What Is It Supposed to Do?
The pancake batter dispenser is an item that helps you pour out pancake batter. You can also use it for other baked goods, such as waffles, crepes, cupcakes, and muffins, and the thought behind it is that it prevents spills and keeps your batter pouring evenly. They come in several shapes, usually a squeeze bottle or a pitcher of sorts that opens at the bottom.
Why Is It Useless?
Maybe the pancake batter does save you from spilling a few drops here and there, but is it worth it? Unless you own a bakery or make pancakes every single day, not really. A measuring cup works as well. You can also cut the tip off a resealable plastic bag and use that rather than buying another gadget that takes up even more space than it should and is something extra you have to wash every time you make breakfast.
What Is It Supposed to Do?
Fruit and vegetable slicers do what the name suggests: slice fruit and vegetables. However, you can usually find one for any specific fruit or vegetable you want. Banana slicers, cucumber slicers, onion slicers, carrot slicers, potato slicers, watermelon slicers, celery slicers, tomato slicers, apple slicers, pepper slicers, orange slicers — there's even a strawberry slicer. Once you've bought a slicer for every single fruit or vegetable you eat, you can fill a whole cabinet or two with gadgets and probably forget which one goes with each fruit or vegetable.
Why Is It Useless?
No matter what type of fruit or vegetable you want to slice, all you need is a sharp knife and a steady hand. While your slices may not be uniform or precise, they'll be good enough for a salad or whatever you're cutting them up for. Unless you're catering some sort of event that requires fruit and vegetables to be in some sort of cute little shapes, you don't need to know these things. Have you ever tried to clean one? Fruit and vegetable bits get stuck all in the nooks and crannies, and it's easier to wash a single knife every day.
What Is It Supposed to Do?
You have a recipe that calls for lemon or lime juice. Maybe you decide you want a cup of fresh-squeezed orange juice. If you have a citrus juicer on hand, you can pull it out, slice your citrus fruits in half, and start squeezing out the juice.
Why Is It Useless?
Unless you're making fresh-squeezed orange juice for a family of eight every day, you can usually get what citrus juice you need with a couple of fruits. All you need is a hand and a little muscle and not even that much muscle. Instead, you have to look for the gadget, pull it out, and in some cases put it together. After you use it, you have to take it apart again, clean it, dry it, and store it. Your hands only require you to wash them.
What Is It Supposed to Do?
People are always looking for ways to eat healthier. One option these days, especially if you're on a low-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet or you're cutting out gluten, is to switch your starchy pasta for noodles made out of vegetables. You can make zucchini noodles or "zoodles" as well as noodles from other types of squash, carrots, beets, radishes, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and more.
Why Is It Useless?
If you're on a diet and desperate for spaghetti you can't eat, having zoodles that feel like spaghetti might help you get past it mentally, but you're still eating zucchini with pasta sauce on it. Does your zucchini have to be shaped like a noodle? Could you slice up some zucchini and eat it that way? You're getting the same health benefits without all the hassle or having to twist out those specially-shaped noodles.
What Is It Supposed to Do?
Nothing beats a dish filled with fresh, tasty, and aromatic herbs, whether you bought them at the grocery store or grew them in your own garden, or even in a pot on your windowsill. Herb scissors are designed to cut your herbs into tiny strips or chiffonade, and it does so cleanly so that you don't tear the little leaves.
Why Is It Useless?
Again, unless you're catering an event and need perfectly cut herbs for a garnish, does it matter if you tear a leaf or two? Get yourself a nice sharp pair of kitchen scissors that you can use for any number of items, and use those on your herbs. A sharp knife will also do the trick. As with fruit and vegetable slicers, you don't need a special pair of scissors for every food in your kitchen.
What Is It Supposed to Do?
Garlic is one of those ingredients that it seems like people add to practically any type of cuisine they cook, and recipes often call for minced or diced garlic. Enter the garlic press. You put your garlic cloves inside this metal device and squeeze, and out comes little tiny cubes of garlic.
Why Is It Useless?
Once again, this falls under the category of "what you really need is a sharp knife." Garlic is so small, and it takes no time at all to dice, slice, chop, mince, cut, or whatever else you need to do to it. Plus, those garlic presses are difficult to clean because the garlic gets stuck in the holes, and you'll find yourself trying to push it out with a toothpick or something sharp.
What Is It Supposed to Do?
It's always a good idea to wash your lettuce and other greens before you make a salad. The salad spinner is a device that does that for you in a few simple steps. Put your lettuce in the basket. Fill the basket with water. Move it around so your lettuce gets washed. Remove the basket. Dump the water. Put the basket back in the spinner. Spin until your lettuce is dry.
Why Is It Useless?
Salad spinners can be costly for something that isn't very useful. Some can cost from $15 to $30, while you'll find higher-end ones for around $65. That's a lot of money to waste on something you don't need. You can wash your lettuce in fewer steps by hand and possibly even do a more thorough job. Then, pat it dry with a paper towel, and you've done the job of the salad spinner for less money, and you don't have to wash it and store it.
