The New York Times - In defense of (some) kitchen gadgets

We’re not generally huge fans of single-task kitchen gadgets here at Wirecutter. But recently one of my colleagues, deputy editor Annemarie Conte, spent a weekend at home with a bounty of summer fruits, and emerged on Monday morning with a compelling argument for owning one of those tools: a cherry pitter.

Prepping cherries is inevitably onerous and messy. But this gadget single-handedly made Annemarie’s adventures with homemade Luxardo maraschino cherries cleaner, faster, and more efficient than if she’d pitted them by hand. Gabriella Gershenson, an editor on our kitchen team, immediately agreed. She has a ritual of pitting sour cherries and freezing them every summer, something she would “never deign to attempt” without her OXO pitter. (She uses it to pit olives, too—not so single-task, after all.)

All of this cherry chatter made me think of another unitasker that was a summer staple in my household growing up: a melon baller. Thanks to this simple, two-sided scoop, opening the fridge after swim practice almost always meant being greeted with a ready-to-eat treat: a bowl of perfectly round orbs of fruit. Turns out, this gadget is a staple in supervising editor Marilyn Ong’s household too. Using a melon baller, her three kids—with their fiendish appetites for fresh watermelon—can just split one open and devour it all on their own.

Unitaskers often aren’t worth the money or the storage space. But there’s a season for everything. And summer—these fleeting months when there’s both an abundance of produce and a deep pull to relish them in the most luxurious way possible, untethered by the mundanity of their preparation—might be theirs.

‌

These are just simply not the months to spend hunched over kitchen counters, toiling away. It’s hard to justify painstakingly hand-cubing fruit when you could be at the beach, or the park, or the pool. And in that context, a few bucks seems more than worth it for a little taste of summer fruit and freedom.

Be free. 

‌

You can reach the Wirecutter newsletters team at newsletters@wirecutter.com. We can’t always respond but we do love to hear from you.

Was this email kindly forwarded to you? Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.