The Most Important Kitchen Gear Releases of 2019

This roundup is part of This Year in Gear, a look back at the year’s most notable releases. To stay on top of all the latest product news, subscribe to our daily Dispatch newsletter.

Anova Sous Vide Pro

Price: $299
From: amazon.com

Most sous vide circulators for home cooks are capable of controlling the temperature of roughly 15 to 25 liters of water. The Precision Pro can handle 100, or enough to fill pretty much any Yeti cooler you’d realistically buy with water to pre-cook steaks and pork chops before a quick sear on the grill. And because it was designed to live in commercial kitchens, the brand says it can run for 10,000 consecutive hours without issue — more than enough time to prep a pork shoulder for the flames.

Artisan Revere Chef’s Knife

Price: $249
From: kickstarter.com

David Olkovetsky’s new Artisan Revere chef’s knife looks familiar. Its tall, uber-thin profile and ergonomic heel are borrowed from designs by lauded American knifemaker Bob Kramer, and its curvy, inch-perfect handle pays homage to Murray Carter’s “International Pro” style grip.

Blacklock Cast-Iron Cookware

Price: $38+
From: lodgemfg.com

Lodge says the new Blacklock pans remedy three common cast iron: heaviness, poor seasoning and scalded fingers. Blacklock cookware is cast thinner than standard Lodge pans to shave off weight (the company says it reduced the weight up to 25 percent of some pieces), designed with a heat-dispelling handle and comes with three layers of seasoning. The launch includes skillets in four sizes, a grill pan, a griddle and a 5.5-quart Dutch oven.

Borough Furnace Dutch Oven

Price: $240
From: boroughfurnace.com

Based in Owego, New York, Borough Furnace’s American-made enameled Dutch oven is a semi-gloss, blacked-out, hand-enameled pot that combines the company’s modern touch with designs from classic French brands like Le Creuset and Staub.

Butter Pat Industries Cast-Iron Skillet

Price: $195
From: butterpatindustries.com

Starting at $145, Butter Pat’s skillets are not cheap, but they are great to cook with (Brock looks to be using the $295 Joan pan). Our choice for best all-around skillet is cast by hand, lightweight and features nicely sloping cooking walls. It’s not necessarily the cast-iron skillet to get if you’ve never owned one before, but if you’re a Southern food luminary like Sean Brock it makes a bit more sense.

Caraway Home Cookware

Price: $395
From: carawayhome.com

Caraway Home is the latest of many cookware makers to crop up in the direct-to-consumer age, but it’s one of the first with a value proposition beyond “it cooks nice.”

Equal Parts Cookware

Price: $249
From: equalparts.com

Cookware brand Equal Parts isn’t trying to make peak performance cooking equipment. It doesn’t want to be a direct-to-consumer All-Clad and it doesn’t make a big deal of how much money you save buying directly from them. Instead, Equal Parts, the first brand under the Pattern umbrella, makes pots, pans and kitchen gear for people who don’t know the difference between a sauté pan and a skillet.

Ferno Firewheel Grill

Price: $4,800
From: fernogrills.com

Ferno uses a patented “FireWheel” that lifts and lowers the gas burners under the grates. This lets a griller avoid serious flareups and add a new array of cooking options. Foods that you want a heavy sear on but need more time to cook (such as chicken) can meet the grill with the burners pulled close to the cast-iron grates, then dropped deeper in the grill body to finish the meat without over-cooking the exterior.

Field Co. No. 4 Cast-Iron Skillet

Price: $75
From: fieldcompany.com

Thanks to a smooth cooking surface, solid out-of-the-box seasoning, fairly reasonable prices and below-average weight, Field’s classic skillet sizes are already our favorite all-around cast iron out there. Now, if you so choose, you can get a Field in what is likely the smallest usable size there is — a whopping 5.75 inches of cooking surface.

Fire & Smoke Society Grilling Accessories

Price: Price Varies
From: fireandsmokesociety.com

The brand launches with upgraded charcoal, fire starter, sauces and spice rubs. Its product seem to take a cue from PK’s grills — they’re not remaking the wheel, they’re just making products that outshine the competition.

Five Two Stoneware Mixing Bowls

Price: $99
From: food52.com

The new FiveTwo stoneware mixing bowls are the result of a site survey that reached 34,500 people, with everything from the material its made of to the pour spouts dictated by community responses. The set of three bowls come in 1-quart, 2-quart and 4-quart sizes, and it is designed with a wider, lower-lying profile than typical metal mixing bowls. But the best part is simpler: the inside is a typical rounded mixing bowl shape, but the outside has a hard angle and flat base. This means you can mix like usual but the bowl will stay put.

Ikea Klasen

Price: $208
From: ikea.com

Klasen ($198) is a 300 square-inch charcoal, rustproof grill. It sports stainless steel grates, air flow regulators on the front and hood, a nifty pull-out ash catch and a built-in temperature gauge. You can also buy it to fit in with the already-popular Applaro outdoor line.

