Cool Tools in the Kitchen - Kevin Kelly [31]
The best thing about Sweet Maria’s is that it is also a great source of information about coffee, roasting, brewing, and drinking. I’ve been a coffee nut for quite a few years now and have learned a fair bit about the subject. As far as I can tell, everything on the Sweet Maria’s site is either correct or clearly marked as opinion. What more could you want?
—Dudley Irish
Sweet Maria’s Coffee Roasting Supplies
8. Quick Tips
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Scrub with an Onion Bag
Everyone knows the worst part about baking bread: Having to clean up the sticky, floury mess from counter tops, bowls, and utensils. The gluey mass refuses to come out of sponges, and gums up anything it touches.
I recently discovered a solution: The netting that onions and other vegetables come packaged in. By cutting up the stiff netting into about 6-inch squares you can make reusable super scrubbing tools. A few bags will produce more than you’ll need. When you’re finished scrubbing, just rinse off the gunk, recycle the netting, and marvel at your flour- and cheese-free sponges.
—Pen Duby
Remedy Garlic Hand Smell
I cook a lot and like to use garlic. One downside of properly cleaning and chopping and slicing garlic is the smell permeates your skin. Years ago, I heard on NPR that if you rubbed your hands under cold water with something made of stainless steel, the smell would be eliminated. I didn’t believe it, but it works. You can buy “fancy” soap-shaped or garlic-shaped stainless steel objects to do this with, but no need. Go into your drawer and get out a butter knife or spoon instead. This really works!
—Michael Raab
Whisk with Chopsticks
On one of my trips to Asia, I noticed an omelet chef at breakfast using a pair of chopsticks to whisk the eggs. Since then, I have kept several pairs of good quality chopsticks in my kitchen for whisking and stirring jobs where a traditional balloon whisk is simply too big and can’t get into the container’s corners, or if the pot does not have a rounded bottom. Simply grasp the chopsticks together as if they were a pair of pencils; hold towards the thick end. For more whisking power, slightly separate the two thin ends. As with a balloon whisk, most of the power should come from moving your forearm from the elbow, with your wrist providing a whip-like follow through.
—Aryeh Abramovitz
Preserve Food with Office Supplies
Sure you can buy special plastic “chip-clips” to keep your snack bags closed, but they’re expensive. Or you can use clothespins, but they’re bulky and don’t always stay put. Binder clips, those little spring steel clamps available at any office supply store, are perfect for resealing opened bags of dried snacks or or frozen food. The versatile little jaws are strong enough you can even use them on cardboard containers. I fold my bags at the corners and roll them down to keep things really airtight. The clips also come in a variety of different sizes.
—Tom Lundin
About Cool Tools
At the Cool Tools website, we post just one review per work day, five times a week. Not just kitchen stuff, but all kinds of useful things. One day you’ll hear about a solar-powered flashlight. The next, a book on how to build an igloo, or the best heart rate monitor. We pride ourselves on the mix.
The Cool Tools website began in 2003. However Cool Tools started even earlier, in 2000, as an email list run by Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired Magazine and, prior to that, publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and its quarterly journal. The Whole Earth Catalog was a reader-written publication, with no ads, long before the web. Much of Cool Tools’ DNA stems from the passionate amateur’s spirit of the Catalog. As Catalog founder Stewart Brand wrote in in the first Whole Earth Catalog in 1969:
An item is listed in the CATALOG if it is deemed:
Useful as a tool,
Relevant to independent education,
High quality or low cost,
Easily available by mail.
We continue to uphold this standard and sense of