12 Cool Kitchen Gadgets That Can Save You Time And Energy

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Cooking up a good meal in the kitchen can be more difficult than it appears. You'll need to source fresh ingredients, find the right measurements to ensure it tastes just right, and actively manage other aspects of the cooking process before you can get the result you're hoping for. As if finding the right balance between so many variables wasn't hard enough, cooking is also very energy intensive and time consuming. Personally, that's why I cook rarely and very reluctantly — it demands all of my attention for far too long, and depending on what I'm making, I can wind up fatigued.

However, even if you're passionate about the culinary arts, there is likely stuff you'd just rather not spend valuable time doing. That's where kitchen gadgets come in — good ones cut your time spent on specific parts of the meal prep process significantly. From air fryers to vacuum sealers, we've compiled a list of 12 such gadgets to ease your cooking stress. Each of these saves time and energy and is rated above 4.0 stars on Amazon with a minimum of 1,000 verified reviews.

Air fryers are hardly novel these days, but that doesn't make them any less revolutionary. Instead of being actively involved in the cooking process, from filling the pan with oil to flipping over food slices so they won't burn, simply dump the pieces you want fried in a machine. Press a few buttons, and voila, it handles the cooking for you in mere minutes. As a bonus, you don't even need oil to cook since these gadgets use hot air instead, which means that your food is actually healthier.

The Cosori TurboBlaze Air Fryer is one shining example of this technology. With an average rating of 4.8 stars from over 14,000 users on Amazon, it's one of the most trusted products in the air fryer category. Its heating temperatures range from 90 to 450 degrees Fahrenheit, and there are five fan speeds (proof dry, warm, bake, reheat, and air fry) to match this. 

These modes deliver evenly cooked dishes with 95% less oil consumption in the air fryer's six-quart storage, more than enough to feed a family of four with leftovers. The Cosori TurboBlaze Air Fryer retails for $89.88. If you need more information, SlashGear has a list of things to know before buying an air fryer. 

Ever been stuck trying to figure out if your food has cooked for long enough? We've all been there. A common workaround, a solution as old as time, really, is to test the texture by tasting a portion of the meal. I, for one, have never liked that. I have a pretty sensitive tongue, and I can't tell you the number of times I've been burned carrying out the taste test. And doing the finger test can be too imprecise.

That's where food thermometers come into play. They're essentially a way for you to know if your meal has been thoroughly cooked, which means you can take the guesswork out of the cooking equation, stop overcooking your meals, and save time all at once.

Amongst all the offerings in this niche, the Alpha Grillers Meat Thermometer is the most highly rated; it's got a 4.8-star rating from over 85 thousand reviews. Now, although it's called a meat thermometer by name, it can be applied to just about every food type and cooking situation: whether that's baking, grilling, or even making stews and noodles — its IP67 water-resistant rating allows this. All you need to do is dip the thermometer into what you're cooking and wait roughly two seconds for a reading to appear on the LCD. The Alpha Grillers Thermometer is priced at $12.98.

Pressure cookers have been in vogue for a while now, and there's one main driving factor behind their popularity: they cut cooking times down dramatically. That high-pressure cooking applies to just about any dish you want to think of, be it stews or soups. In the case of the Instant Pot Duo Electric Pressure Cooker, your meals can be prepared up to 70% faster than with normal cooking methods — and speed isn't its only asset either.

You might view pressure cookers as an appliance to use only when you want to save time. You'd be wrong. The Instant Pot Duo features seven cooking functions for you to prep your meals, whether you just want to warm your food, saute your vegetables, or go full blast with the pressure cooker. That versatility is one of the reasons we recommended it amongst our list of kitchen appliances to buy when moving into a new home. 

Now, you've probably heard of the threat of explosion and injury if a pressure cooker is handled improperly. The Instant Pot Duo guards against this with over 10 built-in safety features; there's overheating protection, an easy seal lid lock, and a release switch to eject pressure. The Instant Pot Duo is an Amazon bestseller retailing for $109.99 with an average rating of 4.6 stars from nearly 200 thousand verified reviews.

Prep work can be tiring; it's time-consuming to go through the motions of slicing, chopping, and shredding, especially if you're cooking something large. Imagine making some salad, for instance. You'd have to shred vegetables, chop carrots, slice onions, and many other ingredients, as the case may be.

That's where food processors come in handy — they take the danger out of the game and significantly shorten your prep time as well. The Ninja Food Processor is one of the best units in this regard; it's rated 4.6 stars from over 14 thousand reviews on Amazon. It's got a 1,000-watt motor to handle a wide range of ingredients, no matter their toughness, and there are four one-touch control preset modes for you to choose from: chopping, slicing, pureeing, and dough making.

