We’ve prepared a list with all essential strainers for your kitchen. Cooking involve the use of water, whether it is to clean, to boil or extract ingredients in a can.

This blog post is the part 5 of the series of the VIVE’s Guide to essential cooking tools and utensils. Check the others parts here.

1. Mesh strainer: are used to scoop impurity in a stock pot, or elements you wish to discard/separate from liquid. The mesh is fine enough so our Chefs use it to sieve ingredients in a form of powder such as flour, and icing sugar.

2. Strainers: these are perfect when you are cooking something in boiling water and you need to separate the food from the water. Maybe you are cooking pasta and you still need to keep the water for that carbonara sauce? A strainer is going to be much more useful than a Colander here.

3. Colander: are more or less the same as a mesh strainer however they are much stronger and more durable. We use them for those bulkier ingredients like potatoes or larger quantity of pasta.

4. Citrus squeezer: these are very useful for squeezing the juice out of your fruit.  This is a very fast and effective way of juicing your fruit. Consider combining this with a mesh strainer to remove the pulp as well.

6. Salad spinner:  like the name indicate is use to remove the excess of water from a washed salad leaves. In some cuisines, having water on salad leaves is considered acceptable, but in mist cuisine it isn’t. Water residual on salad leaves seems to dilute the taste of a dressing. Our Chefs at VIVE use salad spinner to clean berries, even leeks. Truth be told, Salad Spinner takes space, however having it at sight may encourage you to eat more salad which isn’t that unhealthy after all.

5. Can opener: are useful when a recipe call for canned food. We don’t use it often in the kitchen but it comes handy to open that one can when needed!