These 5 Kitchen Tools Are The Secret To My Cooking Success

**The Evolution of Food Storage: From Ziploc Bags to Vacuum Sealers**

In recent years, food storage has undergone a significant transformation with the advent of advanced technologies. Gone are the days of relying solely on ziploc bags for food storage. While they remain a great option for certain types of food, such as delicate produce or items that cannot be vacuum sealed, they have limitations. One major disadvantage of ziploc bags is oxidation, which can cause food to spoil quickly. The more oxygen present, the faster food breaks down.

**The Rise of Vacuum Sealers**

Enter vacuum sealers, a game-changer in the world of food storage. These devices use a special bag with a valve to create an instant vacuum seal, preserving freshness and extending shelf life. Vacuum sealers are no longer just for chefs and restaurants; they can be used by home cooks like you and me. One example is the portable mini vacuum sealer from Zwilling, designed to fit in a drawer, making it easy to whip out when needed.

Vacuum sealing has completely changed the way I store my food. When it comes to storing fresh produce, especially after slicing or cutting, vacuum sealing extends the refrigerator life of my veggies by at least double. This is because oxygen exposure causes food to spoil quickly, and vacuum sealing prevents that from happening. Meat and fish can also benefit from vacuum sealing when freezing them long-term.

**The Benefits of Vacuum Sealing**

Vacuum sealing has numerous benefits for home cooks. Not only does it preserve freshness but also extends shelf life. For example, when storing dried or pantry goods, vacuum sealing keeps them fresh for a longer period. Additionally, vacuum sealers can be used to make cooking and food handling easier and more efficient.

**Upgrading Kitchen Tools: The Spider Strainer**

Another kitchen tool upgrade that has revolutionized the way I cook is the spider strainer. For years, I relied on traditional pasta strainers, which are bulky and limited in use. However, the spider strainer has changed everything. This versatile tool can be used for a variety of tasks, such as blanching vegetables, cooking pasta, and even deep-frying foods. Its portability and ease of use make it an essential addition to any kitchen.

The spider strainer comes in different shapes and sizes, with material options ranging from wood handle to stainless steel. While the wooden version can be a bit rustic, the stainless steel option is more durable and easy to clean. As you may expect, the stainless steel model allows for quick dishwasher cleaning, making maintenance a breeze.

**The Evolution of Cooking: From Traditional Methods to Modern Tools**

In recent years, home cooking has undergone significant changes with the introduction of modern tools and technologies. While traditional methods remain important, these new upgrades can greatly support and enhance your culinary journey. As you experiment with new recipes and techniques, it's essential to have the right tools to bring them to life.

