Best Small Kitchen Appliances 2024

We are going to share the 10' absolute best kitchen appliances that are guaranteed to take your cooking and your food preservation skills to the next level. And be sure to stay until the end, because we have some bonus items to share with you that will make you feel like you have doubled your oven capacity. The first item on our list is an immersion blender. I don't have an immersion blender and have wanted one for a very long time. See, this would make a great gift. They are wonderful. You can make whipping cream. You can blend soups.

You can blend up your tomatoes for sauce. One of the best things about an immersion blender is you don't need to transfer them to a whole other device just to blend them. Whatever you are cooking in, you just stick the immersion blender in and it does its job right there without dirtying another dish. And if there's one thing everybody loves is a gift that requires them to do less dishes than the kitchen. Yes, an immersion blender makes a fantastic gift because they are small, affordable and don't take up much room in anybody's kitchen. We've linked some of our favorites down in the description of this video, and there are both corded and battery options when it comes to these blenders. Now, immersion blenders are great in all, but if you really want to be a hero this holiday season, consider getting somebody a Vitamix blender.

The $300 Blender Is The King When It Comes To Smoothies

Now I get it. These things are expensive. When Alex first showed me one of these five years ago and said, "We needed a $300 blender, I said no, we don't, but I was wrong." We ended up getting the $300 blender, and it is one of the best things that we ever did. We use this thing on a weekly basis, and it is the king when it comes to smoothies, and I'm somebody who doesn't like any kind of chunks of fruit or anything in my smoothies, and it willpulverize anything that I throw at it. It's not just for smoothies, though. I've used it to make homemade baby formula, homemade baby food.

You can make delicious soups out of it, Bisques. Even my favorite thing right now to use it for is making blender muffins. throw all the ingredients in, even turns rolled oats into oat flour. It is a breeze to clean, also. You just add some soap and water, blend it for about 60 seconds, and that's it you're done. So throw away that cheap blender that you got as a wedding gift that you never use, and get yourself something that's actually going to get the job done.

Kitchen Aid Food Processor Review

The next item on our list is the Instant Pot. I love our Instant Pot More than me. It is really great for cooking any type of grains. I struggle with cooking rice on top of the stove in a pot. It is overdone or not done enough every time, and I don't have to worry about that anymore because I have an Instant Pot. The Instant Pot has stopped all tears in the kitchen pretty pretty much. You can do so many things with it. You can make yogurt, you can make bone broth, you can cook a whole frozen chicken in the Instant Pot. Start it in the morning.

It will be done by dinnertime. It is one of the most versatile kitchen appliances out there. We really appreciate that. The base is all stainless steel, so you don't have any toxic nonstick materials to deal with. It cleans up super easy and one of the great features with it is that you don't have to take the food out when it's done cooking. It'll keep things warm. So sometimes Alex might start some food in the early afternoon. It might be done by 4 o'clock and she'll just let it sit in the Instant Pot until we're ready to have dinner and the food is warm and ready to go. It kind of feels like an upgraded rock pot, sometimes much better rock pot.

Now, if you know anybody who is a home cook or a gardener, I can't recommend more getting a kitchen aid food processor. These things are fantastic, and we use it primarily to shred these big five-pound blocks of cheese that we get in bulk. We also use it for picking our produce from the garden. We specifically got the kitchen aid food processor because it did come with a dicing kit option, and this makes the most perfect little squares of carrots, celery potatoes.
It also comes with a dough hook, so it's really great for cutting butter into biscuits, making your pie crust. Another great thing about this food processor is that everything is dishwasher safe except for the base, obviously, but you can take the whole thing apart, throw all of it in the dishwasher, and you don't have to scrub anything. All of the parts and accessories also store right inside of the food processor, so you can store the whole thing as one solid unit, and that's one of the main reasons we love the kitchen aid food processor and a lot of the others.

Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer

They don't have that feature, and the thought of having all of those accessories banging around a junk drawer turned us off from even looking at buying one. Now we can't mention the kitchen aid brand without talking about the kitchen aid stand mixer. This has to be about the best gift that you could give anyone who is a baker. In fact, I got one for Alex early in our marriage and shecried Christmas morning when she opened it. I did. I wanted one for a very long time. I love to bake before, but having the kitchen aid stand mixer was a game changer. Even just the basic attachments made cookies, cakes, muffins, such a breeze.

The dough hook was huge for me. With learning how to bake bread, I even made pretzels, bags. This thing is amazing. A kitchen aid mixer is a great gift for any baker, because they have their mini-artisan model for your occasional baker or somebody short on counter space.
They have their middle of the road or most popular tilt head stand mixer, and then they also have their professional series, which have a much stronger motor and the bowl actually lifts directly up to the mixer itself. They come in a wide variety of colors, so you will be able to find that perfect color forwhoever you are buying your gift for. So if you want to make somebody cry this Christmas morning, think about getting a kitchen aid stand mixer or a cat or a cat.

The Dehydrator – A Great Appliance and Food Preservation Tool

The next item on our list is a dehydrator. This is such a fun appliance and food preservation tool, and with being gardeners, we'll get lots of use. Yes, it does, but it's not just for gardeners. We love buying organic banana chips, but they are so expensive, and we have saved so much money by just going to the store buying organic bananas, slicing them up and throwing them in the dehydrator and making our own.
It's also great for making homemade beef beef beef, which is also very expensive. We also use it for dehydrating pretty much any and all vegetables that come out of our garden – herbs and flowers – for making teas and saves, making fruit leather – and you can even proof your bread in it – you can. Yes, we've never done that. I know I should.

Harvest Right Freeze Dryer – The Best Food Preservation Tool

Now we really recommend buying the X-Caliber brand because they're a good middle of the road dehydrator to start with. There are some cheap ones out there, but they don't do a very good job. The cheap ones typically have a fan at the bottom of the unit and they don't do a very good job of evenly dehydrating the food with the X-liber, the fan is on the back and they are relatively inexpensive for anybody who's looking to get into their own food preservation at home.
Now, if you want to be a Christmas hero this holiday season, think about getting somebody a harvest right freeze dryer. These put dehydrators to shame, and it's about the best food preservation tool out there. There are two major benefits that a freeze dryer has over a dehydrator. One is that the food stores much longer (up to 20 years)–if you store it properly in mylar bags, and the food contains roughly 90% plus of its nutritional value. These freeze dryers are great not only for preserving your produce from your garden, but also for preserving leftovers.

So say you have leftover chili, freeze dry that. Store it in your mylar bag, and restitute it with hot water when you're ready to eat it, and it will be like you just made that chili that night. Now, these freeze dryers are certainly the most expensive thing on this list. If you think about all those leftovers that don't make it to the trash can or all that produce from your garden that you weren't able to get preserved within a few years, it'll probably pay for itself. Now is actually a fantastic time to buy a freeze dryer, as harvest rate has many of these items discounted up to $500. We've got a referral link down in the description of our video to our favorite model.

Electric Pressure Canner

Speaking of food preservation, an electric pressure canner would be such a big blessing for the person who loves to. can in your life, Says the person who really wants one. Oh yeah, you can water bath can in them. You can pressure can in them. If you are intimidated by pressure canning or if you have an electric cook top, this eliminates any of those fears or frustrations or troubles that you would have with pressure canning.
You plug it into an outlet in your wall, set your times and your specifications, and leave it alone, and it does all of the work for you. Pressure canning can take hours, and one of the major benefits of having an electric pressure canner is that it's not going to tie up your stove. So you can have your electric pressure canner on the counter and still be able to make dinner – the dream.

