As you may have by now come to realize, I am a culinary gadget hound. I am constantly in search of something cool to add to the buckets full of "unique" kitchen utensils that litter, and spill over, our food prep area. Like Burning Man my kitchen has been, until the great New Years Day purge of 2018, a place for experimental, interesting and sometimes straight-out weird sculptural hand-held culinary bits and pieces. Seen as the lost corral for one-trick ponies by some of our visitors, our kitchen is an eclectic collection. These, sometimes odd little items, get here by calling to me from the bins at Crate and Barrel, the display cubes at Sur la Table and the bargain rack at the cooking store at the Tanger Outlets near Hilton Head South Carolina. They are tools that oftentimes serve a need that I hadn't realized that I had until I saw them. After purchase many then make it to a drawer in the kitchen only to be used once or twice and then, like the kinetic sculptures, wild tents and costumes of Burning Man, are quickly forgotten.
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| The EX by Raffaele Iannello |
Some however do stay and been around for years like Lemmi, the now seemingly discontinued lemon reamer from Koziol featured in "
Santa Left Aliens in My Bathroom". It's still here after some 10+ years. There is "The Ex" cutlery set by Raffaele Iannello which resembles a man suffering from multiple stab wounds and doesn't look at all as bad as that sounds. There are still Oxo Good Grips but mainly those are the locking tongs which I think OXO has nailed, there are knockoffs of these now which prove both their utility and popularity.
New editions to the collection include an herb stripper, egg sandwich "guides" for keeping your fried egg English muffin sized, small and medium metal mixing bowls, our first Le Creuset, a new anti boil over pot lid and a new vermouth atomizer for perfect martinis, which are gin by the way.
Oh and we also seem to have enough avocado tools to qualify for federal funding as an Avocado Tool Museum. Rest assured, if we were to get the funding I’m sure it would be the biggest and best avocado tool museum in the history of our country. Which begs the question, just how many avocado tools do you really need?
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The “Unknown Soldier” left
and Zyliss Right. |
First of the avocado only tools was the "Unknown Soldier", an unnamed steel band and wire avocado slicer. You first had to prep the avocado by cutting it in half and removing the pit. That's a lot of work to do with non-avocado wonder tools before you can use this tool. Then there were issues with the sharp steel band cutting through the avocado skin and leaving bits of skin, again avocado skin not human skin, behind. The fact that it's survived so long in our kitchen is due in part to the fact that it had hidden itself in the bottom of the utensil drawer like a 14 year old seeking adventure as a stow-a-way in the bottom of a lifeboat on a tramp steamer bound for Singapore.
Then there was the green rubbery thing from Zyliss. I like Zyliss. We have peelers from them that are amazing. In my mind they rank at the top with OXO, Koziol and Joseph Joseph in the whole reinventing the kitchen department. Their avocado tool was great in the same way that, in the military aviation sense, P-51 Mustang (the fastest World War Two propeller-driven fighter plane) was until the F-86 Sabre Jet showed up. The Zyliss tool allowed you to cut the avocado, to pry the pit out and to separate the greeny goodness from the peel. It was a Mustang and like the plane, it served us well.
But then, a few years ago, the F86 Sabre showed up in the form of a new avocado tool from OXO. When I say we were excited to find it while browsing at Crate and Barrel I mean we had roughly the same reaction to finding it in the bin lined with shredded cardboard Easter "Grass" as one would have opening the garage door one morning to go to work and instead of finding your 2008 100,000 mile Subaru Impreza in your space there finding a new Bentley Continental GT in Sequin Blue with no strings attached.
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The business side of the OXO
avocado tool. |
The OXO avocado tool is a wonder. First not only does it slice the delicious avocado flesh into uniform half moon wedges but it halves the avocado and removes the pit before that without even breaking a sweat. It's plastic "hoop" doesn't have the same issues with cutting through the skin of the avocado that "The Unknown Soldier" did. The pit is easily removed with surgical precision after a quick push and twist. The blade is hand safe and cuts straight and true without the wobbly wandering that the overly flexible Zyliss tool seemed to suffer from which was because the "blade also served as the "scoopy bit". The Oxo is truly the cotton gin of avocado tools. I have purchased at least five for family members and will talk this thing up at any avocado appropriate gathering. Sure there are some purists that scoff at one task tools like this one, and I do too when it comes to electronic gadgets, but there are also people who hate laundry dryers and would rather hang their laundry out to collect dust and bird droppings in the fresh air.
So this is it. The first and last avocado tool you will ever need to buy. It is like if ancient man had not only invented the wheel but shod it in Pirelli tires, not just harnessed fire but did it inside a Weber Grill, and the Wright Brothers had moved straight from kites to the SR-71. It is both simple and brilliant.
It will surely be the last avocado tool I'll buy....