These five kitchen tool upgrades – vacuum sealers, spider strainers, and others (not mentioned in the text) – have transformed my cooking experience and encouraged me to explore new possibilities in the kitchen. From preserving freshness to making cooking easier, these tools have become an integral part of my daily culinary routine.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhen you're trying to improve your skills in the kitchen it's vital to build up an arsenal of tools for success now we all start off with some basic equipment to get the job done but i'm here to tell you that you are due for an upgrade so in today's video i'm going to be going over five of the most standard kitchen tools and what i think are five much more efficient options for the pro home cook let's start with cleaning which in my mind is one of the most underrated aspects of cooking because half of preparing a meal is actually just cleaning up the mess and growing up in my house the number one tool of cleaning up a mess was the old paper towel i'm talking going to costco buying 24 packs probably going through one or two of these a day which is not just incredibly wasteful but also incredibly inefficient which brings me to probably my most used pro tool of all time the dish towel now if i had to guess i would say when it comes to home cooking ninety percent of the time people are using paper towels ten percent of the time they're using dish towels my goal right now is to reverse that ratio there's so many reasons why i'm choosing a dish towel over a paper towel when it comes to cleaning up a mess in the kitchen number one is they're just not gonna quit on you they're virtually indestructible and they're extremely absorbent which makes them the most ideal tool for cleaning up your general mess in the kitchen number two is that they are a wearable item which is so important you might see me with the dish towel over the arm maybe you have an apron with a little dish towel holder on it or you just tuck it in your pocket that's something you can't do with a paper towel and you want that dish towel basically connected to your body because you're going to be using it all the time and another big concern the kitchen is protecting yourself from heat while you're cooking and although a dish towel is not an oven mitt it can certainly act as heat protection in the moment so maybe you're boiling some water and the handles are a little hot and you've got two dish towels to transfer it over to the sink or you're pulling a hot pan out of the oven or maybe you just want to use it as a protector for one of your surfaces in the kitchen and just a reminder that not all dish towels are created equal so make sure if you are using it as heat protection you're folding it over itself a bunch of times to increase the protection speaking of material number four dish towels come in all different styles my favorite is going to be just a nice heavy-duty quilted cotton just like this i try to stay away from the microfiber cloths i don't really like the texture of those the feeling and when it comes to sizing there's obviously all different shapes and sizes something in this 15 to 25 inch rectangular form is gonna be the most ideal and all-purpose and number five which is probably the most important reason to start shifting your paper towel use over to dish towels is that they're reusable so what i like to do is invest in a few packs of dish towels say you've got 15 of them what you can do over the course of a week is use them in your kitchen to clean up all your messing build up your dirty supply so then you can just transfer everything over to one load of laundry cleaner dish towels dry them and then boom you've got a weak supply of these bad boys now of course paper towels aren't all bad they certainly have a purpose in the kitchen if you've got a nasty mess which happens from time to time and you need to actually dispose of it for good a paper towel is probably going to be the best option for that or if you've got some meat or a piece of fish and you need to pat that dry well we don't want any meat juice in the laundry machine so a paper towel is going to be the best tool for that so it's not about getting rid of this roll entirely it's about shifting those ratios we want 10 here 90 here which i know for me definitely took me time to kind of shift into that mindset but now it's like i buy a few paper towel rolls for the entire month and i'm really just reliant on these bad boys they will change your cleaning life in the kitchen now dish towels are going to be the key tool to keeping your kitchen clean but when it comes to cooking there is no more important tool than your knife and keeping it sharp is going to be essential so as you can see here i've got a nice collection of knives i'm obsessed with different styles of knives depending on what i'm cooking or how i feel in the kitchen and i can tell you from experience no matter how cheap or expensive your knife is at some point that knife will get dull and if you're like me you want to be self-reliant so you don't have to go to the store or send your knives away every time they need to be sharpened and the standard home cooking remedy is something like this this is a handheld sharpener but we can do much better so technically one of these pull-through sharpeners will get the job done but in my opinion there are a few disadvantages number one is there's very little control of the actual angle of your edge and each of your knives depending on the style will have a different degree of angle of the actual edge so even though this one is a little fancier and it has two different settings it's still pretty much the training wheels of knife sharpening number two is when you're actually pulling through the knife on these types of sharpeners they don't provide any protection from the friction of that motion which can make things a bit awkward when you're sharpening your knife and even more of a letdown can lead to some gaps or some little chips in your blade which is a huge bummer when you've invested