Kitchen Gadgets

Opening a bottle of wine should take about fifteen seconds. With a manual corkscrew — foil cutter, screw insertion, leverage, repeated pulling, gasping cork crumbles — it takes closer to ninety, and there’s a chance you wind up fishing cork bits out of your Cabernet. Electric wine openers solve this. Press it on the bottle, push a button, and the cork slides out. Push another button and it ejects. Total time: less than ten seconds. Some also work as wine preservers — pull the air out of a partial bottle and your wine stays drinkable for another week instead of turning to vinegar by Tuesday. ...

Salad spinners occupy an odd spot in the kitchen gadget world. They are bulky, single-purpose, and take up cabinet space. And they are also one of the few tools that actually change how food turns out. Dressing slides off wet lettuce. Herbs turn brown in damp paper towels. And if you have ever tried to pat dry a pound of spinach with paper towels one leaf at a time, you know the frustration. ...

Opening cans and jars should be the least memorable part of cooking. But if you’ve ever wrestled with a stuck lid or a can opener that skips halfway around, you know a bad one can turn a two-second task into a 30-second frustration. For anyone with arthritis, reduced grip strength, or just bad luck with lids, it’s even worse. We tested 6 electric can openers and jar openers — fully automatic can openers that cut around the side, traditional electric can openers, under-cabinet mounted units, and universal jar-gripping tools. ...

I used to measure flour by volume until I made three different batches of bread dough in one afternoon and got three different textures. Same recipe, same scoop, wildly different results. That’s when I bought a kitchen scale and found out my “cup” of flour varied by as much as 30 grams depending on how I scooped. A good digital kitchen scale fixes that. It’s also the gadget I reach for more than anything else — for coffee brewing, portion control, and following recipes that come from countries where they don’t measure in cups. We tested 7 digital kitchen scales in 2025 across different price points and use cases, from $15 basics to precision lab-grade models. ...

Pull a steak off the grill too early and you’re eating cold, sad meat. Leave a chicken in the oven five minutes too long and you’re eating dry, sad chicken. The line between perfect and ruined is a matter of degrees, and humans are terrible at guessing internal temperature by sight. A good meat thermometer eliminates the guesswork. We tested six digital meat thermometers — instant-read, probe-style with leave-in cables, and Bluetooth/WiFi-connected smart models — to find which ones give reliable readings and which ones waste your time. ...