This blog was inspired by a brief moment of frustrated rage I had in December 2011 when I read the fifth (or maybe sixth?) holiday gift guide that recommended a set of Essential Kitchen Tools that were, I am not kidding, about 90 percent overlapping in content.

There’s a reason the Essential Kitchen Tools stories are all so similar to one another: There are certain basic, brilliant tools that decades of trial, error, and pudding-borne proof in the modern kitchen have identified as meaningfully better than the other products in their category. People who have been turned on to these tools become blazingly, evangelically obsessed with their quality, and I am unreservedly one of those people — I can talk at length about the wonders of Le Creuset, I have no idea how I lived before my first Microplane, and I have actually had a full-on fight with my boyfriend caused by him using soap on a cast-iron skillet. (I have since apologized.)

I don’t blame the people writing these stories and recommending these products. I know many of them, and I love and respect many of them. But it’s time to stop. We all agree. It’s time to canonize and be done with it. It is my fond hope that this website obviates the need for the Essential Cooking Tools story to ever be written ever again.

A silly but probably necessary disclaimer: This site is my own work. The opinions and recommendations are not officially those of my employer, but given my thesis that all food writers ever agree on how great these products are, odds are good that most of the people employed by my employer do actually share my opinions.

Agree? Disagree? helenrosner at gmail dot com