The Indian Kitchen

Tools that earn their drawer space. Two of these came off the mango page because they are used far beyond mango season, and one of them is the only thing here a Konkan kitchen cannot do without.

Buy the scraper before the gadget

If you are furnishing a Konkan kitchen from scratch, the clamp-on coconut scraper comes before anything else on this page. Fresh coconut goes into the curry, the chutney, the solkadhi and the modak, and a scraper turns a ten-minute job into a two-minute one, every single day.

Get the clamp type that screws to the counter edge rather than the handheld blade. The handheld is cheaper, and you will use it twice.

Most of the rest of this page is honest about being optional. A sharp knife does what a mango cutter does. A set of jars does what a masala dabba does. What you are buying in each case is speed and a tidier drawer, not a result you could not otherwise get.

The one that is not worth it

Electric mango peelers and electric kulfi churns both exist and neither is worth the counter space. The peeler takes longer to clean than a mango takes to peel, and a kulfi churn solves a problem that a freezer and six hours already solve for free.

The same goes for most single-purpose gadgets sold around March. If a thing only works on one fruit for eight weeks a year, a knife is almost always the better buy.

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