The Best and Worst Kitchen Tools For 2025 | Gear Heads

A breakdown of our favorite and least favorite kitchen gear for 2025, handpicked and thoroughly tested by our team of unbiased experts.

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0:00 Best and Worst Kitchen Gear for 2025
0:33 Lisa’s Best: Panini Presses
1:40 Lisa’s Best: Outdoor Griddle
2:38 Lisa’s Best: Wine Savers
3:49 Lisa’s Worst: Electric Composters
4:54 Hannah’s Best: Oyster Knives
6:01 Hannah’s Best: Burr Coffee Grinders
7:09 Hannah’s Best: Outdoor Pizza Ovens
8:30 Hannah’s Worst: Wireless Remote Probe Thermometers

[SaltyTubers]

I've been kitchening for a looong time and YOU TWO are my favorite ATK people ever!

[marygrott]

I have heard from others that those kitchen composters aren't worth their expensive price! I do just as you suggested; i put my kitchen scraps in a compist bucket and empty it directly into the garden when full. So simple, and it works!

[robertkoreis]

The Vacu Vin pump is a multitasker. You can also use it on reusable vacuum seal food bags. Works far better than the crappy battery powered pumps and weighs a lot less. I take a pump and bags when traveling and doing picnic meals.

[Nate-Anderson-]

I've used my Combustion thermometer several times per week for about a year, and I absolutely love it! Using it has made me so much smarter about how heat transfer works.

[vahultman]

Soooo, love watching you ladies! Keep up the good work!

[garrett]

1979. The last time I opened a bottle of wine & didnt finish it.

[ScratchGlass]

Thank you, ladies.
Cheers from Detroit 🇺🇸

[einundsiebenziger]

I once was gifted a Parmigiano wedge/knife at a bike race in Italy, which has a thick wooden handle and a thick, short, wide blade. It works absolutely perfect as an oyster knife! I use it in that capacity more oftn than to cut Parmigiano cheese.

[kenmore]

I actually have both the Smoke 2 and the Combustion inc. thermometers and I love them both. I used the Combustion one to slow cook a beef roast for roast beef sandwiches and loved the real-time graphs on my phone of the different sensors as it cooked. Even though I was only cooking at 250F, I could see it was going faster than I had expected, so I turned the oven down to 150 towards the end. It came out perfectly cooked!

[Artofcarissa]

If you don’t have enough space for another appliance like a panini press, you can buy a cast iron sandwich press for around $25 or so.

Takes up less space and works just as well to make tasty paninis.

[danaboatman]

What's this stuff you call leftover wine?? 😅

[johnT]

For this past Thanksgiving I bought a dual probe wireless thermometer that has native connectivity with its probes. You can also go through the trouble of apps and setting up BT - but you don't have to. You just turn the base on and it immediately knows the temps of the probes up to a hundred feet or so away. I've been using it constantly since purchasing w/o any of the app or bt 'features.' Highly recommended.

[jpbaley]

4:39 Thank-you for this. The FTC should come down hard on all the lies perpetuated by these companies. Worse than just killing the nutrients and microflora creating compost, because these units dehydrate food waste to such a great degree, it takes so much longer to rehydrate sufficiently allow the normal soil microflora to start doing their job and break down the material to make the nutrients bioavailable to plants.

[GM_____]

I have the Combustion Inc one and actually love it. I was able to make juicy Cornell chicken on the grill and reverse sear a chuck steak to perfection. I love that you can set the temperature you want your food to be at, especially when accounting for the heat rising after the steak is taken out of the pan to rest. Chris Young created this thermometer and he’s also one of the authors of Modernist Cuisine. He has a YouTube channel that shows you how to use this thing to the best of its ability and he’s done some incredible work explaining how physics affects the cooking process.

[denniskeane]

I've used different wireless thermometers, & the combustion Inc is by far the best. Excellent connectivity, accurate readings, & no batteries to replace like a big-name product charger. Foods cooked perfectly every time. I highly recommend it

[tracyallen]

I was wondering if it would be possible for you guys that America’s test kitchen to test kitchen products for the blind and visually impaired? Items like talking, thermometers, scales, and things to make the kitchen and appliances easier to navigate?

[AwesomizedArmadillo]

Couple notes for people following these buying guides and wanting to save a little while still following the recommendations in this video:

-If you want a coffee grinder, but you don't need espresso grind because you only make drip/pourover/French press, then you're much better off getting the older encore model, as it's cheaper and actually has more adjustability in that range (the ESP has to make steps between grind sizes in normal coffee ranges bigger to make room for the espresso grind settings)

-it might not be as elegant of a solution for preserving opened wine, but Private Preserve works very well in my experience. It also uses an inert gas that prevents oxygen from contacting the surface of the wine, but it's just sold in a can and you spray it into the bottle. As long as you get enough in there and store the bottle upright with its cork/cap on airtight, then you can keep wine for days after opening with little to no oxidation

[mlsyogi]

Thank you for the reviews of the electric composters. We have been composting for years and saw these products being promoted for such a high cost. So glad we didn’t take the bait and know that nothing replaces what is done in nature.

[spodvoll]

I've been using the Combustion predictive thermometer for over a year now. It's great. I use it indoors, too. I pretty much use it for everything, especially for roasting chicken and turkey. I'm clueless as to why Cooks Illustrated doesn't recommend it. Kenji likes it, too.

[milkjugs]

i’ve been using the meater thermometer since last christmas and can’t live without it now - although i only use it in the oven not the grill