The Ninja Food Processor's capacity is also built to save time; you can pour in up to nine cups of your desired ingredients to process as you like. That means less prep time in the long run, since you can efficiently handle bigger loads. It's retailing for $129.99.

If food processors sound a little too industrial for your day-to-day cooking needs, or you want a little more control over the cuts, perhaps you'd fancy an appliance that's a bit more hands-on. An ordinary knife still won't cut it; it's far too slow and guaranteeing that the cuts will be uniform takes effort and skill. The next best gadget to consider buying should be a mandoline slicer.

The Mueller Mandoline Slicer gives you control of the degree of fineness of your cuts with its nine interchangeable blades, and there's an adjustable Spiralizer to make cute ribbon shapes out of your vegetables, too. The spiralizer also has three blade options you can toggle between, which really makes the Mueller Mandoline Slicer a 12-in-one gadget for chopping, dicing, grating, and slicing your ingredients.

Rated at 4.5 stars from nearly 40,000 reviews, it has the #1 bestseller tag in the Mandoline and Slicer genre on Amazon, and it retails for $39.99.

Blenders are kitchen essentials; you can find a use for them in just about every meal you're cooking up, especially if it requires some form of paste. However, the conventional countertop workhorse you're probably thinking of can be bulky, and quite frankly, overkill for many tasks. If you're big on saving time, the transfer process from a bowl to the blending jar and back creates a mess you'd have to clean up — something you can avoid with an immersion blender. However, if a countertop unit is what you have in mind, we've ranked kitchen blender brands from worst to best.

With an immersion blender, you can simply stick it in the pot or bowl where you're cooking a soup, stew, or any paste, and do all your blending in one place. The Turelar Immersion Blender is one of the best-performing examples in this regard. It's got a 1,100-watt motor to crush your ingredients into a paste, and it allows you to control the blending speed through a pulse-activated sensor. That means you can reduce splatter while switching speeds as you like. On sale for $35.98, the Turelar Immersion Blender has a rating of 4.5 stars from over 7,000 reviewers.

One note of warning, though; where you'd easily use your countertop blender to crush ice, the Turelar Blender can't work for too long under such conditions — the main part could burn or get damaged otherwise. 

Many of the items on this list are aimed at chopping or slicing, and the garlic press is a particularly important one if you're sensitive to taste or smell. Garlic has a pretty strong smell and taste in foods, and it can linger on your fingers and tongue for much longer than the warm sensation of good food in your belly. You wouldn't want multiple trips to the sink to rinse your hands with soap just to mask the smell.

With this piece of kit, you just put the garlic clove in, and use the provided handles to push the clove through. Take the Kitessensu Garlic Press, for instance. It's equipped with 37 small spikes to crush the garlic and release the cloves, whether or not you peel it beforehand. If you didn't peel it, the peels stay back in the chamber for easy disposal. A concern you may have is that garlic presses often act as de facto grip strengtheners, but the Kitessensu sidesteps this with a design that's easy to clamp, so you can focus on peeling without the physical stress.

Its use isn't limited to just garlic either — you can squeeze stuff like ginger, seeds, and even potatoes, so press away if you don't feel inclined to use a knife. It retails for $9.99 with an average rating of 4.6 stars from over 15,000 reviews.

If chicken is a regular staple of your diet, you probably know how frustrating and time-consuming it can be shred it down, if that's what the recipe calls for. I'd personally say the effort contributes to the tastiness of the meat, but if you're cooking for a large gathering with multiple chickens to attend to, you'd probably like your processing speed to be as quick as possible.

That's where chicken shredders are most useful, both for industrial settings like restaurants and for when you have mega holiday celebrations with lots of guests, like Thanksgiving or Christmas. If you're cooking just for yourself and your immediate family, it might not be worth the time savings; you'd still need to clean the gadget up. Nevertheless, Suretivian's Chicken Shredder is one of the best in the business if you're in the market for one. Retailing at $21.99 with a 4.7-star average rating from well over 20,000 reviews, it's one of the top options available on Amazon.

So, what makes the Suretivian so good? For starters, it's heat-resistant up to 356 degrees Fahrenheit, which means you don't have to worry about it melting near the grill. Second, it comes with an anti-slip strip, so no recalibrating when you're on the clock. Finally, you can shred multiple times to increase the fineness of your chicken strips.