JB Prince x SolidTeknics Wrought-Iron Skillet

Price: $55
From: kickstarter.com

This is not a cast-iron skillet. Made in collaboration with commercial chef cookware purveyor JB Prince, SolidTeknics Professional Iron Skillet is a machine-wrought iron skillet, and it’s good at pretty much everything.

Kalamazoo Shokunin Kamado Grill

Price: $5,995
From: kalamzoogourmet.com

Kamado grills are ancient Japanese cooking vessels fueled by charcoal or wood and made of natural materials like clay (ceramic tiling, concrete, brick and terra cotta all became popular later). The gist is fairly simple: kamado grills feature much higher levels of heat insulation and circulation than your everyday grill. Kalamazoo’s calls its take on the Kamado the Shokunin, and it’s a bit different than other kamados on the market — especially the ever-popular Big Green Egg.

Lodge Cast-Iron Fish Pan

Price: $97
From: amazon.com

The 21 x 11-inch cast-iron pan was built to cook for a crowd. Plop it down over two stovetop burners or over a fire outdoors, the Fish Pan is good for so, so much for than frying fish — think camp breakfasts with all the sausage and bacon possible, crisping entire sacks of potatoes or browning whole sheet pans of cornbread.

Lodge Chef’s Collection

Price: $30+
From: surlatable.com

The Chef Collection Skillet is lighter and more ergonomic. Lodge shaved 15 percent off the weight of equivalent skillets from its main line — a change that sheds about half a pound from the 10-inch pans and more than a pound from the 12-inch ones. This, combined with elongated handles that taper more naturally with the shape of a hand and new gently sloping side walls, makes for a much more maneuverable skillet.

Made In Carbon Steel Wok

Price: $99
From: madeincookware.com

The wok is the second addition to Made In’s carbon steel line. It features a lengthy, ergonomic handle and a flat-bottom base that’s better for home-kitchen stovetops. Its carbon steel construction imbues it with heat retention similar to that of a cast-iron skillet without all the weight. Plus, because carbon steel isn’t as porous as casted iron, it’s more non-stick out of the box.

Material Copper Core Cookware

Price: $95
From: materialkitchen.com

Bonded cookware isn’t new. The practice of layering metals to optimize a pan’s performance and durability was invented by All-Clad decades ago. Using copper in cookware isn’t new either; among metals that are safe to cook with, its thermal conductivity is unmatched. A combination of the two isn’t particularly novel either — many high-end cookware manufacturers make steel pans with copper cores. So what does Material Kitchen’s new collection of copper-imbued skillets have that others don’t? Price tags below $200 apiece.

Pella Weber Kettle Grill Attachment

Price: $199
From: spidergrills.com

Weber’s kettle charcoal grills are the most famous grills in America. As such, they’ve inspired more aftermarket grill products than any other — meat smoking insets, upgraded lid hinges, makeshift pizza ovens and more. Add Pella to the list, the Weber kettle’s first ever wood pellet-grilling attachment.

PicoBrew Pico C

Price: $399
From: picobrew.com

Thanks to PicoBrew’s new UnkPak’d Kit, users can now brew beers using their own ingredients in the PicoBrew C, S and Pro machines. They’ll also have access to the online PicoBrew RecipeCrafter tool to create their own beer recipes.

Pyrex Deep Bakeware

Price: $16+
From: pyrexhome.com

You stew the red sauce, boil sheets of pasta, splurge on some good parmesan and pull out the drawer under your oven to find your casserole dish. You are making lasagna, and you’ve just realized the baking dish is all of two inches deep — not a depth adequate for lasagna-making. You are enraged. Pyrex, makers of Amazon’s best-selling casserole dishes, has your back. The literally named Pyrex Deep collection is your savior.

Smithey Ironware Company Chef’s Pan

Price: $140
From: smithey.com

If Isaac Morton’s early skillets were tributes to the cast-iron of yesteryear, his new skillets are decidedly more contemporary. The new 10-inch Chef’s Skillet comes with gently sloping walls for easier tossing, shaves off nearly a full pound from the brand’s standard 10-inch and, because there’s no hard angle where the wall meets the cooking surface, is significantly easier to clean.

Vermicular Musui + Kamado

Price: $670
From: vermicular.com

Like most enameled Dutch ovens, you can do almost anything with Vermicular’s Musui pot — roast, stew, sear, sauté, braise and so on. It’s a graphite cast-iron Dutch oven with a tight-fitting lid, an optional induction base (called Kamado) and nubs on the inside of the lid that drip evaporated water back on whatever you’re cooking. Its specialty, though, is waterless cooking — or cooking without adding water, broth or other liquids.

Read More

• 

  The 25 Best Kitchen Tools You Can Buy for Less Than $25

Note: Purchasing products through our links may earn us a portion of the sale, which supports our editorial team’s mission. Learn more here.

Related Topics