We love fruits and vegetables. (We assume you do too, since you’re reading our blog.) But let’s address the elephant in the room: incorporating fruits and veggies into whatever it is your cooking can be a real pain in the ass. The whole song and dance can be messy and time consuming, and even result in grievous finger injury! 

So with that in mind, here are a handful of kitchen gadgets that on first pass might seem superfluous, but that members of our team swear by to make the most of their fruit and veggie prep work while cooking. All of the tasks these gadgets speed up are 100% accomplishable with a dull knife, your bare hands, and a whole lot of patience. But as a fruit and veggie lover yourself, you know how horrible that sounds.

Please note that these aren’t affiliate links, and we aren’t receiving a dime for these endorsements. These products are merely the tried and tested favorites of the fruit and veggie aficionados that make up the kencko team! Should you find an alternate version of any of these products – there are plenty out there – those are also probably great!

Manual citrus squeezer

This product – which goes by a million different names – is really nothing more than two cupped pieces of enamel or steel that you use to squeeze sliced lemons, in order to extract as much juice from them as possible. Can you do this by hand? Of course. But will you get every last drop out? Probably not. With this device, you don’t have to fish seeds out of whatever you’re using lemon for, and “you also get approximately twice the juice, so you waste less,” says Maggie, our Head of Integrated Marketing.

Grater

Not to over-index on just how many lemon-lovers you have to shop for, but we also love to keep a microplane grater on hand to extract zest from our favorite yellow, sour fruit. This gadget is also super handy for finely grating things like garlic, root veggies, and hard cheeses. Sure you could accomplish finely, thinly diced bits of fruit or veg through hard work and determination… or, you could just use a grater and be done with it in seconds!

Garlic press

Look, garlic rocks. It tastes awesome and lends so much depth of flavor to so many dishes. But it’s also kind of annoying and time consuming to prep, even if you aren’t pulling a Goodfellas and slicing up your cloves paper thin using a razor blade. To avoid the hassle, you could go with convenience plays like garlic powder or pre-minced, jarred garlic. But we all know it’s not the same. So that’s why we love a good garlic press. You’ve still gotta deal with the peeling aspect, but that’s about it. Just plop a clove or two in there, squeeze, and voila: perfectly minced, fresh garlic at the ready.

Immersion blender-food processor 

Have you ever noticed that when you look at most creamy, veggie-heavy soup recipes, there comes a point where you are given a choice of two instructions? Something like: “pour contents from the saucepan into the blender (carefully! Contents are extremely hot!), and do your best to not allow half-pureed, molten soup to ruin your home” and another that’s basically “or simply whisk out your immersion blender and listen to a chorus of angels singing 🙂.” 

This soup season (and yes… holiday season, too), give the gift of effortless souping. And it also doubles as a food processor, which can make quick work of onions, garlic, and other veggies. Silviana, our Product Innovation Project Manager, offers this endorsement: “I make hummus in it; anything beetroot goes in so I don't stain half of my kitchen utensils… and the motor thingy attaches to a vertical blender which saves a lot of space on kitchen counters, the #1 reason for disagreements in my house!”

Apple corer-peeler combo

You might not bake with apples too often. But when you do, you’re undoubtedly bemoaning the fact that you don’t have one of these puppies, which look straight out of Little House on the Prairie. Our Head of Nutrition, Mallory, says “I use it when I’m wanting to add apples to a salad, and when I make pies. I can peel/core 5 apples in under a minute!” This gift is probably preemptive in intention, but come next Thanksgiving, its recipient will thank you… and hopefully bake you an extra pie. 

Peeler

No, you do not need a fruit and veggie peeler to peel a piece of fruit or a vegetable. However, they are just so nice to have on hand! For other holiday staples like mashed potatoes and squash-based soups, a peeler is a godsend. But if you buy one of these for a loved one, just know you’re foisting them into a centuries(?) old debate about which type is best: horizontal or vertical. In our internal chat, this topic was hotly debated, with neither side ceding an inch. The good news is that both alignments seem to work well. The bad is that whichever type of peeler you wind up with will come to define you as a person for the rest of your life, apparently!

Vegetable chopper

Barbara, a Registered Dietitian with kencko cannot recommend a veggie chopper any higher: “it makes preparing veggies for dinner so easy, and no more accidentally cutting my fingers when trying to dice veggies finely!” It functions like one of those giant paper cutters your elementary school art teacher may have operated – just place the veggie in question into the device, press down on a lever, and watch as it’s chopped perfectly into a designated receptacle. No mess, and basically zero chance of the user cutting their fingers, which we suppose lessens the chances of a different sort of mess.

Nut cracker

We are enamored with the improvements to nut cracking technology on display here. Have your favorite nut-enthusiast head up to the attic, dust off that old hand-carved German nutcracker that looks like a little guy, then toss it straight in the garbage, craftsmanship be damned. Then introduce them to the Drosselmeyer Nutcracker. Sleek, efficient, Scandinavian, this precision-engineered device gets the job done. If there’s any downside, it's a low level shame – as our Vice President of Brand, Lucy, puts it, “it's embarrassing how much I love my Swedish nutcracker.”