Here are 8 weird-looking kitchen gadgets. Are these useful nifty little inventions to make cooking easier or useless fails that nobody really needs or wants?
Kitchen gadgets and tools tend to come in waves. Some of them are not so bad, but in reality, most of them either fail to catch on or are just plain silly.
The list below examines a handful of what I would consider being the top kitchen gadgets that failed. However, some might find these super useful.
1. Onion Goggles
I get it. Some of you can't slice an onion without shedding a tear. It's a normal reaction, and lucky for you, the creative minds out there in Kitchen Gadgetland came up with a solution.
Sure, they may look like your ordinary swimming goggles, but they aren't. Really, they aren't.
Would you need them in an onion slicing emergency?
Probably not, but the kid working the prep table in the back of the kitchen at A&W might. Otherwise, skip this gadget.
2. Bear Paws Meat Claws
In case you are terrible at slicing roast meat, this kitchen tool might actually be useful for you.
This wonderfully dumb-looking gadget resembles bear paws (hence the name).
It allows you to rip up the Sunday roast or Christmas turkey with ease and vigor.
Or you could just go old school and use a fork and knife to accomplish the same thing – only without bewilderment and confusion on your dinner guest faces.
3. Egg-And-Muffin Toaster
Here's an example of a combo gadget that should take care of two different tasks that would normally require two different gadgets, all in a single, bulky, and expensive appliance.
I have to admit the concept was okay – not good – and execution of the toasting of the egg and muffin combo could only be described as awkward.
A muffin toaster that added butter or jam to the finished product would have been a better idea even if it were a lot messier.
4. Banana Slicer
Out of all the ridiculous kitchen tools, this banana slicer has to be the most useless thing ever to hit the market! Or that could be just me?
Who wants to spend ten bucks on a gadget that that really doesn't solve any problem?
Plus, if you thought about it for a few seconds, you can slice that banana with any knife in your kitchen without requiring video tutoring. Or I hope you can.
But if you did buy one of these, please tell me… how often did you use it before you got rid of it?
5. Tomato Slicing Knife
Spoiler Alert: You only need four knives in your kitchen. This is not one of them. Any chef can tell you that you can slice, dice, cut and shave just about any food item with one of four knives.
They are a chef's knife, serrated knife, boning knife, and a paring knife. A tomato knife is just one too many, and the designers created this gadget by combining two of the four to make a serrated paring knife.
Do you need one of these? Probably not at all.
6. Pickle Fork
Speaking of too many knives in the knife block, here's a fork that will mess up any dinner party it gets invited to with just a glance. As if the dessert fork wasn't troubling enough for the average dinner host/hostess.
The pickle fork came out as an extra gadget to keep you from having to resort to using an ordinary fork to stab and recover floating pickles from the pickle jar or the retrieve pickles from the pickle server. I call this one a huge fail.
7. Salad Scissors
Remember the Bear Paws Shredder Claws noted above? Well, someone must have heard me and created a pair of scissors designed just to cut those leafy greens to go with your meat. While I admit the idea is clever, I wouldn't spend $15 for something I could literally do by hand.
If the Salad Scissors were capable of cutting other items like paper, metal, particleboard, and such, we'd have two or four of them. For cutting up the salad, we'll skip this one.
8. Portion Cake Mold
Bulky is the word that comes to mind with this entry from Kitchen Gadgetland.
Secondly, isn't the fun of cake cutting got to do with portion size in the first place? Not everyone wants an identical piece, and although this gadget ensures uniformity, it only works on cakes of a certain size.
For me, that doesn't justify the cost and limits our ability to get the biggest corner piece we want. If you are nuts about portion sizes matching, you'll be okay with this one.
In Conclusion
The original plan for this article was to make up silly gadgets that one could imagine finding in a kitchen somewhere in the past. While researching the idea, I came across several real gadgets that didn't fare well at all.
After looking over this list, I have to admit it would have been difficult to make up some of these crazy gadgets.
However, on the other hand, I also have to credit the creative minds of those who did manage to manufacture a device that they thought would make a kitchen chore a little bit easier. Sadly, not all of the gadgets seems to be that useful.
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