Kitchen Appliances

Countertop composting is having a moment in 2025. The reason is simple: more people want to cut down on food waste, but nobody wants a slimy bucket of scraps under the sink attracting fruit flies. They come in two styles. Electric composters use heat, a grinding blade, and a carbon filter to dehydrate and deodorize scraps in 4–8 hours. A week of peels, eggshells, and coffee grounds comes out as a dry powder. Manual compost bins rely on a charcoal filter and a tight lid to keep scraps smelling fine until you carry them to the garden or the municipal compost drop-off. ...

Drip coffee makers don’t get the respect they deserve. Everyone talks about espresso machines and pour-over kettles, but most households still brew their daily coffee from a machine that drips hot water over grounds. The difference between a $50 coffee maker and a $300 one isn’t just build quality — it’s whether the water gets hot enough, whether it contacts the grounds long enough, and whether the brew temperature stays consistent through the whole cycle. ...

The average American household throws away about $1,500 per year in spoiled food. A vacuum sealer is the best tool for fixing that — it pulls out the oxygen that causes freezer burn, mold, and spoilage. Meat lasts 3-5 times longer in the freezer. Dry goods keep for years instead of months. Sous vide becomes practical instead of a hassle. Not all sealers are the same though. Cheap ones pull a weak vacuum and lose seal within weeks. Expensive chamber sealers cost thousands. We tested 7 models across countertop automatics, handheld portables, and chamber sealers to find the ones that actually keep food fresh. ...

Making yogurt at home sounds like the kind of thing people with a lot of time and a sourdough starter do. But it’s actually simpler than making most breakfasts. Heat milk, cool it, stir in a spoonful of live yogurt, keep it warm for 8-12 hours, and you’re done. A yogurt maker just handles the “keep it warm” part — maintaining a steady 108-112°F so the cultures do their work without needing you to check a heating pad or an oven pilot light. ...

I bought my first soda maker because I was spending $40 a month on LaCroix and felt ridiculous about it. Six years and three machines later, I can tell you two things. The upfront cost pays for itself in about six months. And not all soda makers are worth your money. Some carbonate well and keep fizz for days. Others go flat in hours or feel like they’re going to explode when you twist the bottle off. ...

A panini press sounds like a single-purpose gadget. One thing: pressing sandwiches. But the good ones — the ones worth owning — do a lot more. They grill chicken breasts while the top plate sears the other side. They cook burgers indoors when the weather won’t cooperate. They griddle pancakes on one half and fry eggs on the other. We tested 7 models, from basic sandwich presses to full-function griddles that could replace your stove for most meals. ...

I love pizza, but I was skeptical about countertop pizza ovens. My regular oven with a pizza stone seemed fine. Then I spent an afternoon at a friend’s house watching his Breville Pizzaiolo crank out a Neapolitan pie in three minutes. The crust had leopard spotting. The cheese was bubbling. It was pizza, in a kitchen, on a weekday. Countertop pizza ovens work because they get much hotter than a regular oven. Your home oven maxes out around 500-550°F. These things hit 750-800°F. That’s the difference between a decent pizza and a really good one. We tested 7 models in 2025 to find which ones deliver. ...

A cast iron skillet is the longest-lasting piece of cookware you’ll ever buy. It’s also the hardest to get wrong — Lodge makes a perfectly usable pan for forty bucks, and it’ll outlive you. But there’s a range between “usable” and “this is the pan I reach for every single time” that matters more than you’d think. Weight distribution, handle angle, surface smoothness, how the seasoning takes — these details determine whether you use the skillet daily or it sits on the bottom shelf gathering rust. I tested six cast iron skillets spanning the full spectrum from budget workhorses to enameled French imports, comparing how they heat, how they handle, and how they feel after a year of use. ...

Sous vide cooking went from restaurant-only technique to home kitchen staple faster than almost any cooking method in recent memory. The idea is simple: seal food in a bag, submerge it in a precisely heated water bath, and cook it at exactly the right temperature for exactly the right amount of time. The result — perfectly cooked steak edge-to-edge without a gray band — is something you just can’t get with a pan or oven. ...

Electric pressure cookers have taken over a lot of kitchens because they do one thing well that other kitchen appliances don’t: cook a tough cut of beef from rock-hard to fall-apart tender in 45 minutes. The same pot can also work as a slow cooker, rice cooker, steamer, saute pan, and yogurt maker. A good multi-cooker can pull double or triple duty and free up counter space by replacing three other appliances. ...