Unnecessary kitchen gadgets: a reference [closed]

For reasons I have yet to understand, my parents once bought me what I would have to describe as a manual food processor. I am not talking about a hand blender, nor am I talking about a chopper (which is what you'll find if you try to google "manual food processor"). It is literally a crank-operated, plastic-encased device that looks like a very small food processor.

To date, I have never found a use for it. The only reason I even took it out of the box was because the box took up too much space in my cupboard. I have no idea what this... thing... can do that an ordinary food processor or hand blender can't do about a thousand times better. I guess, if I ever really need to purée some tuna in the middle of a nationwide blackout, I'll be prepared.

Because I no longer have the box, I have no idea what the name of this product is. I received this gift over 5 years ago. The guard labels are still on the blades - a testament to just how useless this product turned out to be.

The most useless gadget I've found is the Slap Chop (food chopper/mincer).

It sounds like it would save time, but it takes longer to clean than it would to just cut things with a knife.

Some garlic presses have this same problem, you have to make sure to get one that has bumps on the back, so you can swing it around and push the garlic chunks out of the tiny holes when you're done.

Not sure that everybody would agree, but: bread maker.

We have one. It's huge, takes up a whole heap of shelf space, and the only thing it does is make bread.

Never mind the fact that bread costs a few pence per loaf in the first place, or that it's perfectly possible to make bread the old-fashioned way. You know, with your hands. I think my real beef with it is that it makes such tiny, tiny loaves, and all with a metal paddle embedded in them. Once you fish that out, the loaf is even tinier.

Sure, throwing some ingredients in a machine and waiting an hour or two is way simpler than the multiple complex cycles of kneeding and rising that manual bread-making requires. But the results are so poor, it hardly seems worth the effort.

PS. Fun fact: First time my mother tried to use her shiny new bread maker, she came back a few hours later to find the bottom of the tin coated in a kind of edible cement. She asked me what went wrong (because, obviously, I would somehow know this?). So I chiselled out a piece of this stuff and tasted it.

"Holy mother of God, how much salt did you put in this?!"

"One tablespoon, like it says."

"No, no - 1 tsp means one teaspoon!"

You do not need a degree in food science to figure out why this might be a problem. ;-)

Funny, you would have thought an extremely old person would know about all the quirky abbreviations in recipies. (E.g., "oz" for ounce? What is that about?)

Small butane torches

If you are making crème brûlée, go to the hardware store and buy a proper torch. The tiny ones you get at kitchen stores are barely powerful enough to light a cigar.

The George Foreman grill has to be up there in the top ten. It does nearly everything a regular oven or grill does but in a hard-to-clean and unwieldy form factor. Useless.

UPDATE: I got a Slap Chop as an ironic Christmas gift last year. It is pure junk, but pleases this guy no end.

I've had one "official" sifter in my adult life and it broke within 3 months. I mean the kind that looks like a cup where you have to squeeze the handle repeatedly to sift the contents out.

It also gave me a pain in my hand and wrist. I'm much happier with my medium sized strainer!

I'm going to go out on a limb here...

Knife Sharpeners

Not a honing steel, mind you, but a "proper" sharpener.

These are simply not good enough for quality cutlery. Have your knives professionally sharpened instead (and do hone them often).

I think that this type of bottle opener

is so awkward to use as to make it pointless. They also take up an inordinate amount of space. There are simpler bottle openers (waiter's friend, or a double lever design) which are effective, smaller and easy to use.

Herb Scissors

and all other gadgets that need way more time to clean than they actually save.