing garlic.
  2. A slow cooker. This is definitely a secondary priority, since most recipes that call for one can easily be adapted for the stove top or oven. However, it is nice to be able to throw a meal together and forget about it for a few hours. I’ve included some recipes that use it, but I’ve also made suggestions as to how to cook them conventionally.
  3. A convection toaster oven In the summer months, it’s nice to be able to cook in one of these and avoid heating up the house by using the oven.
  4. Only a few of these recipes call for using a microwave oven, but one is great to have, especially for thawing and warming leftovers.
  5. Finally, we finally broke down and bought an Instant Pot®, the six quart Pro model, and having had it for several months, I have no regrets. While it is basically a computerized pressure cooker at heart, its capabilities go beyond that - I’ve done sous vide cooking (nothing elaborate) and yogurt making with great success. And once you learn certain basic protocols for different kinds of dishes it is relatively easy to adapt other recipes to it. And there are at least as many recipes on the internet as there are cat videos, so the possibilities for exploration are limitless. One piece of advice that is ubiquitous - they are not especially good as slow cookers, since they heat only from the bottom, as opposed to from all sides in a dedicated device.