Pull the Plug on Gimmicky Gadgets

There are outwardly normal people in America today who have been saving their pennies diligently for a “professional model” Salad Shooter.

The shrimpy standard size won’t do. They want the big mambo, the hammer of Thor, the one that shoots out sliced cucumbers the way John Wayne used to shoot Winchester slugs.

No longer will their kitchen be a gadget wasteland. With the professional model Salad Shooter, they’ll finally enter the home culinary big leagues. Never again will they be forced to use a mere knife to prepare salad. No. They will be able to shove the ingredients in with one hand and fire with the other and whammo!

Salad.

These people are the reason “Ginsu” and “Veg-O-Matic” are household words in this country. They are the techno-cooks, and they are responsible for the shrinking amount of usable kitchen counter space in America today.

But these are lean and mean times. Kitchens that look like a Star Trek garage sale are out. Utility is in. But how to achieve it, especially if you’re an infomercial junkie? For my money, you listen to Betsy Moulton and Berlene Bogard.

To these two women, the kitchen is a friendly place, a workshop that smells good, and a Salad Shooter would only impair the view. Even Bogard, who with her husband is the owner of Kitchen Things, a pair of Orange County stores in the Mission Viejo and South Coast Plaza malls, has a personal list of kitchen items she’ll be happy to talk you out of buying.

“Most of the items that can be eliminated are electrical items, like electric French-fryers,” she said. “You can do the same thing by getting a basket and putting it inside a saucepan.”

Electric pasta-makers, she said, take up lots of space and don’t make pasta as delicate as the kind turned out by the hand-cranked models. Gimmicky--and redundant--electric burger-fryers, sandwich-makers and other dedicated use items compete with one another to see which can suck up more money and space.

Cutesy items, too, are on Bogard’s hit list. She mentioned a current specialty, a banana-slicer that works in much the same way as the traditional egg-slicer but is shaped like a banana. Lucite domed fruit-ripeners (some in fruit shapes) lurk for the unwary who would rather buy a gimmick than ripen fruit in the traditional paper bag.

“When I see something gimmicky like that,” Bogard said, “I just totally ignore it. You need to make sure you select the kitchen gadgets that fit in with your type of cooking. Some make cooking much easier--for instance, I have a tomato corer that I use a lot--but others are pretty frivolous.”

A fancy spice rack, for instance. That’s first on Moulton’s list of gripes. A cooking instructor and former caterer from Newport Beach, Moulton put the kibosh on supposedly space-saving spice racks with the assertion that “dried herbs shouldn’t be out in daylight or anywhere near a stove. It’s really dumb to get one of those racks that go over a stove. Boy, does that ruin herbs quick.” Likewise, “a pricey coffee canister. It’s expensive because it’s intended to be seen on the counter--where it takes up space--but it’ll ruin your coffee. Coffee should be kept in an airtight zip-lock bag in the refrigerator, not the freezer.”

A pepper mill, she said, is “essential” but a salt mill--which is often seen combined with a pepper mill--is “meaningless.” A first cousin in the space-hogging derby, the nutmeg grinder, “never works; a little hand-held grater works better, and it’s important to know that nutmeg must be ground.”

Moulton agrees with Bogard on the space- and money-devouring nature of the dedicated use electrical appliance menace, but she continues the fight all the way into the gadget drawer, where such abominations as the plastic spatula and the mushroom brush too often live.

Rigid plastic spatulas, said Moulton, don’t work well, and often melt when they come in contact with a hot surface. Rubber is the preferable material. And the mushroom brush “is a pet peeve of mine. People will be surprised to hear this, but restaurants never wash their mushrooms. They come with the dirt on them. It’s organic, but it’s sterilized organic.”

Short rolling pins, wire whisks that rust or have too few wires in them, nearly all knife sharpeners and “all cheap knives” are also sins in Moulton’s book.

And what about the big Kahuna of all kitchen gadgets, the food processor? Interestingly, the two women don’t entirely agree. Moulton called the processor “a necessity,” but added that buying the most immense model--or the smallest--probably isn’t a good idea; a mid-size one is usually adequate for any home job. Bogard said that “it’s more important to have three good knives--and I mean top-quality knives--than a food processor.”

But they do agree on one thing: the Salad Shooter is surely silly. Practice saying that. It’ll take your mind off actually buying one.