What J. Kenji López-Alt Can’t Live Without

A bench scraper is a tool that every home cook can benefit from. You can use it for moving stuff around your board, transferring ingredients, scraping and cleaning flour off your cutting board, or cutting dough if you’re making bread. It’s such a versatile tool, and it’s really cheap — $15. Aside from my knife, it’s the tool that is probably at my side the most frequently. I don’t cook without it, and that’s been the case for at least 15 years. It’s always sitting on my cutting board because I just use it all the time. I think a lot of people will maybe pick things up with the side of their knife, or they’ll try awkwardly to scrape things off the board with their hand. A bench scraper is the tool to use for that. It makes cooking much cleaner and more efficient, and, I think, a lot more fun.

I’m a big popcorn fan. I’ve tested every way to make popcorn, and the Whirley-Pop is the best. It gives you the best yield — you don’t waste as much, and you don’t end up with as many unpopped kernels at the bottom. It pops the fastest out of anything I’ve tested, whether that’s a microwave or an air popper or a skillet or a wok. Because it’s designed to agitate the popcorn and vent steam off at the same time, your popcorn ends up much crispier. So if you’re serious about your popcorn, serious enough that you can afford the space to keep an extra gadget just for popping popcorn, the Whirley-Pop is the best tool.

It’s been around for a really long time, but it’s one of those designs that was just genius when it was invented, and they haven’t really changed much about it. It still works the same way. The more inexpensive Whirley-Pop is made of aluminum. They have a fancier stainless-steel one, but I think the aluminum one actually performs better.

I’ve been using this pepper mill since 2006, so almost 20 years. I’ve had the exact same one in my kitchen all this time, and it works the same as the day I bought it. Compared to most pepper mills it’s inexpensive, especially for the performance that you get out of it. Of all the pepper mills out there, it has the the most rapid dispersion. If you compare the amount of pepper you get out of a grind from the Unicorn compared to a Peugeot or one of the other popular brands, it’s three or four times more. It’s just this big shower of pepper. It makes cooking much faster.

It has a completely adjustable grind size, so you can get everything from like, dust to a really coarse grind. It also has this unique side-loading mechanism where you never have to take the top off. A lot of pepper mills, you adjust the grind size with a little screw on the top. But that screw is also what holds the top of the pepper mill on. So as you’re grinding it, the top spins around, and it loosens or tightens that grinder so you don’t get a consistent grind. Whereas with the Unicorn, the grinding adjustment is on the bottom, so you’re never touching it when you’re grinding. The loading mechanism is not on the top either, so there’s no interference between loading the pepper mill, using the pepper mill, and the grind size.

In Japanese,kari karimeans crunchy. There’s a whole bunch of chili crisps that came on the market a few years ago. I was doing a bunch of taste tests, and this one was by far my favorite. The spice mixture that they use in the oil is just really well balanced. There’s some heat to it, there’s some warm spices in there, and there’s a little bit of sweetness, some savoriness, and some saltiness. They also really load it with these big fat chips of crispy garlic. They say chilicrisp,and this actually is really crispy. The garlic itself is crunchy the way potato chips are. I think it has the best balance of flavor, heat, and texture. My daughter eats a bowl of it on the side with dinner every night.

A molcajete is essentially a Mexican mortar and pestle made out of volcanic rock. If you’ve ever made guacamole just by chopping up an onion or chopping up a chile and mixing it with avocado, if you compare that to the flavor you get out of pounding those same ingredients in a molcajete, you release much more flavor. When you go in with a knife, you’re basically shearing the cells apart, so maybe some flavor gets released, but a lot of the cells end up staying intact. Whereas when you go in with a molcajete, it’s like Godzilla’s coming in, stomping around. Everything gets crushed, all the flavors inside get released. You get much more flavorful salsa, much more flavorful guacamole.

I use it as a spice grinder also. I do have an electric spice grinder, but I find that with the cleanup time and the setup time for a spice grinder, the molcajete is the faster way to do it — you just drop them in there, grind them for 30 seconds, and then you rinse it out and you’re done. You don’t have to worry about taking it apart or anything. It’s a great tool for kids also. I have a 4-year-old and an 8-year-old. If I have, say, a ton of ginger I want to chop up for a stir fry or a curry, I can just drop it in the molcajete and give my 4-year-old the pounder, and he’ll just sit there and pound it. It’s really fun for him, and it actually helps in the kitchen.

This olive oil is actually produced by an old childhood friend of mine. Primis is his last name — he’s Greek, and he’s really into olive oil, and he went into olive-oil importing a couple years ago. He sources really great, fresh, early-harvest olive oils. A lot of the extra-virgin olive oils on the market will be blends. So there might be some early-harvest olives in there, but there’s also some later-harvest stuff. Generally, the early-harvest olive oils have a more robust flavor: more of that pepperiness and spiciness, more of the astringency, a little more of the bitterness, all those flavors that people look for in really good extra-virgin olive oils. Primis is very devoted to really sticking with the best olives and bringing out those flavors consistently. The product changes from year to year because it’s a different harvest of olives every year, in the same way that a wine will change from year to year, even from the same vineyard and the same grapes and the same producer. For me, that’s just a mark of the quality. They’re getting you the real flavor of the olives. It’s been consistently among the best olive oils that I’ve had.

