Ina Garten Thinks One Common Kitchen Tool Is Totally Overrated

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It seems like there's a kitchen tool for every task and ingredient these days. While some are useful, others really only serve a single purpose and take up precious kitchen storage space. Examples of these include salad scissors, egg yolk separators, and vertical tomato slicers (here's how to cut them like a pro). Most chefs will tell you these tasks require nothing more than your bare hands or a sharp chef's knife. Ina Garten is more than qualified for identifying useful kitchen tools and there's one particular item she believes is completely overrated: the garlic press.

A garlic press is designed to firmly press a whole clove of garlic into tiny, pulverized pieces. It takes the place of having to chop up garlic with a knife. In the "Ask Ina" section of her Barefoot Contessa website, Garten explains, "I never use a garlic press; I always have a knife handy and it does the same thing perfectly well. The fewer fancy gadgets you have, the more organized your kitchen will be."

Still, many home cooks keep a garlic press in their arsenal. It may keep your fingers from absorbing strong garlic odors, but it isn't very versatile. I recently tried to push a knob of fresh ginger root through my garlic press, hoping for the same results it gave with garlic. Instead, the press broke apart, leaving me to hand chop my ginger anyway. I haven't, nor will I, replace the press. If only I'd asked Ina first.

In all honesty, I personally don't love chopping garlic with a chef's knife. The minced garlic sticks to my knife, for one. I scrape it off, but it's a constant dance of chopping and scraping. In the end, my fingers are sticky with garlic. Although I've been cooking for a long time, this continues to annoy me. More and more, I use a Microplane grater to mince my garlic and it works like a dream. All you do is peel your garlic cloves and scrape them down the grater, which results in very finely chopped garlic. If you know you have a lot of garlic to peel, plan ahead and soak them in water the day before you prep the cloves.

If you have a lot of garlic to chop, you can also use a mini food processor (or a full-sized one if that's what you've got). A handful of pulsing, rotating chops is all it should take to give you perfectly chopped garlic. Sometimes, whacking your garlic cloves with the side of your chef's knife is all you need to do. Depending on how hard you crush the clove, it can naturally break into small pieces without you having to further chop it with a knife. The great thing about this method is that you can whack cloves that haven't been peeled since the tough outer peel will shed right off with the force of your blow. Of course, using two metal bowls is another fun way to both peel garlic and get rid of some aggression in the kitchen.