Most of us already have standard kitchen gadgets like a food processor or an immersion blender, but there are some less-common gadgets that can really make your life a lot easier. I’m all about saving time and avoiding food waste, so I’ve compiled this list of 5 lesser-known kitchen gadgets that you only need to use once before you’ll wonder where they’ve been all your life.

1. Garlic mincer

There are very few savoury recipes in my repertoire that don’t call for garlic, but all that peeling and chopping can add up, not to mention that lingering odour it leaves on your fingers. Food processors aren’t much help unless you need to chop a significant amount of garlic, so that’s why my garlic mincer is one of my most-used kitchen essentials. 

All I have to do is lay a knife flat against the clove, whack it hard with the palm of my hand (this is actually kind of fun), and pop it out of the paper and into the mincer. Squeeze it directly into the pan and you’re done!

2. Microplane

When you need to quickly zest a lemon or dust a dish with parmesan, a Microplane is your best bet. Yes, a Microplane is technically a grater, but it’s actually so much better than your run-of-the-mill grater and is one of my best and most useful kitchen gadgets. Its precise blades mean it requires very little effort to use, and the results are so much fluffier and more appealing than you’d get with a standard grater. It’s amazing for zesting citrus, softening butter and grating ginger, spices, hard cheese or garlic.

My Microplane is also the star in one of my favourite kitchen hacks – removing the burned parts of food – which I need more often than I’d like to admit. Whether you’ve burned toast for the 100th time or scorched the tops of a batch of muffins in the oven, you can easily grate the black part off with a Microplane and your kids won’t have any reason to turn their noses up at it!

3. Lemon squeezer

Just because you can squeeze a lemon by hand doesn’t mean you should – especially if you want to get every last bit of juice out and save time in the process. A handheld lever-style lemon squeezer (not to be confused with a reamer) is a genius tool and one of my must have kitchen gadgets. You just cut your lemon or other citrus in half, place it between the two metal pieces, and it will magically get every last drop of juice out of there and even reserve the seeds for you.

These devices aren’t messy, they’re super fast and efficient, and they help you reduce the number of lemons you need for recipes. But perhaps best of all, it means you won’t end up with citrus juice making its way into those tiny cracks and cuts in your hand and stinging like mad. 

4. Freezer bag filling stand

So, if you know one thing about me, it’s that I am a huge batch cooking and freezer meal devotee. And lots of the things I freeze go into freezer bags because they stack so neatly in my freezer.

But let’s be honest: getting a batch of spaghetti sauce or chicken broth into a Ziploc bag is a two-person job (or one-person, if you really enjoy cleaning your kitchen counter and floor when the bag inevitably caves in during filling and the contents end up all over the place).

Enter freezer bag filling stands. These genius kitchen inventions make light work of filling baggies. You just fasten your bag under the clips, and it stands up patiently while you fill it to your heart’s content. It’s a very simple, cheap gadget that takes up next to no space and reduces messes, wasted food, and wasted money.  

5. Pot strainer

I don’t really like anyone to be watching when it’s time for me to drain pasta because I do it so awkwardly. In fact, I’m convinced there is no graceful way to pour a pot of boiling pasta over a strainer in your sink. And more often than not, my sink has something else in it already when the perfect time to drain arrives, so I have to waste precious seconds removing things before I can do it – and those seconds can take pasta from al dente to a mushy mess faster than you’d think.

So, I have my eye on a silicone hanging strainer. It clips onto the edge of your pot, so you can just gently tilt it over the sink and all the hot water comes out while the pasta stays there nicely behind the sieve. This is especially useful if you were planning to put your drained pasta back in the pot anyway to mix it with sauce. I’ve also heard they can be good for draining the fat out of cooked ground beef. Plus, it takes up way less space than a traditional strainer!

These kitchen gadgets might not be standards in every kitchen, but I think they should be as they really do make those tasks we do over and over while cooking a lot easier!