Most cooking thermometers only have a single sensor in their tip. The problem with traditional thermometers is that you have to get it exactly in the center of the food to get an accurate reading. You gotta make sure that the tip lands right there. The way the Combustion thermometer works is that it has seven different sensors down the length of the probe. It connects either to your phone or to a separate handheld device. With this thermometer, because it has multiple probes, it’ll calculate the exact center of the food, so you can just jam it all the way through. You don’t have to be precise with it.

The other cool thing about it is based on the temperature differentials — between the various probes as well as the ambient air temperature on the outside, it will very precisely calculate exactly how long your food is going to take to cook. So if I stick it into a prime rib and I want it to come up to 135 degrees, it’ll tell me, your prime rib will be done in exactly three hours, 14 minutes and 33 seconds. It gives you a very precise prediction of when your food is going to be done, which I find to be extremely helpful because it helps you time everything else. You don’t have to keep an eye on it, you just stick it in the meat, put it in the oven, and you know exactly when it’ll be ready. It’s a very high-tech thermometer, and it feels pricey because you can get a thermometer for 15 bucks. But for anybody who regularly cooks meat or gets frustrated with their standard thermometer, this is a game-changing device.

The Chef’s Press is a product that was developed by Bruce Hill, who’s a chef in San Francisco, and he’s been making these for many years now. I’ve been using them for at least the past ten years. They function as a weight to keep good contact between the food and the pan. The really cool thing about them is that they’re vented, so you don’t trap moisture under them the way you would with something like a bacon press. That means the food will brown more efficiently. They’re also stackable, so you can adjust the amount of weight you want on there.

I use them for everything: When I’m making a grilled cheese or a melt, I put one on top to make sure I get that really nice, even, golden-brown crust. They’re great for searing fish or chicken. A piece of fish, if you just put it in a hot pan, it’ll start to curl up. But with the Chef’s Press, you just pick it up and put it on top, and then it stays there through the whole cooking process. It makes the fish crisp up much better and cook more evenly. Just yesterday, I was searing a bunch of zucchini in the skillet, so I cut my zucchini in half, put it face-down in the skillet, and dropped a Chef’s Press on top to make sure it got that really nice crust. Basically, anytime I want something with a golden-brown, crispy crust, I reach for it.

Spinnaker is a local Seattle chocolate company that was started by a couple of brothers during the pandemic. It has a broad range of single-origin chocolates and a very select range of flavored chocolates, like one with cacao nib and one with bee pollen. They’re all really smart and well considered. It’s one of these companies that focuses on doing just a few things and does them extremely well.

It’s essentially developed a new method of roasting and sorting cacao, so that it gets a much more even roast. Spinnaker built this custom equipment that really fine-tunes the roasting process, so it’s able to coax all these flavors out of these single-origin beans that are really hard to come by. Its chocolate consistently has really intense, bright flavors, but also a consistent snap and melt. I think its chocolate is among the best you can buy.

The folks at Our Place are really smart, both from a design perspective and from a technical perspective. I’ve spent decades testing and reviewing products, so I know what’s good and what’s bad and what I want in something. So rather than just sort of wait for it to roll around, why not work with companies to actually help bring something to market that checks all of my boxes so I know it’s going to be great?

The Wonder Oven Pro was a product Our Place had in development, but I worked very closely with it on testing the various functions, making sure it did everything I wanted it to do. It does all the basic things that a good oven does, like roasting and baking and convection cooking, but it also does proofing and dehydrating and air frying. The dehydrating is great because I’ve got kids and we often buy fruit that doesn’t get eaten and is about to go bad. So I just throw it in the dehydrator and then I get dehydrated fruit to put into my kids’ lunchboxes. It can function as an air fryer, which is something that I never wanted to buy, popular as they are, because I don’t want a whole other separate appliance in my kitchen. I’ve also found that other countertop ovens that say they do air frying don’t really — they’re more just like basic convection settings. But the Wonder Oven air-frys as well as the best stand-alone air fryers I’ve seen. It also does proofing — it can hold a very precise low temperature. The other thing that I thought was really cool is that it has steam injection. When you’re making toast, you can add a cap full of steam, and because moist air transfers heat more efficiently than dry air, your toast comes out crisper on the outside and moister on the inside than it would in a typical countertop oven.

It comes in a pistachio color that I really enjoy having in my kitchen. The Wonder Oven does everything that my old toaster oven did, but does it better in a more functional, fun way.