Whats in Carole's Cupboard? - Essential Kitchen Equipment

You don't need much equipment to cook good food. One of the challenges I have enjoyed (particularly over many years of self catering holidays) is preparing meals with limited equipment and ingredients.

Below is a list of items I think are absolutely essential for cooking (think student or first time away from home), and a secondary list of useful items, depending on what and how you like to cook. I'm assuming everyone will have access to an oven, hob and fridge.

Absolutely essential equipment:

1. Good knives. You will need at least one sharp knife, and really one large and one small for the range of different tasks. You don't have to spend vast amounts for a good knife, but it's a false economy to go cheap here.

2. Scissors are another essential, useful for snipping herbs as well as opening packets ( using your hands or your teeth never ends well, believe me).

3. As a bare minimum, one large and one medium sized lidded saucepan, and a milk pan sized one is useful too.

4. If you can only afford, or have room for, one frying pan, then get a medium sized one, but if you can stretch to it, a small omelette pan will be very useful.

5. If you eat a lot of stir fries, a wok is absolutely essential - you can buy a large steel one relatively inexpensively from your local Chinese supermarket or cash and carry. It will need seasoning. There are instructions for this out there. A wok will also double up as a frying pan.

6. Can opener. Don't pay out for a fancy one, buy one of the old fashioned kind, pictured below, usually available for £1 or less. It will work well and last for years. If you're lucky it even comes with a bottle opener in the handle.

7. Wooden spoons - essential if your pans are non-stick, and great for mixing ingredients when baking.

8. Silicone spatulas - great for scraping every last bit out of the bowl/ pan. Mini ones are also available and good for emptying jam jars etc.

9. When on a self catering holiday, one of the areas where I find self catering kitchen supplies sadly deficient is roasting pans, baking sheets and casserole dishes. Maybe they just want to deter you from using the power hungry oven. One baking sheet, a large casserole dish ideally with a lid (although you can improvise with aluminium foil or a large plate) and a medium or large sized roasting dish or pan is essential. If your oven comes with a grill pan, this can often double up as a roasting pan and/or baking sheet.

10. Chopping board/ bread board - essential if you don't want to ruin your worktops or knives. Wooden boards are more environmentally friendly, plastic ones are easier to clean and can go through the dishwasher so I would recommend these for salad veg and cooked meats. Don't use glass and marble boards - they will blunt your knife.

11. Measuring cups/weighing scales/measuring spoons. At Carole's cupboard, we rarely weigh or measure things, but for some recipes and ingredients, quantities are important and, when baking, accurate proportions are essential. So in the recipes here where it says a "pinch", or "a slosh", accuracy is less important, and where measurements are given, they are best followed.

Very useful, but not essential:

1. A balloon whisk is useful for beating eggs and making pancake batter, but unless you're whipping cream or baking, you can get by with a large fork.

2. In addition to sharp knives, a vegetable peeler is inexpensive and makes short work of, well, peeling veg, and a steel cleaver is useful for chopping and can be obtained from a Chinese supermarket.

3. Sharpening steel. if you know how to use one this will serve better than any other so-called knife sharpening gadget.

4 Tongs, forks, and other implements for manipulating hot food will always be handy and saved burned fingers.

5. Cast iron pots may need regular seasoning but they will last for ever and even add a a bit of iron to your diet.

6. A pressure cooker will reduce cooking times and is great for making stock from bones, soup and cooking dried beans and chick peas. also good for traditional steamed puddings.

7. Despite the name, a slow cooker is another time saving device if you are organised enough to plan your evening meal either first thing in the morning or even the day before. Can be used for slow roast, eg for pulled pork, or "boiling" a ham, as well as for soups and casseroles.

8. I wouldn't be without my stick blender which is great for soups and pureeing foods. It takes up less space than a traditional blender, and is also easier to clean. I wish I had splashed out for a grinder attachment.

9. A freezer is incredibly useful for saving half of a double portion dish, leftovers and bulk bought perishables.

10. A melon baller, apple corer and lemon zester will often come in handy, but you can improvise with an ordinary knife. As well as making melon balls, a melon baller can be used to make balls of other firm fruits and is great for removing the core from a pear after you've cut it in half.

11. Metal skewers of different sizes are useful for holding boned& rolled meat together, checking if food is cooked in the middle and making kebabs. if you make a lot of kebabs then wooden disposable skewers are good, but you do need to remember to soak them in advance of use to stop them burning.

12. Chip mesh - I bought one of these speculatively a few years ago for a couple of quid, and they are far better than a baking sheet for ready made foods that are meant to be crispy rather than soggy. such as oven chips, onion rings, and pizzas. No good for oozy foods, though.

13. Not essential, but I wouldn't be without my microwave oven for defrosting and reheating food, cooking fish, and softening butter.

14. An electric hand mixer is essential if you want to make cakes and is also useful for whipping cream and making really creamy mashed potato. You can just about get by with the old fashioned mechanical hand whisk if you have strong arms, and a lot of energy, but its no good for a stiff mixture.

15. You can juice citrus fruits by cutting in half and squeezing, but a citrus reamer is more efficient and a hand juicer/sieve will remove any pips.