The Tools I Cook With Every Single Day
Not a gift guide. Not a ranking. Just an honest account of what actually lives on our counters — and why.
By Matt | Updated: May 2026 | 8 min read
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A couple cooking together in a bright, modern kitchen, demonstrating their favorite tools for everyday meal prep.
There is a drawer in my kitchen that I almost never open anymore. It has the vegetable peeler I used to reach for out of habit, a box grater I keep around for sentimental reasons, and a set of tongs that never quite grip the way tongs should. None of it is bad. I just stopped needing it the day I started being more deliberate about what I actually cook with.
I do not think most people need more kitchen equipment. I think most people need better kitchen equipment — a smaller number of things that are so well made and so well matched to how they actually cook that they reach for them without thinking. That is what I have been working toward for the past few years, and the honest answer is that I have landed on about five things that do nearly everything.
Two of them are pans from Made In Cookware. Three of them are from ZWILLING. I want to tell you about all of them, but more than that I want to tell you how I actually use them — because knowing a pan exists and knowing what it unlocks in your cooking are two very different things.
Made In Blue Carbon Steel Frying Pan
I should start with the pan that changed the most about how I cook dinner on a weeknight, which is the Made In Blue Carbon Steel Frying Pan. I know that sounds like hyperbole. Bear with me. I cooked on coated nonstick pans for years — everyone does — and they are fine until you realize what they cannot do. They cannot take high heat without degrading. They cannot go from stovetop to oven to the grill on the same night. And they absolutely cannot produce the kind of crust on a piece of protein that makes you wonder if you accidentally became a better cook.
Carbon steel is what restaurant line cooks have used forever, for those exact reasons. It gets searingly hot and holds that heat the way cast iron does, but at half the weight. The Made In version arrives pre-seasoned, which gives you a head start, and it keeps improving every time you cook in it. For the first month I used it mostly for chicken thighs and steak, which is where it earns its reputation fastest. After that I started doing everything in it — browned butter eggs in the morning, crispy smashed potatoes, pan sauces built directly in the fond. By now it is the first pan I reach for, almost without exception.
The thing nobody tells you about carbon steel is how satisfying it is to maintain. You dry it over a low flame after washing, rub in a thin layer of oil, and put it away. That is thirty seconds of care for a pan that will outlast every coated nonstick you have ever owned. Mine looks better now than it did when I opened the box.
Stainless Clad Saucier
The second Made In piece on my counter is the one people notice less but use just as often once they understand it. The Stainless Clad Saucier looks at first glance like a slightly rounder saucepan, and that description does it a disservice. The curve of the base is the whole design — no sharp corners where the walls meet the bottom, just a smooth, continuous arc from one side to the other. When you are stirring risotto or whisking a beurre blanc, your spoon follows that curve completely. Nothing gets missed. Nothing scorches in a corner. It is a subtle thing until the first time you finish a pasta dish in it and realize the sauce came together in a way it never quite did before.
Made In built this one in Italy with five bonded layers of aluminum and stainless steel, which sounds like marketing until you cook in it and feel how evenly the heat travels up the walls. I use it for anything that involves constant motion over heat — risotto, caramel, hollandaise, chocolate. I also use it for pulling pasta directly from boiling water into a ladle of pasta water and sauce and tossing everything together in the pan itself. If you have never finished pasta that way, the saucier is what makes it feel manageable rather than chaotic. Food and Wine named it the best overall saucier for a reason.
I do not think most people need more kitchen equipment. I think most people need better kitchen equipment — a smaller number of things so well made that they reach for them without thinking.
ZWILLING Pro 8-inch Chef’s Knife
The knife situation in my kitchen took longer to get right than the pans did, and I think that is true for a lot of home cooks. Knives feel personal in a way that pans do not. You carry one in your hand for the entire time you are prepping, and a bad fit — weight, balance, handle, blade height — accumulates into a real physical toll over a long cooking session. I spent years using knives that were technically fine and never quite loved them.
The ZWILLING Pro 8-inch Chef’s Knife is the knife I stopped thinking about, which is the highest compliment I know how to pay. ZWILLING has been making blades in Solingen, Germany since 1731, and the Pro series is where their craft shows most clearly. The curved bolster at the base of the blade guides your hand into the pinch grip naturally — thumb and index finger on the blade itself, not wrapped around the handle. It is the way professional cooks hold a knife, and it gives you a level of control that changes what prep work feels like. I was skeptical the first week. By the second week I had reorganized my grip on every knife I own.
The blade holds its edge for an unusually long time. I cooked with this knife daily for six months before it needed sharpening — onions every morning, chicken a few nights a week, the occasional whole fish. The steel is SIGMAFORGE forged and FRIODUR ice-hardened, which means it starts sharp and stays sharp longer than most blades at twice the price. At $169.99 it is an investment, but it is also the kind of thing you buy once and keep for twenty years.
ZWILLING Pro 7-inch Santoku
What I did not expect when I got serious about knives was how much I would end up reaching for a second blade. The ZWILLING Pro 7-inch Santoku is not a backup to the chef’s knife. It is a different tool for different work. Shorter, lighter, with a flatter profile that suits a forward-and-down push cut rather than the rocking motion of a Western blade. The hollow edge — small oval indentations along both sides — creates tiny air pockets that prevent thin slices from suctioning to the blade as you cut. That sounds minor until you are working through a cucumber or a pile of radishes and the slices just fall away cleanly instead of sticking and folding.
I reach for this one on any day that is vegetable-heavy. Fine herb work, fish prep, anything where I want a lighter touch and more precision than a full 8-inch blade gives me. A few of the people I cook with regularly have smaller hands and find it the more comfortable knife for long prep sessions. Same German steel, same edge retention — just a shape built for a different motion.
ZWILLING Multi-Purpose Kitchen Shears
The last thing on my counter, and the one that surprises people most when I bring it up, is a pair of shears. The ZWILLING Multi-Purpose Kitchen Shears are built from the same German steel as the knives, with micro-serrated blades that grip rather than slip. They pull apart completely for cleaning, which sounds like a small thing until you realize that a pair of shears you cannot properly wash is a pair you will stop using.
I spatchcock almost every whole chicken I cook now because it takes twelve minutes less in the oven and the skin gets evenly crispy all the way across. You run the shears along both sides of the backbone and it comes right out. No knife technique required. I also use them for snipping herbs directly over a finished dish, for cutting pizza without dragging the toppings, for breaking down crab. The built-in bottle opener and lid lifter are there when I need them and invisible when I do not. A couple of people on our team have owned their pairs for over a decade. That tells you something about the steel.
I want to be clear that none of this happened all at once. I did not overhaul my kitchen in an afternoon. I added the carbon steel pan first, cooked with it for a few months, noticed what changed, and worked outward from there. The point is not to own all five things. The point is to know what each one does so you can decide what your own kitchen is missing. If you are searing proteins on a coated nonstick pan that you replace every two years, the carbon steel pan will change how you think about dinner. If your knife work feels slower and more effortful than it should, the chef’s knife and the bolster that guides your grip will change that too.
The drawer I mentioned at the beginning is still there. I keep meaning to clean it out. But I do not think about it much anymore, because everything I actually need is already on the counter.
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