I love to cook and bake and I am also a real geek for gadgets and technology, so one could suspect that I would have a lot of strange appliances and gadgets in my kitchen.

In reality I don’t really have all that much and what I do have is pretty standard. This is mostly because I think most strange kitchen appliances seem so utterly redundant (especially the ones they advertise in the infomercials). Most of them seem like nothing but unnecessary additions to the regular tools; just small variations for the lazy.

But sometimes I remember that I am extraordinarily lazy myself, and when that happens I can sometimes buy one of those things. And when I do, I’ve often found myself very glad that I did, because sometimes the appliances and gadgets really are great.

I want to share my impressions of some of those things here, to help anyone else who might be pondering the usefulness of certain kitchen gadgets.

This was one of my first forays into the depths of the “kitchen stuff we don’t really need”-side of things.

For years I had resisted the temptation of getting myself a bread maker because I felt that they are surely a very silly thing to have. I am fully capable of making my dough the old fashioned way and baking it in my regular oven; having a special machine for it just seemed like a pointless extra thing.

I had also heard that they are difficult to clean and that you could only make simple, white bread in them. This made them seem extra worthless to me, as cleaning up is the only boring part of baking, and I really don’t like white bread. I find it incredibly dry and boring and I want to be able to bake heavy, dark bread, preferably with manly chunks of some kind or another.

But after some talk with people who actually have bread makers I started to see another picture. When I had a bit more money than usual I suddenly bought one as a spur-of-the-moment thing, and I can’t say that I’ve been sorry about that.

Some of my original assumptions instantly proved to be very wrong, especially for newer models. Using a bread maker has certainly cut down very significantly on the amount of dishes that needs to be done after baking, and it is very possible to make good dark bread in them.

My bread maker has really made making most kinds of bread a breeze. For the most part, I can just fill the ingredients I want in the container, turn it on and not do another thing until it is time to eat the bread. And to be honest, it actually makes most kinds of bread better than I do myself.

The reason for this is simple, and it is the same reason that we usually use machines for things: it doesn’t get tired or bored. My bread maker kneads the dough an incredibly long time, lets it rise, kneads it some more, lets it rise again, and finally bakes it. I don’t really have the time or the mental fortitude to process the dough for such a long time. And it can really make a difference.

But the greatest thing that the bread maker does is of course to wake me up with freshly baked bread. I can set a time when I want the bread to be finished, fill in the ingredients and go to bed, and it will automatically start baking at the right time.

All in all I’m very happy with my purchase. There are still some things it can’t do, but it performs way above my expectations. And even though it is still technically an unnecessary thing for me to have, I wouldn’t really want to be without it.

If you are interested in bread makers, you can check out bread-maker.net for more information.

If I had some doubts about the need for a bread maker, that was nothing compared to my doubts about the usefulness of a rice cooker. I really couldn’t see the need when boiling rice is such an easy task.

But I had to admit that my scepticism might be a little off in this case, since most homes in the most rice-consuming countries in the world seem to have a rice cooker (for instance, recent statistics say that 95% of Japanese homes have one), so I started looking into it. And when I started making sushi and onigiri (rice balls), I decided to get one.

When you make that kind of rice dishes you need very sticky rice, so that it sticks together and holds the shape you want it to be. To achieve maximum stickiness when cooking rice the old fashioned way can take a lot of work, but when I read into it I found that rice cookers can achieve that much more easily.

After buying one, I found out that it really can save effort when cooking regular rice too. The fact that there is no risk of it boiling over or for the rice to burn and stick to the pan just takes away a lot of hassle. This lets me concentrate on more interesting parts of the cooking while the rice cooks effortlessly in the background. The Wikipedia article on rice cookers puts it well with “Although the rice cooker does not necessarily speed up the cooking process, the cook's involvement in cooking rice with a rice cooker is reduced to simply using the correct amount of water.”

I do have to say that it is still one of the least necessary things I have, since cooking rice never is all that much of a hassle, but it’s still a really nice machine. And it has, like most rice cookers seem to have, a tray to use for steaming vegetables and other food items while cooking the rice, and that’s wonderful. Now I always have some nice, healthy steamed vegetables with my rice.

More recently, I started using a kind of pretty simple onion chopper, which is often called a “crocodile onion chopper.” This wasn’t something I bought myself, but a Christmas present, and I didn’t really have any high hopes for it.

These things are made by a couple of different companies, but they all look pretty much the same. You take half an onion, place it on a board and press down with a mesh of blades. I really couldn’t get why that would be better or less trouble than just chopping an onion with a knife. It isn’t all that hard, after all.

But when I got it, I naturally did the usual “Oh, that’s just what I need”-routine, acting thankful for the present, and silently promised myself to at least try it out. And I found out that it’s actually really good.

It does save time, since you chop half an onion almost instantaneously instead of in many steps. But most of all it saves a lot of effort in making pieces the right size. To me, the mesh in this kind of chopper gives bits of onions in just the size that I want for most dishes.

It is especially a blessing when I’m doing many things at once and am a bit stressed in chopping my onions, allowing me to get perfect pieces even when I’m short on time. It is a bit harder to clean than just a knife and a chopping board, but I still really like it.

Stand mixers were a complete mystery to me until recently. I had seen those typical stand mixers from KitchenAid and wondered what they could be good for. They really only seemed to relieve you of the effort of holding a mixer over the bowl when mixing something, and I couldn’t see that I needed much help in that department.

I have started to realize the usefulness of those things though. I don’t have one myself, but I’ve recently had some chance to try them out, and they do seem pretty great for a range of tasks.

They are of course especially helpful when dealing with things that must be mixed very thoroughly. For instance for some types of cookies you have to mix butter and sugar together to a very even mix. That sort of thing usually takes a lot of patience and time to get it good enough, but with a stand mixer you can just pour the ingredients into the bowl, start the mixer and leave it on while you prepare other things.

Another common problem when mixing things like that is the issue of reaching all of the stuff you want to mix. Often when I use a regular handheld mixer, the beaters can’t really reach all around the edges of the container I’m sticking it into, and I have to take care to get it all mixed without any clumps. But typical stand mixers have a specialized bowl with attachments that of course are fitted to perfectly reach all around the edge without any effort on your part.

They are usually a bit expensive, but for the above mentioned reasons I can actually see myself getting something like that in the future.