Love it or list it! Here’s a list of my favorite kitchen appliances and why they earned the real estate.
Ironically, I had more appliances when I had a smaller kitchen. I had a whole section of our living room buffet that was overflow storage for our largest kitchen appliances. As of today, I think we have the fewest I’ve had in years. But the ones we DO have, I couldn’t live without.
I have a love/hate relationship with kitchen appliances. Most of them are designed to save you time. But aside from a high speed blender or juicer, I can’t think of any you couldn’t just use full-size appliances or kitchen tools for. I also know that they can be very hit or miss! I went without a microwave for a year (before I had kids), but now I couldn’t live without it. Some of you live and die for your crockpot / instant pot / air fryers. But two of those three I have long since given away.
Here is a list of my must-have favorite kitchen appliances, along with the ones we passed on to someone who would love it more.
If you want a tour of our kitchen, see it here!
My Favorite Kitchen Appliances
Love It, Use It Daily
Blender
We use our Vitamix every morning to make family smoothies. It’s so important, it gets to sit out on the countertop! It would be pretty hard to make a green smoothie without one, so this is at the top of the essentials list.
Toaster Oven
We use our Breville Toaster Oven daily for toast or baking small things like an individual pizza for Mazen. I’ll never go back to a pop-up toaster because you can do so many things in this kind! I DO think this is sort of a duplicate item because you can technically toast or bake anything in your full-size oven. However, it heats so quickly and is more energy efficient, so it’s worthy!
Microwave
I love our Breville microwave because it has a turn wheel to add time – so much faster than pushing buttons! It fits snugly in our kitchen island, and we use it multiple times a day for reheating food, making quick kid oatmeal, defrosting bagels, or cooking Blue Apron prepared & ready meals.
Coffee Maker and Grinder
Breville Precision Brewer Coffee Maker – We love this coffeemaker. The carafe isn’t glass so it’s fine to toss around, coffee tastes great, and the dial is super easy to program. Needless to say, we use it everyday!
Thomas bought this OXO Burr Coffee Grinder on a whim, and it’s been LIFE CHANGING! Not only does it fit a whole bag in the top at a time, but you grind just what you need, to the exact size you want, every day. Saves time. Saves mess. Fresher coffee. Triple win!
Electric Kettle
I have gone through a phase where I had a kettle sitting on my stovetop. It was cute but also was always getting dirty when I cooked. An electric kettle heats up so much faster, and we use ours nearly every day for nightly tea.
Milk Frother
Aka: hot chocolate maker. This is getting in the essentials list because it’s winter and we’re making hot chocolate on the regular. It’s PERFECT for evening heating milk, not too hot, and mixing in the chocolate at the same time. Mine is an older model (8-9 years old?) and the frother doesn’t work like it used to, so I mayt replace this one when it dies.
Like It, Use It, But Not Often
Nespresso
Whenever I wake up here alone, I use the Nespresso. But admittedly, it doesn’t get used as much as it should. If it were to break, I’m not sure I would buy another. However, I do really like it and do have the occasional afternoon coffee combined with the frothed milk above!
Slow Cooker
While I do not use my slow cooker daily, it’s on the list because there is nothing like it. When I do use it, I love it! I wish and want to use it more, especially this time of year. I once had a very, very large one and the one we have now is the perfect size.
Check out: Slow Cooker Black Beans and Chicken Taco Soup
Cuisinart Food Processor
This is another “when you need it, you need it.” I use it to grate cheese only occasionally because it’s a pain to clean, but most often I use it for Sherry Cheese Dip, pesto, or No Bake Cookie Dough Bites!
KitchenAid Mixer
We use this mostly for baking cookies, occasionally for whipping cream or making something fancier. It is very nice to have when the cookie craving calls, but it’s also a beast that I could do without.
Stick Blender
We have been using our stick blender to make milkshakes lately! I also use it for pureed soups.
Waffle Maker
Listed It: Once Had But Gave Away
Air Fryer
We had an Air Fryer because I worked with a brand to develop some recipes for their instruction manual years ago (Check out these Air Fryer Avocado Fries and Air Fryer Kale Chips!). However, my beef with the air fryer was that it wasn’t really big enough to make our whole meal! For example, four baked salmon filets wouldn’t fit with enough space without overlapping. So I ended up just baking them in the oven. Even french fries had to be made in pretty small batches. I know people LOVE their air fryers and I think if I lived alone and was cooking for 1-2 all the time I would have loved it more, but the bin is smaller than you think.
Instant Pot
Here is another polarizing one – so many of you use your Instant Pot daily! I get it – it’s magical. We went through a phase when we were making lots of Instant Pot eggs! Egg salad, hard-boiled eggs. But it’s just SO BIG, and I have to also blame this on Thomas a bit because he really doesn’t like “mushy food,” so all the delicious shredded chicken and stew recipes you guys love, he didn’t. Since this is a beast of an appliance to store, I gave it to my neighbors.