money in your knives and finally number three when i used to use these pull-through sharpeners i just didn't feel like i was legit as a home cook like i was just pulling a knife through and hoping for the best but it didn't feel like a proper way to actually sharpen your knife which brings me to the much more superior knife sharpening method the whetstone now i'm not gonna lie these things used to scare the hell out of me the training wheels are officially off and to use a whetstone properly you've gotta learn a new skill that's gonna take a little time it's gonna take a little patience but i can say once you do learn and you will anyone can learn this skill you will now know how to properly sharpen your knife for life now the first reason why a whetstone is going to be the more superior knife sharpening tool is like i mentioned before every knife is unique and your whetstone is going to offer the most control and refinement of your edge so whether you're using a single-sided japanese blade or a double-sided german blade you're covered no matter what the degree of the edge is or the style of your knife is so there's a few different options when you're buying wet stones the simplest version is something you can find all over amazon which is basically one stone that has a different grit or roughness on each side it sits in a nice little holder that will give you some stability on your table and that's a great place to start but depending on how far you want to take it you can also buy individual stones with different grits so the first thing you're going to do when you're using your whetstone is soak it that's why it's called a wet stone and you're going to want to do this for at least a few hours or you can leave it overnight so that stone really absorbs all the water and stays lubricated through that sharpening process so always going to start with the lower grit around 1000 which is going to work to really strip away metal so you can actually refine the edge and this motion of sharpening and getting that right angle can definitely be intimidating at first but i'm telling you it's just about getting in there practicing really learning that muscle memory and continuing to build the skill over time i certainly was not great at this the first few times i did it and then one day it clicks like okay i can sharpen a knife with a wet stone but one thing you can do to see if you properly sharpen your knife is to check for something that's called a burr which is basically a buildup of metal at the top of your edge so if you just gently graze your finger on the top of your edge you should feel and hear a little bit of roughness right at the edge of your knife and when that bur is present that's when you know you can move on to the refining stage you can switch to your higher grit whetstone somewhere around 6000 which is really there to polish it up and get rid of any last imperfections of your edge now the last thing i'll mention is one of these honing steel a lot of people think that these are actually knife sharpeners but really the purpose of a honing steel is just to maintain your edge so this is actually a sharpener this is maintenance both of these together are the keys to becoming self-sufficient with sharpening in the kitchen so take your time be careful of course and soon enough you will be a pro at sharpening so if you've been following along with the channel over the last few months you've seen some pretty big changes with the kitchen and we're pretty much done with renovations at this point which means it's time to replenish the pantry and when i'm looking to stock up on pantry goods i always call on today's sponsor thrive market thrive market is an online membership based grocery store on a mission to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone just like investing in high quality tools i think it's super important to invest in high quality ingredients and with thrive i can count on all their products being outstanding whether you're looking for awesome pantry items snacks eco-friendly cleaning supplies or maybe you're shopping for a certain dietary preference like keto or gluten-free thrive has something for everyone's needs i'm personally a big fan of thrive's own branded products they're always reliable and top-tier in terms of quality and they're super affordable but it's nice that thrive also offers some of the best organic grocery brands in the game so if you're interested in signing up for thrive market click the link below in my description or go to thrivemarket.com pro home cooks for 30 off your first order and a free gift worth up to 50 dollars now back to some tools so the box grater was probably the first kitchen tool i ever used in my uh super expansive high school culinary career freshman year homeclass probably making some type of potato pancake and really for years after that completely naive to the idea that there was any other way to grate something in the kitchen now it wasn't until years later when i was watching some food tv i believe it was tyler florence and i saw him using the microplane and just his ability to be portable with his grading in the kitchen and to grate something directly into a dish in the moment was somewhat of a revelation to me at the time now don't get me wrong a box grater of course has its purpose which is generally to do that heavy prep load of grating but taking one look at this thing you just know it's awkward you can't just take this on the fly and hover over a pan and grate something in as a home cook a lot of our meals are coming together very quickly and we don't always have the time to prep everything out beforehand so having a grater that you can just bring around with you and just grate things directly into a pan or a bowl is just going to be a much more efficient option so for me the microplane is the optimal grading utensil and here are a few reasons why now although these are commonly used for zesting i find that i'm using this in the kitchen every day to grate all types of things one of the biggest uses is definitely grating