Before I lived with my boyfriend, I had never used a colander. Back in the day, my method of draining pasta could best be described as creative. It involved a lot of me using chopsticks to snatch clumps of spaghetti out of the water, and even a lot more swearing as one by one, the strands slipped from my grasp.
That was my B.C. era. Before Colander. But then my boyfriend introduced the perforated utensil into our kitchen. Suddenly a process that used to take minutes took mere seconds. Now I use the colander more than he does.
We all have these moments in the kitchen, don’t we, those epiphanies that occur when you use a new tool and realize, where have you been my whole life? To uncover more of them, I asked CR’s food editor, kitchen appliance writers, and food and home appliance testers about the things that changed their cooking forever. Here are their personal recommendations.