Ina Garten Swears By These 8 Must-Have Kitchen Products, and They Start at Just $9

“What would Ina Garten do?” is a universal mantra many home chefs have adopted, inspired by the chef’s ability to glamorize everyday cooking. Garten has built a whole career out of her impeccable taste, starting off with a Hamptons specialty food shop back in 1978 that led to her iconic nickname, Barefoot Contessa. Upgrading your kitchen gear can feel overwhelming with all the options out there, but who better to trust than the one and only Barefoot Contessa? 

Decades of culinary experience have taught Garten what’s really necessary in the kitchen — and our gear testing backs up many of her choices. Below are eight of her favorite kitchen tools, which will change the way you cook. 

Ina Garten-Recommended Kitchen Products

Kuhn Rikon Original Swiss Peeler 3-Pack

Vegetable peelers (which you should be replacing once a year, according to Garten) don’t have to be fancy. As Garten told us, “Vegetable peelers get rusty, they get dull, and they’re very cheap, so you can just throw them out and buy new ones.”

Kuhn Rikon makes our favorite value vegetable peelers, and you can get a 3-pack for $16 at Amazon right now. The kitchen tool has an ergonomically shaped handle to prevent a sore wrist and an ultra-sharp carbon steel blade that can clean up any fruit or vegetable. 

John Boos Block R-Board Reversible Maple Cutting Board

Garten swears by John Boos cutting boards, confidently declaring it a worthy investment. “If you take care of them, they last forever,” she said when listing the John Boos Block R-Board as one of her all-time favorite things (kitchen or otherwise). The 12-pound, 1.5-inch-thick maple wood slab is durable enough to stay put on the countertop but gentle enough to protect cherished, sharp knives. At 20 x 15 inches, it will quickly become a fixture of your countertops. 

Garten doesn’t even bother putting her Boos boards away — she always has them within reach atop the counter. Both Rachael Ray and Giada De Laurentiis are also in agreement that John Boos makes the best cutting boards; the brand makes our favorite wooden cutting board, too. 

PepperMate Pepper Mill

Freshly cracked pepper is a small luxury that doesn’t cost much time or money, according to Garten. She has been using the PepperMate Pepper Mill for ages and plans on remaining loyal till the end. She’ll compliment the pepper grinder any chance she gets, calling it the best she’s ever used. The easy-to-fill grinder only requires one hand and holds up to 1.7 ounces of peppercorns and nearly 5 ounces of salt. With multiple coarseness options, it’s a trusty sidekick for any recipe, and it’s currently on sale at Amazon.

OXO Salad Spinner

Before you own a salad spinner, you might consider it a needless kitchen gadget, but post-salad spinner, you’ll never know how you lived without it. With one button, it flawlessly disperses tasty dressing onto greens in mere seconds. OXO’s “large” version, which holds 6.22 quarts, is the perfect size for all your salad tossing needs, but Garten has a secret use for it. She pulls out her spinner even when salad isn’t on the menu, using it to rinse fresh herbs and spin them dry. Plus, the OXO model’s break button is another simple yet innovative advantage, giving the user more control.

Chef’sChoice 1520 Professional Electric Knife Sharpener

Any chef will tell you how important a quality knife is when getting comfortable in the kitchen, but the sharpness of the blade is half the battle. Garten swears by her electric knife sharpener, the Chef’sChoice 1520 Professional, which results in “perfectly sharp knives, every time.”

A magnet mechanism helps the knives smoothly glide through the machine, which has three separate sections of diamond abrasives to ensure ultimate sharpness. Sharpening steel takes precision, but this electric kitchen gadget takes the stress away. It also happens to be our favorite electric knife sharpener, creating the sharpest blade in all of our testing.

Microplane Classic Zester Grater

Zesters are another tool that Garten replaces each year, and, thankfully, they can be affordable. If you love the taste of fresh citrus as much as she does, a Microplane grater (or rasp) does the trick for just $13.

“You know what I love is a rasp because I love the zest of citrus fruit. And actually now I do garlic on the rasp because it grates it so finely,” Ina told Bon Appétit. Microplane’s stainless steel blade can sharply grate even the toughest ingredients.

Taylor Large Analog Oven Thermometer

Garten doesn’t leave anything up to fate when it involves oven temperature, noting that “No matter what it says on the dial, the oven itself could be totally different.” Consistency and accuracy are everything when it comes to perfecting a recipe, and Taylor’s affordable analog oven thermometer can help you do just that. The retro dial reads temperatures up to 600°F, allowing cooks to experiment with a range of dishes and cook them precisely.

Piazza Ice Cream and Cookie Scoop

As much as Garten adores ice cream, her trusty ice cream scoop pulls a lot more weight around the kitchen. The tool can be used for scooping and evenly distributing cookie batter, but Garten reaches for one of her many stainless steel scoops when portioning muffin batter, forming juicy meatballs, and to help craft her famous fish cakes. This tool is an easy way to make foods uniform and avoid mess. Its cog-and-ratchet system releases tacky doughs and mixtures without getting your hands dirty.