hard cheeses so if i made a pasta and i need to finish it off with some parmesan boom take the microplane over to the pot grate in that parmesan and since it's so fine it just instantly melts in and creates a beautiful sauce also you can grate hard spices with it so a lot of times if say i'm cooking an oatmeal take a little bit of nutmeg grate that up on the microplane and that fresh grated nutmeg is gonna be so much more potent than the pre-dried stuff you get at the supermarket something that's always going into recipes are aromatics and rather than pulling out the blender or having to sit there and mince something up super fine the most efficient way to get that aromatic flavor into your dish is just to take out your microplane and whether it's some garlic some ginger or even a chili just give it a grate and you've got an instant mince or puree of flavor right into your dish and like i said probably the most common use of course is zesting citrus having the microplane around i find rather than just using the juice i am taking advantage of that citrus so much more bringing another level of citrus essence to your dish so there's two different main versions of the microplane you've got the skinnier long one and then this wider one with a little more surface area i've personally found over the years that this right here the wide one with the cheese grater setting having the wider surface area and this sort of smaller to medium greater setting is by far the most all-purpose so if you can only buy one that's really going to change the game for you it's this right here let's talk about food storage for a second now everyone's got a box of ziploc bags it's pretty much become the standard of food storage for ages now but as technology advances well we get more options yes this right here is a vacuum sealer now i love the idea of vacuum sealers these obviously work great for chefs and restaurants but i always struggle to make this an everyday appliance that i use that was until i found this little guy by zwilling a little portable mini vacuum sealer that you can just slip into the drawer you whip it out it's got these special bags with the valve pop that right in an instant vacuum ceiling without any hassle now ziploc bags are still great especially for things that can't be vacuum sealed that are a little more delicate like a lettuce or a fluffy piece of sourdough bread but there is one major disadvantage to the ziploc which is oxidation the number one threat to your fresh produce is oxygen that is the one thing that will break them down quicker than anything so the more amount of oxygen the quicker your produce is going to go bad so i find that vacuum sealing my veggies especially after i've sliced something in half and expose it to more oxygen if i can get that vacuum sealed and in the fridge it will extend the shelf life or the refrigerator life of your veggies by at least double and this has completely changed the way that i store my food now when it comes to vacuum sealing you can get very locked in to the idea of just storing fresh things but of course you know dried or pantry goods they're still going to oxidate as well so vacuum sealing them is going to extend the shelf life it just keeps it so fresh for so much longer of course meat and fish if you're freezing them long-term vacuum sealing is a great option and then of course you're opening yourself up to the world of sous-vide cooking there's definitely an investment involved in this technology but keeping things this fresh for this much longer will pay off in just a matter of months when you're thinking about straining liquids for most of you i'm sure this is what comes to mind just a classic pasta strainer a workhorse in the kitchen i grew up using this but just like the box grater it's a bit bulky and there's a much more portable and versatile option and that upgraded tool is this thing right here which goes by a few names some people call it a skimmer or a mesh strainer i like to call it a spider when it comes to a traditional pasta strainer it really has one function which is straining off large amounts of liquid into the sink with one of these spiders you instantly obtain portability with a variety of uses rather than taking a bulky heavy pot over to the sink to strain out your pasta water and lose most of it you can just scoop in your spider take the noodles to the pot next door and retain all that pasta water and use it as you need and one of my favorite uses for these spiders is blanching vegetables which can be a very quick process so if i have a super delicate veggie i can just dip it in the hot water for a few seconds keep it in that spider and then right to the ice bath and you can totally handle bigger items like these potatoes right here or say i'm boiling some eggs i love the control you get with a spider because you can stack on those eggs and just gently lay them into the pan rather than just plopping them in the water and hoping for the best and of course for deep frying at home since we don't have a professional deep fryer set up these spiders are going to be the best option because you can pluck out any piece of food you want safely and all of that residual oil will drain off right back into your pot now these do come in a few shapes and sizes and materials you've got the wood handle versus the stainless steel which are both great options that i've used in the past but i do find that the stainless steel is great because these things do get dirty so being able to throw this in the dishwasher is a huge bonus so again this is what i grew up on for many years this was the only way i thought you could strain liquids that is until this baby entered into my tools arsenal and i am telling you i use this multiple times a day in the kitchen because there's just so many uses it's so versatile and of course it's just super portable so those are five of my favorite kitchen tool upgrades and remember it's not about going out and getting everything all at once if it's not broke don't fix it but this is about figuring out what can be