Avoid Buying These 8 Useless Kitchen Gadgets That Will Clog Up Your Junk Drawer

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In an age of influencers and online reviews, we think we've become savvier than our infomercial-watching predecessors. Yet we all become guilty of falling victim to advertising and over-shopping. Everyone has been there: You see a TikToker using a shiny new device in their videos, or the Temu wheel of fortune suggests you get a free avocado slicer with your purchase. Out of nowhere and against all reason, you feel like you simply must have it. Months go by, and after using this new device once or twice, you've forgotten all about it.

And as a recipe developer and food blogger, I've tested my fair share of kitchen gadgets for reviews or for personal consumption. Some, like the cherry pitter or mandoline slicer, became instant favorites. Others have proven themselves obsolete over time. Based on my experience and scouring the Internet for many online reviews, read on to see why you should avoid buying these eight useless kitchen gadgets.

If there's one kitchen gadget I found extremely hard to break up with, it would be the garlic press. When many budding amateur chefs begin in the kitchen, they often rely on the garlic press for stripping and mincing their garlic cloves, and I was no different. It's easy, affordable, and accessible. What's not to love? A lot, if you ask professional chefs.

The garlic press is the kitchen gadget Alton Brown absolutely despises, according to a video he posted on his Facebook. Anthony Bourdain was on the same page. One reason is that the press is single-use, which makes it a part of a family of gadgets derided as a "unitasker" in culinary lingo. Brown also takes issue with how hard it is to clean well. And Bourdain, like myself and many others, simply claims that by crushing the garlic, you lose a lot of its flavor and potency.

It is worth noting that not all cooks hate the garlic press. In fact, Middle Eastern chef Yotam Ottolenghi swears by it during his cooking Masterclass, saying it's the best way to clean and mince as much garlic as he needs for his pungent dishes. But to each their own.

If you cook with herbs often, you may have been tempted to buy an herb stripper on Amazon or even Etsy. Herb strippers are often made out of metal or plastic, but they can also come in cute, organically shaped ceramic forms or even wood. In its essence, it's a bowl with a small hole in it or a ruler-like shape with circular cutouts in various sizes. The idea is always that you insert an herb or even a leafy green like kale and pull it through the hole, separating the tough stems from the coveted leaves.

There is nothing wrong with how the device works, but the fact remains that it does nothing that a pair of hands and a good knife can't do. It's not hard to strip tough herbs and leafy greens. In a pinch, you can even de-stem your herbs with a box grater. You don't need an additional kitchen gadget that you'll be hard-pressed to find, let alone clean properly.

Oh, spiralizer, how you disappointed me. This kitchen gadget had its heyday in the 2010s with the rise of keto and low carb diets. It had one stated overarching purpose — to turn any vegetable or hard fruit into long, noodle-like stands or ribbons. It came with an even bigger promise: to replace starchy, carb-heavy pasta in our diet with healthy, fresh, and delicious veggie-based, spiralized noodles. The reality was much messier.

The most common vegetable spiralizer was made out of plastic, which easily stained from the juices of bright vegetables like beets and sweet potatoes. It also proved to be clunky, often tearing softer zucchini in half, tilting it in bizarre angles, and otherwise producing mushy noodles. Finally, it takes up plenty of room in your cupboards or drawers.

The truth is, you don't really need a spiralizer if you have a shredder, a julienne peeler, mandoline, or even a box grater. You can even spiralize cucumbers without any fancy kitchen tools. Even if you're a dedicated veggie noodle eater, getting a spiralizer just isn't worth it.

If shredding a chicken using two forks just seems like an insurmountable task to you, then you may have fallen victim to purchasing the meat shredder, also known as meat claws. The ultimate unitasker, meat claws look like, well, two claws or plastic combs with very sharp teeth. They don't take up a lot of space in your drawer, but they serve absolutely no purpose besides helping you shred cooked meat, and most users are not fans. The other issue with the claws is that they actually force you to get dirtier than you would with forks or the TikTok-viral rotisserie chicken shredding shortcut using a Ziploc bag. Because they are shorter than forks, your hands get much closer to the meat, covering you with juices.

Instead of this device, we recommend you practice your fork shredding skills. Keeping your cooked chicken warm may also help you shred it much faster and easier.

If you thought the garlic press angered chefs, then you should meet the avocado slicer. Made out of plastic, this device has only one purpose — to help you slice avocados into even slices. That's right, this gadget doesn't help you ripen them or even scoop out the avocado itself. Instead, it addresses what any sharp paring knife can do, and it doesn't even do that well, as it only works on softened, perfectly ripe avocados.

Now, to be frank, "avocado hand" is a real risk that, according to OSF HealthCare, lands nearly 9,000 people in the hospital each year when they try to stab the pit of their avocado with a sharp, heavy chef's knife and injure themselves in the process. But there are plenty of avocado pitting tricks you may want to buy before purchasing this unitasker.

The star of many tables from the 1960s to the '80s, the electric knife was at one point owned by approximately one-third of all American families in the U.S. We can attribute its massive success to major marketing efforts by appliance companies, a nationwide state of early-onset carpal tunnel syndrome, or maybe turkeys back in the good old days were somehow stronger and more resistant to human-powered cutting. The truth will likely always remain a mystery.

Despite its past success, the electric knife is not a vintage tool you should run out and purchase. While some fishermen recommend it for breaking down small fish, many others complain that it ruins the texture of meat and results in uneven cuts. There is also plenty of criticism about its design and the fact that it can be very loud.

Today, some American households still whip out the electric knife for Thanksgiving, but we don't think you should be one of them. Instead, invest in a good meat cleaver.

If you've ever removed a rotten banana from your work lunch bag or your child's backpack, then you may have considered buying a banana case. Designed to be in the shape of a banana, this plastic container is part of a long list of single fruit or vegetable storage containers. And the worst part is, it doesn't even fit all bananas. Well, the banana slicer is pretty much the same thing (except it chops up the fruit), also having a singular purpose for only one food.

One of the most popular banana slicers is undoubtedly the Hutzler 571. Still, it solicited a chorus of snide comments from Reddit users, with the best thing said about the banana slicer being that it was "just fine — but is crap to clean." Mostly, people just hated the idea of trying to squish their bananas into a rigid plastic device rather than just using a knife. Yet somehow, more than 7,000 people have purchased and rated it almost five stars on Amazon. But if you own a cutting board and a knife, you probably could do without this decidedly useless gadget.

The hamburger patty mold, also known as a burger press, is usually made out of plastic, like this Cuisinart 3-in-1 Patty Maker, or it's made from a combination of metal and plastic, such as the Meykers Non-Stick Hamburger Mold. In all of its iterations, though, it is pretty much unnecessary.

We can understand using a 4-inch round ring mold to give your hamburger patties a nice circular shape. Uniform patties are easier to portion out and cook at the same time when feeding a crowd, which is usually one of the main concerns when forming ground beef into patties. But there is absolutely no need to buy a specialty container for squishing your patties. You may actually end up misshaping your patty more when trying to take it out of the mold or compacting the burgers so much you end up with tough pucks.

Instead, we recommend you use the right type of beef for juicy burgers and practice working it with your hands. This will give you deliciously tender burgers unlike any hamburger mold ever could.