The Westin Commercial Grade Vacuum Sealer

So maybe you'd like to preserve some food at home, but canning and dehydrating just seems too complicated and you'd rather throw things in the freezer. If that's the case, then we can't recommend more than getting a good quality vacuum sealer. You can throw your food in just regular freezer bags, but it doesn't last more than just a couple months before things are covered in freezer burn, and all that hard work from the garden has pretty gone to waste.
We recommend the Westin commercial grade vacuum sealer for several reasons. It has an extremely powerful pump, so it's going to get all the air out of your bags. It leaves a nice thick seal and the unit doesn't overheat a lot of the cheaper brands. You have to wait several seconds before you can go from bag to bag, and when you're mass-storing food, it can become a huge bottle in the process. I talked to many friends and family who had the FoodSaver or other consumer brand vacuum sealers out there that just didn't seal well, overheated, broke down.

Most of the people had multiple foodSaver vacuum sealers that they'd purchased over the years, and we just didn't want to have to do the same thing either. Now these vacuum sealers are a big investment. You might have some sticker shock if you're used to just looking at those cheap foodSaver brands, but it's not going to break down on you. It's another item that will last for many, many, many years, and if you take care of it well enough, you can probably even pass it down to the next generation. Speaking of Westin products, we have to mention the Westin Sauce Maker. This is probably the best thing we've bought for our kitchen.

Make Tomato Sauce, Applesauce and Salsa With This

When it comes to saving time, you can make tomato sauce, applesauce, and salsa with this, and there is no peeling or pouring anything required. It separates the liquids from the solids in a matter of minutes by just warming your apples or tomatoes and then pouring them into the tophopper. Your crank is simple, shaft, and it's like magic. All those skins, seeds and pulp come out one end and out of the other end is glorious tomato or applesauce. The base kit is intended for making just applesauce, but there's an additional kit that you can get that has screens for making tomato sauce, salsa and for strawberries.

How to Double Your Oven Capacity This Christmas

We have a ton of strawberry trees on our property and we can make straight strawberry juice in no time and turn that into delicious strawberry jelly. I love strawberry jelly. It's so good. We told you at the start of this video that we had a few bonus items for you that are basically a good, affordable way for you to double your oven capacity without having to buy a whole other oven for your kitchen, an item that you may not be familiar with as a roaster oven. It sort of looks like a rock pot, where it just sits on your counter and plugs into the outlet, but it has a thermostat and is basically just an electric oven that sits on your counter. It is so great for slow roasting and making soups, bone broth, even cooking down your apples for applesauce. One of the best benefits of it is you can cook your whole Thanksgiving turkey in there, slow roast all day long, and have your oven open for any of your side dishes and rolls and anything else that anybody brings over to throw in.

We love these big roaster ovens as Christmas gifts because they're very versatile and everybody's cooking and baking around the holiday season. So what better gift than something that's going to free somebody's oven? It's a big lifesaving happening. Another great gift that can double somebody's oven capacity is a oven oven. And don't be so quick to turn your nose up at that, because oven ovens have actually come a long way. We love ours and we've recently opened its best feature. It is fantastic for baking our sourdough sandwich style loaves.

It's actually my preferred method for baking our sourdough bread. Now it frees up the oven so I can have dinner going. The loaf pan fits perfectly in there, and the bread just cooks so much better when it's in there. Now, some of the nicer models even come with luxury features like air, cooking and convection baking, so don't overlook this affordable addition to your kitchen this holiday season.

Conclusion

An immersion blender makes a fantastic gift because they are small, affordable and don't take up much room in anybody's kitchen. The Instant Pot is one of the most versatile kitchen appliances out there. Freeze dryers are great not only for preserving your produce from your garden, but also for preserving leftovers. Now is actually a fantastic time to buy a freeze dryer, as harvest rate has many of these items discounted up to $500. The Westin commercial grade vacuum sealer has an extremely powerful pump, so it's going to get all the air out of your bags. It leaves a nice thick seal and the unit doesn't overheat a lot of the cheaper brands. It separates the liquids from the solids in a matter of minutes.