Although many of these kitchen gadgets may seem useful, they often end up taking up space at the back of cabinets, sometimes even unopened!
The unitaskers – kitchen gadgets that do one task efficiently – are endless, from potato peelers to salad spinners. While some of them are useful, many of them are simply expensive and useless, taking up precious drawer space and collecting dust. Here are the 6 most useless kitchen gadgets:
- Banana slicers: while a banana slicer may sound useful for cutting a banana into perfectly sized, highly aesthetic pieces, a banana slicer is more troublesome than helpful. Often, bits of banana will get stuck in the slicer, and due to the small size of the slicer, it is nearly impossible to properly clean out the slicer. Using a knife is much more efficient in terms of ease of cleaning, even if the pieces aren’t perfectly equal. Another ideal option is eating a banana straight from the peel, although this may not be feasible in some situations.
- Herb scissors: a cousin to the banana slicer, herb scissors are multiple scissors combined that help mince herbs. Although they may help speed up the process of slicing herbs, they suffer from the same cleaning problems that banana slicers encounter. Herbs will often get stuck in between the blades, requiring tedious cleaning to fully remove the tiniest bits. Using a knife is slightly more time consuming, but the cleanup process is far less complex.
- Bagel slicer: For a fancy (yet far less useful) knife, a bagel slicer is another useless gadget. It can easily be replaced by an ordinary kitchen knife, making its $10-$30 price tag seem a little absurd. Bagel slicers take up quite a lot of space in kitchen drawers or on kitchen countertops and are far more difficult to clean compared to their common counterparts, kitchen knives.
- Avocado pitter/slicer combo: It cuts! It scoops! It slices! It does everything that a spoon and a knife can do together! Although it may seem like a dream tool, an avocado slicer is indistinguishable from a knife and a spoon used together, using the knife to cut the skin, the spoon to pit and scoop, and the knife once again to slice the pulp. In addition to taking up the same amount of space as a dozen spoons, being tough to clean (when avocado gets stuck in between the many blades), and wasting precious avocado pulp (since it is does not perfectly fit every avocado), these tools cost $5-$10, making them a worthless investment.
- Pickle Picker: A glorified fork, a pickle picker’s sole purpose is to allow people to grab pickles (and other foods generally preserved in liquid) without having to touch the liquid. For a $5-$10 item, a pickle picker is nothing but a glorified fork or knife, both of which can be used to extract pickles in the same manner as a pickle picker.
- Melon peeler: a melon peeler is a U-shaped blade attached to a stick whose sole purpose is to make peeling melons easier. In short, it is a $10-$20 waste of money that can simply be replaced with a knife. With a little bit of patience, a knife can more accurately peel large melons than any peeler. These peelers often waste large quantities of flesh, which requires a knife anyway in order to recover the lost fruit.
