A Few “For Life” Things No Kitchen Should Be Without

Essentials That Will Probably Never Have To Be Replaced

Maybe you're like me and you've got kids getting ready to set up housekeeping. Or maybe you're just setting up housekeeping for yourself. Either way, there are a few kitchen essentials you must buy, either for yourself or as a gift. These are things that will be used over and over and the beauty is that once you've bought them, provided you take proper care of them, you'll likely never have to buy them again. They are the “for life” things no kitchen should be without.

First of all, a good chef's knife. And I do mean “good.” Don't go down to Walmart and spend twenty dollars on a set of five generic “kitchen knives.” Go someplace like Williams Sonoma or Sur La Table and drop a hundred or so on one high quality 8 or 10-inch chef's knife. Henckels, Wüsthof, and Global are among the gold standard brands. Or you can do what a lot of pros do – myself included – and hit a restaurant supply store to get the same kind of knife without the expensive brand name or price tag. Dexter-Russell, Mercer, and Victorinox make knives that restaurant line cooks use to mow through literal tons of meats and vegetables over the course of years and they can be purchased for about half (or less) of what the big name kitchen store brands will cost. I've got both kinds, but I'm a notorious overachiever.

A cheap knife is a bad investment. In the first place, you'll wind up replacing it in a fairly short time. It'll be dull right out of the package and will pretty much stay that way. You'll be constantly sharpening a cheap knife which will never hold a decent edge. And there's nothing more dangerous in a kitchen than a dull knife. Then the blade will break or the handle will come off or something. You can buy a ten-dollar knife ten times or you can buy a hundred-dollar knife once. Your choice. Make it the smart one.

A word of advice, though, when buying a knife for a gift: don't. A knife has to "feel right” in order to be of any use. The shape of the handle, the comfort of the grip, the overall balance, the weight. These are all things that factor in to owning a good knife, so maybe it's best to give a gift certificate of some sort and let the person you're buying for pick out their own. Just a thought. And if you're buying for yourself, don't buy anything you can't pick up and hold in your hand at the store.

Once you get a good knife in your hands, maintain it. DON'T throw it in a drawer with a bunch of loose junk and DON'T run it through the dishwasher. Get a honing steel and learn how to use it and keep the knife sharpened. You don't actually “sharpen” a knife with a steel; the steel helps maintain the alignment of the edge but it doesn't “sharpen.” For that you need a good manual or electric sharpener, a double-sided whetstone, or a professional to do it for you. But if you get a quality knife and maintain it, you'll likely never have to buy another one. I have knives in my kitchen that my mother got in the 1950s. They're right up there on the magnetic strip with my Henckels and my Victorinox. Talk about a “for life” purchase: they have been in Mom's kitchen or mine literally my entire life. (So far, anyway.)

Two more kitchen essentials that will wear like iron are – you guessed it – made of iron. Cast-iron. “Oh, that's so old-fashioned” or “Oh, that's so heavy.” Yeah, fine, whatever. I've got all the fancy-schmancy stainless steel and anodized aluminum non-stick cookware there is and I still wouldn't trade my 10.25-inch Lodge cast-iron skillet or my 6-quart Lodge enameled cast-iron Dutch oven for any or all of it.

There is nothing – let me hit that word again – nothing as durable and as versatile as cast-iron. I can't think of anything I can't do in one or the other of those essential kitchen tools. Fry, sear, braise, boil, bake. Yeah, bake. You can make killer cornbread in the skillet and great raised yeast bread in the Dutch oven. I've got a real, honest-to-goodness electric deep-fryer in my kitchen and I've got a 6-quart enameled cast-iron Dutch oven and a thermometer. Guess which I use more often. I make a lot of soups and sauces. Care to ponder what I make them in? And you want to talk about a non-stick surface? My well-used and well-seasoned fifty-year-old cast-iron skillet has a shiny patina that is as smooth as glass and there ain't nuthin' that sticks to it. Not even eggs. I challenge anybody to get the same kind of a sear on a steak cooked in cast-iron using an aluminum non-stick pan. And try taking that fancy aluminum pan off the stovetop and throwing it directly into a 450 degree oven. Nope. Give me cast-iron any day.

Besides being durable and versatile, cast-iron is dirt cheap. You can get a decent pan for twenty-five or thirty bucks tops. An enameled cast-iron Dutch oven can be had for less than a hundred, depending on the size. Unless you really want to go out of your mind and drop $250 to $350 on a Le Creuset brand. Talk about paying for a name. Good ol' American-made Lodge, right out of South Pittsburg, Tennessee, does everything the overhyped and overpriced French stuff does for less than half the cost. And it's just as “pretty.” Best of all, if you take care of it, you'll pass it on to your kids or grandkids someday. Seriously. Cast-iron is the definition of a “for life” kitchen purchase.

And then there's the appliance I couldn't imagine being without: a KitchenAid stand mixer. Yeah, this one's gonna cost ya: around $250 for the base model, about $350 for the fancier ones, and as much as $600 for the pro-line models. Why would you want to pay that much when you can get a Sunbeam Mixmaster at Walmart for $59.99? You want to know how many Sunbeam Mixmasters I burned up before I answered that question myself?

KitchenAid stand mixers can do anything but fly – and I wouldn't put it past some creative genius to get one to do that, too. They've certainly got the power for it. The company has been around for a hundred years. It was started in 1919 by the Hobart Manufacturing Company, the same folks who still make the commercial mixers you'll find in restaurants and bakeries all over the country. Doesn't matter if you're whipping up light, fluffy egg whites or bearing down on double batches of the heaviest bread dough, the KitchenAid can do the job. (It was those double batches of bread dough that did in the aforementioned Mixmasters, by the way.) Look in any restaurant kitchen today and you'll probably see a KitchenAid. Watch all the cooking shows on TV. KitchenAids again. (Alton Brown's has flames painted on it.) And KitchenAid has been the standard in home kitchens for a century. Okay, so it's heavier than a broken heart. It's also dependable as a sunrise and durable as a mother's love. A KitchenAid stand mixer is one “for life” purchase you won't want to be without.

Hey, I'm not saying these things are all you need in your kitchen. I've got everything in my kitchen from bread machines to induction burners to immersion circulators and even the latest “go-to” gadgets like the air fryer and the instant pot. But the four things I mentioned; the knife, the skillet, the Dutch oven, and the stand mixer, are essentials that, if properly cared for, will continue to serve your needs for years to come and will probably never have to be replaced. “They don't make things like they used to,” you say? Yeah, sometimes they do. You just have to go out and look for them.

Buona fortuna e buon appetito!