upgraded because as you start evolving as a cook you need those tools to really support and back up that journey so hopefully you learned something valuable and i'll see you in the next videowhen you're trying to improve your skills in the kitchen it's vital to build up an arsenal of tools for success now we all start off with some basic equipment to get the job done but i'm here to tell you that you are due for an upgrade so in today's video i'm going to be going over five of the most standard kitchen tools and what i think are five much more efficient options for the pro home cook let's start with cleaning which in my mind is one of the most underrated aspects of cooking because half of preparing a meal is actually just cleaning up the mess and growing up in my house the number one tool of cleaning up a mess was the old paper towel i'm talking going to costco buying 24 packs probably going through one or two of these a day which is not just incredibly wasteful but also incredibly inefficient which brings me to probably my most used pro tool of all time the dish towel now if i had to guess i would say when it comes to home cooking ninety percent of the time people are using paper towels ten percent of the time they're using dish towels my goal right now is to reverse that ratio there's so many reasons why i'm choosing a dish towel over a paper towel when it comes to cleaning up a mess in the kitchen number one is they're just not gonna quit on you they're virtually indestructible and they're extremely absorbent which makes them the most ideal tool for cleaning up your general mess in the kitchen number two is that they are a wearable item which is so important you might see me with the dish towel over the arm maybe you have an apron with a little dish towel holder on it or you just tuck it in your pocket that's something you can't do with a paper towel and you want that dish towel basically connected to your body because you're going to be using it all the time and another big concern the kitchen is protecting yourself from heat while you're cooking and although a dish towel is not an oven mitt it can certainly act as heat protection in the moment so maybe you're boiling some water and the handles are a little hot and you've got two dish towels to transfer it over to the sink or you're pulling a hot pan out of the oven or maybe you just want to use it as a protector for one of your surfaces in the kitchen and just a reminder that not all dish towels are created equal so make sure if you are using it as heat protection you're folding it over itself a bunch of times to increase the protection speaking of material number four dish towels come in all different styles my favorite is going to be just a nice heavy-duty quilted cotton just like this i try to stay away from the microfiber cloths i don't really like the texture of those the feeling and when it comes to sizing there's obviously all different shapes and sizes something in this 15 to 25 inch rectangular form is gonna be the most ideal and all-purpose and number five which is probably the most important reason to start shifting your paper towel use over to dish towels is that they're reusable so what i like to do is invest in a few packs of dish towels say you've got 15 of them what you can do over the course of a week is use them in your kitchen to clean up all your messing build up your dirty supply so then you can just transfer everything over to one load of laundry cleaner dish towels dry them and then boom you've got a weak supply of these bad boys now of course paper towels aren't all bad they certainly have a purpose in the kitchen if you've got a nasty mess which happens from time to time and you need to actually dispose of it for good a paper towel is probably going to be the best option for that or if you've got some meat or a piece of fish and you need to pat that dry well we don't want any meat juice in the laundry machine so a paper towel is going to be the best tool for that so it's not about getting rid of this roll entirely it's about shifting those ratios we want 10 here 90 here which i know for me definitely took me time to kind of shift into that mindset but now it's like i buy a few paper towel rolls for the entire month and i'm really just reliant on these bad boys they will change your cleaning life in the kitchen now dish towels are going to be the key tool to keeping your kitchen clean but when it comes to cooking there is no more important tool than your knife and keeping it sharp is going to be essential so as you can see here i've got a nice collection of knives i'm obsessed with different styles of knives depending on what i'm cooking or how i feel in the kitchen and i can tell you from experience no matter how cheap or expensive your knife is at some point that knife will get dull and if you're like me you want to be self-reliant so you don't have to go to the store or send your knives away every time they need to be sharpened and the standard home cooking remedy is something like this this is a handheld sharpener but we can do much better so technically one of these pull-through sharpeners will get the job done but in my opinion there are a few disadvantages number one is there's very little control of the actual angle of your edge and each of your knives depending on the style will have a different degree of angle of the actual edge so even though this one is a little fancier and it has two different settings it's still pretty much the training wheels of knife sharpening number two is when you're actually pulling through the knife on these types of sharpeners they don't provide any protection from the friction of that motion which can make things a bit awkward when you're sharpening your knife and even more of a letdown can lead to some gaps or some little chips in your blade which is a huge bummer when you've invested money in your knives and finally number three when i used to use these pull-through sharpeners i just didn't feel like i was legit as a home cook like i was just pulling a knife through and hoping