What Is It Supposed to Do?
An asparagus steamer is a tall thin pot with a steamer basket inside that's the ideal size for asparagus, although you may need to cut it sometimes. It's easy to use as well. You put your asparagus inside with some boiling water and let it steam on your stove until it's as soft as you'd like it to be.
Why Is It Useless?
Asparagus steamers are fairly large — think of an extra pot or pan in your kitchen — and take up a lot of space. They especially take up a lot of space to only work for one single food item — and a side dish at that. You'd have to be the biggest asparagus fan in the world or be on some kind of asparagus-only diet to think this gadget is useful. Most people don't eat that much asparagus.
What Is It Supposed to Do?
Many people keep a spoon rest by their stoves so they'll have a place to sit a spoon or other cooking utensil after they stir a pot. The thought is that they can reuse the spoon when they need to stir the pot again, the spoon is there to grab, and it hasn't touched your counter surface where it might pick up some germs or get the counter dirty with juice from whatever you stirred.
Why Is It Useless?
If a spoon rest is always sitting on your counter, it's probably got the same germs as your countertop, maybe even less so if you wipe down the counter every day but don't always clean the spoon rest. If you're that worried about contamination, place the spoon, a towel, or a paper towel, and skip this useless kitchen gadget.
What Is It Supposed to Do?
Several recipes and diets call for you only to have egg whites or egg yolks. So, you'll need to separate the two parts of the egg from each other, and that's where the appropriately named egg separator comes into play. You break your egg onto this spoon-shaped device, and the white falls through small cracks while the yolk stays in the spoon.
Why Is It Useless?
If you've ever cracked open an egg, you already know that you don't need a special device to keep the white and the yolk separate. You can use half of the eggshell. You might have to wash your hands afterward, but you get the job done. It may even be a little easier to do. Plus, when you think about it, who wants to use a device with tiny slits in it that has raw egg in it all the time? This seems like a breeding ground for germs.
What Is It Supposed to Do?
An iced tea maker is sort of like a coffee maker, except it makes tea. You add ice, water, and tea to the device, and after five or 10 minutes, it brews a pitcher of tea. Sounds delightful and kind of refreshing, right?
Why Is It Useless?
Well, first of all, you have to watch an iced tea maker every time you use it, or bacteria may build up inside of it. Second of all, you can make iced tea without a gadget that takes up a huge amount of space on your countertop. All you have to do is boil water on your stove, pour it over your tea bags, let it steep and cool down. Once it's finished, pour some in a glass, and add ice. You don't even have to wash the pot you boiled water in because all you did was put water in it.
What Is It Supposed to Do?
There's a meme going around the Internet about how when you cook pasta, you either have enough for one person, or you have enough to feed a family of 30. There is no in-between. So, that's where your pasta measuring tool can save you. It's a flat device with holes in it that allows you to stick spaghetti noodles in based on how many people you plan to feed or how many servings you want. For example, if you want to feed two people, find the whole marked with a number two, and measure out that amount of noodles.
Why Is It Useless?
First of all, they should call it a spaghetti measuring tool because that's the only type of pasta that it's good for measuring. Second of all, if you've made spaghetti for your family a few times, you generally have an idea of how much pasta you'll need without digging through a drawer for a measuring device.
What Is It Supposed to Do?
There are few things tastier than a quesadilla filled with delicious creamy melted cheese. In theory, having a device that only makes quesadillas seems like a good idea. You put a quesadilla in, sort of like a panini press or waffle maker, press it down, and it cooks your quesadilla so that you can eat it.
Why Is It Useless?
Once again, who needs a device for a single type of food? Quesadilla makers aren't small. They'll take up plenty of room on your counter, or they'll sit in a cabinet, and you'll have to lug yours out every three or four months when you decide to make a quesadilla. Unless you plan to eat them multiple times a week, it's easier to make them on the stove, in the oven, or in the microwave.
What Is It Supposed to Do?
A rice cooker is sort of like a small slow cooker, except instead of filling it with everything from pot roasts to homemade queso dip, you can only use it to cook rice. Anytime you want to boil or steam rice, you can set it up and get perfectly cooked rice.
Why Is It Useless?
Rice admittedly is hard to get right sometimes, but it doesn't have to be. Look up some instructions for perfect rice online, follow the instructions, and pay attention rather than letting it overcook because you were too busy surfing Instagram on your phone, and you can do what the rice cooker did for a lot less money. You don't have an extra device to take up space or clean every time you use it.
What Is It Supposed to Do?
You have a bowl or pot full of fruit that you want to turn into a smoothie or vegetables you want to puree into soup. The immersion blender is a handheld blender that you put into the bowl or pot, turn on, and start blending.
Why Is It Useless?
The immersion blender can be handy if you make a lot of soups or smoothies, but even so, it's not a necessity. If you already have a countertop blender — and most people do — you can pour the contents into it. There's no need to have multiple types of blenders. Immersion blenders can also be messy and tricky to use, and they may not always work as well as the real thing. They're also kind of dangerous, according to The New York Times.
