Kitchen Gadgets for Meal Prep
Dial in your meal prep with gadgets that are perfect for the kitchen. These tools can help you measure and prepare food in ways that are quick and efficient. Cooking can often become scientific, looking more like an experiment than an art form. But why scoff at new approaches to cooking? It’s never stopped us in the past.
Meal prep takes the final product of cooking a step further once we store it in the fridge. It’s vital that we ensure its shelf life and these gadgets are great for that. Whether you need to dial in the temperature of a certain meat or measuring ratios for calorie-conscious meal prep, we have you covered with the latest and greatest in cooking technology.
Choppers
Prep work is usually the most time consuming part of home cooking. Dicing and slicing your way through a ton of vegetables can feel tedious and repetitive when you cook in large quantities for meal prep. Choppers like mandolins and other slicers can help speed this process up in various ways that produce uniform cuts of ingredients.
In the context of meal prep, uniform ingredients are useful because it helps with storage. Having a variety of shapes and sizes works well for a family dinner, but can cause inconsistencies when spread out through a week. Choppers are also useful if you are uncomfortable with a certain type of knife.
Openers
There are a lot of different ways to open a can and depending on what’s inside, how you open it will matter. The OG can opener, an icon of the 1920’s, has come a long way since its inception during the industrial revolution. Cans are quite the engineering feat, but opening them can be a challenge especially if you have arthritis or a bad grip.
Fortunately, we’re seeing more and more electric can openers hitting the market with advanced features that make opening cans easier than ever because when the pan’s hot, it can get tense taking the time to fumble through opening up a can of beans.
Scales
Weight control is a major benefit of meal prep. By using scales and proper measurements, we can accurately tune our meals to the exact amount of calories we need to achieve our physical goals. Scales can be used in both ways too, helping you to gain weight or lose it depending on your needs.
While it’s easy to just say ‘just eat more’ or ‘just eat less’, accurate measurements will help you keep track of your portions and eating habits. Not only does this help you maintain healthier habits, but it can also help you save money as you adjust your grocery shopping to match.
Thermometers
Chicken isn’t the only temperature worth checking in the kitchen. There are countless times when putting your hand over the fire won’t cut it or just plain isn’t safe (i.e. deep frying). It’s necessary to know just how hot everything is so that you can ensure your food is being cooked properly and safely.
Fortunately, there are numerous ways that we can check the heat of an ingredient, pot, pan, liquid, you name it. Whether you’re going old school with probes and dials or using high-tech lasers and infrared readings, we’ve found only the best.
Timers
It’s a lot easier than you think to forget something’s cooking on the stove. We’ve all done it, but at what cost? Burning valuable ingredients and wasting food – a cardinal sin. Thankfully, we can rely on timers to keep us reminded about certain ingredients before they burn or boil over.
It’s been said before that something magical occurs when you’ve slowly simmered a meal for 4 hours. That’s quite a long time to tend to something on the stove, but setting various timers throughout will also help you develop the rest of your meal prep during that time. Take advantage of your time in the kitchen, you’re saving more than just money with meal prep.