Cooking can be a bit of a guessing game. Leave your meal on the heat for too long, and you run the risk of it being overcooked, or worse still, burned. Too little, and you get an undercooked and inconsistent texture that makes it hard to savor your efforts (or even eat it safely). Finding that sweet spot where everything is just right typically comes through years of experience, but even then, you might occasionally mess something up.

Sous vide cookers take the guesswork out of cooking by sealing and submerging food in a temperature-controlled water bath. You set the temperature you'd like your meal to cook to, and they cook it evenly and to the exact level of doneness. The Inkbird Sous Vide Cooker follows this philosophy with a bit of a spin: it's Wi-Fi enabled, so you can use an app to control your cooking from any location. That alone saves a world of time — imagine commuting and having your meal cooked and ready by the time you're home. 

This device is pretty powerful too. It maintains a steady temperature with a 0.1 degree Celsius margin of error for up to 20 liters of water, with 14 preset modes to choose from if you're not certain of the temperature and timing settings. Rated at 4.4 stars on Amazon from more than 5,000 reviews, the Inkbird Sous Vide retails for $95.99. Who knows, you might even find some unconvential uses for your Sous Vide Cooker like SlashGear did. 

Peeling leaves from stems was one of my most hated chores as a kid. Imagine sorting through bundles of vegetables and plucking leaves off a stem one by one. It was torture. Luckily, with technology you don't have to live that experience.

The Vibirit Herb Stripper comes equipped with holes of different sizes to serve a variety of leaves: be it kale, thyme, rosemary, or any type of vegetable you can think of. Simply slide the stem from the bottom into the desired hole and slide the stalk through until the leaves are completely stripped from it. Just in case you need a knife to chop the now-freed vegetables, you can flip the herb stripper onto its curved edges — they're sharp enough to cut leaves.

If you're purchasing the Herb Stripper on Amazon, where it's rated 4.4 stars from just about 2,000 reviewers, you'll get a pair of herb scissors and a herb peeler as part of a multifunction package. The peeler comes with three different blades: a slicer, a julienne cutter, and a knife. The herb scissors, on the other hand, are particularly useful for cutting stems and can serve as practical kitchen scissors. The Vibirit Herb Stripper currently retails for $11.99.

It's no secret that grinding spices makes their flavor and aroma stronger in your meals. When applied in moderation, it upgrades your food considerably. However, actually grinding spices can be quite taxing. If you've ever had the misfortune of using a pestle in an attempt to pulverize some pepper seeds into a paste, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It's a sweat-filled endeavor that takes way too long.

Dedicated electric spice grinders use powerful motors to spin blades at high speeds, doing the work in mere seconds. The Shardor coffee grinder is built on the same principle, and it's one of the best-rated on Amazon, with a 4.3 average star rating from around 4,000 reviews. With a 200-watt motor and a stainless steel blade, all you need to do is press the lid to get your spices ground. The texture of the ground spice you get depends on how long you hold it for — five seconds gets you a coarse powder, but going for 20 grinds it to a fine powder. It's on sale for $39.99. If you're looking for other coffee-making gadgets, we have you covered too. 

Preserving your food is just as important as cooking it. The last thing you want is something to spoil after you spend all that time prepping it. There's multiple ways to do this, of which freezing is by far the most popular. However, there's the risk of freezer burn to consider — the taste of your food could change due to exposure to the cold, dry air. That happens when you don't properly wrap your meals, and that's why you need a vacuum sealer. It makes for a great potential gift under the Christmas tree, too. 

Vacuum sealers work by removing the air from packaging and creating an airtight pocket; a simple process that extends the shelf life of your food. To this end, Chef Preserve's Vacuum Sealer does its job without taking up valuable space on your kitchen counter. It's a handheld gadget that seals plastic bags in 5 seconds and automatically shuts itself off once the process is complete. As a bonus, the manufacturer claims to only need one charge to seal 1000 bags.

Rated at 4.6 stars from just under 10 thousand reviews, Chef Preserve's Vacuum Sealer retails for $79.99 — and in the event you're not satisfied, there's a 60-day money-back guarantee.

When compiling this list, we considered several factors: gadget quality, user satisfaction, and most importantly, the practicality of each of these solutions. Some gadgets may, in the sense of the word, save your energy by performing the task in and of themselves, but the process of setting them up and the time they take to work disqualifies them from this list. For instance, an automatic pot stirrer may help you save a few twists of the wrist, but it takes the exact same time to stir regardless.

Once we had a shortlist of helpful gadgets, we set to work ensuring their quality. We selected items that had a minimum of 4.0 stars and 1,000 reviews. These benchmarks were set to determine whether the gadgets worked as they should for a wide range of users. Similarly, products that were earmarked as less likely to be returned were preferred.