Cooking
Someone who cooks well is actually one of the easiest people in the world to buy for. Except it almost always feels like one of the worst. We all know someone who has received a gadget that sounds impressive in the shop but lives in a drawer by February, or something so useless they already own three of them. We’ve been given both on numerous occasions and felt bloody terrible every single time.
What we wanted instead was stuff that actually improves how you cook. Not novelty. Not theatre. Not the kind of thing you take out once a year to show off to guests and then push back in the cupboard. Proper tools that earn their place on your worktop (or in your kit) because they do a job better than anything else. Help you cook better. Naturally that’s a much shorter list than most gift guides will have you believe.
This is the person who cares about getting things right. Not anyone who slavishly follows recipes or watches cooking shows on TV; we went with cooking more seriously than that. The people who cook in our lives that we want to buy gifts for care about food, period. They taste as they go. They have opinions on knives. They own a good pan and they know why that matters. You can’t simply give these people something decorative and call it a day.
You’ll find items that work for different kinds of cooks in here, because this needs to cover all those bases. The serious baker needs something on this list, but so does the person cooking a meal from scratch every night. Both of them need something different to the person who hasn’t quite got that hobbyist mindset yet but is getting more seriously into learning how to cook. We tried to cover all of the above without inflating the list just to make it seem larger than it is.
We thought about every item on this list. Some of them we own and use ourselves. Some were recommended by people we trust who cook seriously. None of them made the cut because they look good on Instagram or come in nice packaging. * (*Please note that is a far stricter filter than it sounds.)
Gift for a Cook is where we’d start if someone we knew took food seriously. Period.