Cool Tools in the Kitchen

There are now over 3,000 reviews of great stuff on Cool Tools. In an effort to make that abundance more useful we've selected the best recommendations in a narrow field, updated the info, and formatted the reviews into a handy ebook. We are releasing the first of those ebooks today, as Cool Tools in the Kitchen: Things We Recommend. This collection of the best of Cool Tools was edited and updated by Steven Leckart, who formerly edited this Cool Tools website, and was designed and engineered in partnership with O'Reilly Publishers.

Steven Leckart picked out the best 80 kitchen-related tools you might not know about, updated their reviews and ordering information, and stuffed them into a very portable epub format for quick browsing. He also added a sprinkling of food-tool related tips. The book resurrects from the archives some great old kitchen tools that are still great, and brings together some speciality tools that few will need, but everyone should know about (almost just as important). I found it a great refresher course to flick through this collection of highly-evolved tools, reminding me of tools I had forgotten, and suggesting others that would make a great gift for someone else.

It costs $6. Yes, you can root through the archives of Cool Tools for free and eventually find all these, but for this modest price you get a carefully curated, winnowed, and updated serving of great tools specific for food lovers, cooks, kitchen mavens, and anyone who loves well-designed stuff. And you can screen it on a tablet or phone.

This ebook can be viewed on any device which takes the common epub format. It has been optimized for iBooks on the iPad, but it can be screened on your computer, Nooks, and with the appropriate readers, iPhones, Android phones, and iPads. We plan to do other ebooks such as Cool Tools for the Outdoors, or the Workshop, assuming folks find this one useful.

-- KK

Cool Tools in the Kitchen

Kevin Kelly and Steven Leckart

2011, 14MB (EPUB)

$6

Published by and available from O'Reilly

Don't forget to leave a comment or submit a tool over at Cool Tools

• [Randy Graham]

  Heading off to buy it. Always love my Cool Tool reads, having long read the RSS feed. Only wish the ebook was available in PDF format as well as epub, but that’s purely a convenience issue. Looking forward to digging into this.

• [Four Naught Four]

  It took me just a few minutes to browse through ~130 kitchen related gadgets on the site to find a dozen or so that might be relevant to my interests.  How could this possibly be worth $6?

• [futnuh]

  Surely a more fitting way to earn money from this collection is via the product makers, not the reader. Sure it’s only $6, but who pays to read advertising?

  • [TacoChuck]

    Not accepting money from the manufacturers is one way to help ensure no bias. Otherwise how are you going to know why an item is included, was it included because the manufacturer paid more than someone else or because it was the best tool?

    • [EH]

      I would assume an item is included because it had previously appeared on the CT blog.

      • [TacoChuck]

        Once they start taking money from manufacturers you are never going to know why it appeared on the CT blog or in any compilations.

        Lets say manufacturer A pays 5k to be in the compilation. Now when the blog has a chance to publish a review of another product by A it is probably going to get a green light because they know if they include it in another compilation, bang, another 5k.

  • [mccrum]

    Just about anyone who buys magazines or watches television.

• [Z]

  So we’ll have have profitsharing for our submiterated cool tools, right?