Kitchen Essentials

Nobody thinks about their kitchen trash can until it annoys them. The lid that won’t stay open. The fingerprints all over the steel. The way it smells three days before the bag is full. Then suddenly it’s the most important appliance in the room. The good news: trash cans have gotten a lot better in the last few years. Sensor lids that actually sense, odor filters that work, and step mechanisms that don’t break after six months. ...

A cutting board is the work surface of your kitchen. You use it more than any pan, any knife, any appliance. But most cutting boards are sold on looks — grain patterns, wood species, whether they match your countertops — and the things that actually matter (how they treat your knife edge, whether they harbor bacteria, if they slide around while you chop) get buried in the marketing. We tested 6 cutting boards across different materials — edge-grain wood, end-grain wood, bamboo, polypropylene, and composite — using the same knives, the same ingredients, and the same abuse over two months. Most of them were fine. A few were worth buying. ...