for the best but it didn't feel like a proper way to actually sharpen your knife which brings me to the much more superior knife sharpening method the whetstone now i'm not gonna lie these things used to scare the hell out of me the training wheels are officially off and to use a whetstone properly you've gotta learn a new skill that's gonna take a little time it's gonna take a little patience but i can say once you do learn and you will anyone can learn this skill you will now know how to properly sharpen your knife for life now the first reason why a whetstone is going to be the more superior knife sharpening tool is like i mentioned before every knife is unique and your whetstone is going to offer the most control and refinement of your edge so whether you're using a single-sided japanese blade or a double-sided german blade you're covered no matter what the degree of the edge is or the style of your knife is so there's a few different options when you're buying wet stones the simplest version is something you can find all over amazon which is basically one stone that has a different grit or roughness on each side it sits in a nice little holder that will give you some stability on your table and that's a great place to start but depending on how far you want to take it you can also buy individual stones with different grits so the first thing you're going to do when you're using your whetstone is soak it that's why it's called a wet stone and you're going to want to do this for at least a few hours or you can leave it overnight so that stone really absorbs all the water and stays lubricated through that sharpening process so always going to start with the lower grit around 1000 which is going to work to really strip away metal so you can actually refine the edge and this motion of sharpening and getting that right angle can definitely be intimidating at first but i'm telling you it's just about getting in there practicing really learning that muscle memory and continuing to build the skill over time i certainly was not great at this the first few times i did it and then one day it clicks like okay i can sharpen a knife with a wet stone but one thing you can do to see if you properly sharpen your knife is to check for something that's called a burr which is basically a buildup of metal at the top of your edge so if you just gently graze your finger on the top of your edge you should feel and hear a little bit of roughness right at the edge of your knife and when that bur is present that's when you know you can move on to the refining stage you can switch to your higher grit whetstone somewhere around 6000 which is really there to polish it up and get rid of any last imperfections of your edge now the last thing i'll mention is one of these honing steel a lot of people think that these are actually knife sharpeners but really the purpose of a honing steel is just to maintain your edge so this is actually a sharpener this is maintenance both of these together are the keys to becoming self-sufficient with sharpening in the kitchen so take your time be careful of course and soon enough you will be a pro at sharpening so if you've been following along with the channel over the last few months you've seen some pretty big changes with the kitchen and we're pretty much done with renovations at this point which means it's time to replenish the pantry and when i'm looking to stock up on pantry goods i always call on today's sponsor thrive market thrive market is an online membership based grocery store on a mission to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone just like investing in high quality tools i think it's super important to invest in high quality ingredients and with thrive i can count on all their products being outstanding whether you're looking for awesome pantry items snacks eco-friendly cleaning supplies or maybe you're shopping for a certain dietary preference like keto or gluten-free thrive has something for everyone's needs i'm personally a big fan of thrive's own branded products they're always reliable and top-tier in terms of quality and they're super affordable but it's nice that thrive also offers some of the best organic grocery brands in the game so if you're interested in signing up for thrive market click the link below in my description or go to thrivemarket.com pro home cooks for 30 off your first order and a free gift worth up to 50 dollars now back to some tools so the box grater was probably the first kitchen tool i ever used in my uh super expansive high school culinary career freshman year homeclass probably making some type of potato pancake and really for years after that completely naive to the idea that there was any other way to grate something in the kitchen now it wasn't until years later when i was watching some food tv i believe it was tyler florence and i saw him using the microplane and just his ability to be portable with his grading in the kitchen and to grate something directly into a dish in the moment was somewhat of a revelation to me at the time now don't get me wrong a box grater of course has its purpose which is generally to do that heavy prep load of grating but taking one look at this thing you just know it's awkward you can't just take this on the fly and hover over a pan and grate something in as a home cook a lot of our meals are coming together very quickly and we don't always have the time to prep everything out beforehand so having a grater that you can just bring around with you and just grate things directly into a pan or a bowl is just going to be a much more efficient option so for me the microplane is the optimal grading utensil and here are a few reasons why now although these are commonly used for zesting i find that i'm using this in the kitchen every day to grate all types of things one of the biggest uses is definitely grating hard cheeses so if i made a pasta and i need to finish it off with some parmesan boom take the microplane over to the pot grate in that parmesan and since it's so fine it just instantly melts