Juicer
Once upon a time, I had a fancy juicer (See this post). It was fun to DIY juice for a while, and I even experimented with juice pulp crackers. But when it came down to it, the cost of the juice ingredients was often the same or more than the juices you could buy in shops. And if you buy those, you didn’t have to clean all the pulp out! I think a juicer would be most ideal for someone who loves gardening and can grow their own veggies to juice. Or someone who is just juice obsessed! That person is not me (team smoothie).
Rice Cooker
RIP early KERF rice cooker! It finally died on me this year. I love any appliance you can set and forget, and I used to make nearly all of our grains in one, from quinoa to steel cut oatmeal (I still remember the day when Emily @ Daily Garnish made me steel cut oats in her rice cooker for the first time!). But these days, I tend to make rice and oatmeal on the stove-top anyways. So when the rice cooker stopped cooking, I didn’t feel the need to replace it.
What are your ride-or-die appliances?
Let me guess – your air fryer and instant pot!! Haha!
Connie says
100% with you on air fryer and instapot. I tried but I just don’t get the hype. And I keep the slow cooker only to make pulled pork. Everything else tastes the same out a slow cooker—like MUSH.
I keep that juicer in the basement on the off chance I might want to juice something…hasn’t been used in years but I can’t get rid of it.
Elisa says
My most used: Vitamix blender, Kitchen Aid countertop oven, KA stand mixer, Cuisinart immersion blender.
Two I take out occasionally: Breville juicer (good during hot months) and Cuisinart food processor.
MH in OH says
I use my bread machine to prepare dough for pizza crust, breadsticks, or rolls a few times a month. Also use the crockpot regularly for soups, pulled pork, black beans. I make pasta sauce in the crockpot too.
Kath Younger says
My mom had a bread machine!
Laura says
My Vitamix is our most used appliance, it gets used everyday for smoothies and we use it often to make dressings, oat flour, etc. I often look for sales before buying something but I know if our Vitamix were to die, I would pay full price for a new one immediately. A new item we’re obsessed with the: the viral manual cheese graters I kept seeing on IG. It is the best and so easy to grate our own cheese!
A flop for us was the instant pot. I felt like it was never as fast as they said because it would take so long to heat up and come to pressure. We got rid of ours.
Kath Younger says
I have not heard of these cheese graters, but grating it by hand is the worse. But not worse than cleaning the food processor : )
Melanie says
We have the same Breville toaster oven and use it all the time. But we are considering upgrading to the version that has an air fryer built in. We’ve never had an air fryer and don’t want to add another appliance to our kitchen. Were just looking at the Breville oven/airfryer at Willams Sonoma last week.
Your kitchen is beautiful! Love the blueish island!
Kath Younger says
That is great idea whenever ours dies! It would be awesome to have a 2 in 1.
Gilly says
We have the Breville air fryer / toaster oven and it’s great. 2 shelves and it works so quickly. Definitely worth it!
Kath Younger says
Great to know – thank you!
Danielle says
I’m getting married in May and feeling good that you’ve listed the exact coffee maker and coffee grinder we put on our registry- ha! What are the odds?! I used some amazon Prime points to get a Breville frother a few months ago and it’s been the difference between me enjoying a few matchas a week and… not enjoying them. 🙂 I mix Pique matcha + water + half a scoop of vanilla protein in the frother and heat it then pour that in my mug and put a cup of unsweetened vanilla almond milk in and froth it to top my matcha. It’s brought me a lot of joy this winter!
Kath Younger says
That sounds so good!
Nancy says
We keep our KA stand mixer and Ninja Creami (xmas gift for the teens!) on the counter, along with a regular toaster. I would love to replace the toaster with a Breville toaster oven sometime – I think we’d use it a lot. We keep our Vitamix and food processor in a cabinet with easy access pull-out drawers – one or the other is used nearly every day. I have an IP and slow cooker in the pantry. I use the slow cooker maybe 3x/year and the IP 2x/month.
Other random appliances — we have an inexpensive meat slicer that we use maybe 2-3x/year, and a very old drip coffee pot that hardly ever gets used, but with a big pantry I don’t mind keeping it around.
Kirsten says
You may have mentioned this is a previous post so sorry if I missed it but how are you feeling about your stove? I’m thinking of switching from gas to electric but worried I will hate the electric stovetop.
Kath Younger says
I love it!! I have really fallen in love with its simplicity. Once we got the correct cookware, it felt normal to me. While I DO think that gas is sliiiiiightly better for cooking, it’s balanced out by how easy the flat top is to clean. It’s a DREAM to clean!! Overall I’d give it a 9/10.