in and creates a beautiful sauce also you can grate hard spices with it so a lot of times if say i'm cooking an oatmeal take a little bit of nutmeg grate that up on the microplane and that fresh grated nutmeg is gonna be so much more potent than the pre-dried stuff you get at the supermarket something that's always going into recipes are aromatics and rather than pulling out the blender or having to sit there and mince something up super fine the most efficient way to get that aromatic flavor into your dish is just to take out your microplane and whether it's some garlic some ginger or even a chili just give it a grate and you've got an instant mince or puree of flavor right into your dish and like i said probably the most common use of course is zesting citrus having the microplane around i find rather than just using the juice i am taking advantage of that citrus so much more bringing another level of citrus essence to your dish so there's two different main versions of the microplane you've got the skinnier long one and then this wider one with a little more surface area i've personally found over the years that this right here the wide one with the cheese grater setting having the wider surface area and this sort of smaller to medium greater setting is by far the most all-purpose so if you can only buy one that's really going to change the game for you it's this right here let's talk about food storage for a second now everyone's got a box of ziploc bags it's pretty much become the standard of food storage for ages now but as technology advances well we get more options yes this right here is a vacuum sealer now i love the idea of vacuum sealers these obviously work great for chefs and restaurants but i always struggle to make this an everyday appliance that i use that was until i found this little guy by zwilling a little portable mini vacuum sealer that you can just slip into the drawer you whip it out it's got these special bags with the valve pop that right in an instant vacuum ceiling without any hassle now ziploc bags are still great especially for things that can't be vacuum sealed that are a little more delicate like a lettuce or a fluffy piece of sourdough bread but there is one major disadvantage to the ziploc which is oxidation the number one threat to your fresh produce is oxygen that is the one thing that will break them down quicker than anything so the more amount of oxygen the quicker your produce is going to go bad so i find that vacuum sealing my veggies especially after i've sliced something in half and expose it to more oxygen if i can get that vacuum sealed and in the fridge it will extend the shelf life or the refrigerator life of your veggies by at least double and this has completely changed the way that i store my food now when it comes to vacuum sealing you can get very locked in to the idea of just storing fresh things but of course you know dried or pantry goods they're still going to oxidate as well so vacuum sealing them is going to extend the shelf life it just keeps it so fresh for so much longer of course meat and fish if you're freezing them long-term vacuum sealing is a great option and then of course you're opening yourself up to the world of sous-vide cooking there's definitely an investment involved in this technology but keeping things this fresh for this much longer will pay off in just a matter of months when you're thinking about straining liquids for most of you i'm sure this is what comes to mind just a classic pasta strainer a workhorse in the kitchen i grew up using this but just like the box grater it's a bit bulky and there's a much more portable and versatile option and that upgraded tool is this thing right here which goes by a few names some people call it a skimmer or a mesh strainer i like to call it a spider when it comes to a traditional pasta strainer it really has one function which is straining off large amounts of liquid into the sink with one of these spiders you instantly obtain portability with a variety of uses rather than taking a bulky heavy pot over to the sink to strain out your pasta water and lose most of it you can just scoop in your spider take the noodles to the pot next door and retain all that pasta water and use it as you need and one of my favorite uses for these spiders is blanching vegetables which can be a very quick process so if i have a super delicate veggie i can just dip it in the hot water for a few seconds keep it in that spider and then right to the ice bath and you can totally handle bigger items like these potatoes right here or say i'm boiling some eggs i love the control you get with a spider because you can stack on those eggs and just gently lay them into the pan rather than just plopping them in the water and hoping for the best and of course for deep frying at home since we don't have a professional deep fryer set up these spiders are going to be the best option because you can pluck out any piece of food you want safely and all of that residual oil will drain off right back into your pot now these do come in a few shapes and sizes and materials you've got the wood handle versus the stainless steel which are both great options that i've used in the past but i do find that the stainless steel is great because these things do get dirty so being able to throw this in the dishwasher is a huge bonus so again this is what i grew up on for many years this was the only way i thought you could strain liquids that is until this baby entered into my tools arsenal and i am telling you i use this multiple times a day in the kitchen because there's just so many uses it's so versatile and of course it's just super portable so those are five of my favorite kitchen tool upgrades and remember it's not about going out and getting everything all at once if it's not broke don't fix it but this is about figuring out what can be upgraded because as you start evolving as a cook you need those tools to really support and back up that journey so hopefully you learned something valuable and i'll see you in the next video\n"