How to Care for Your Favorite Kitchen Tools

Inspired by conversations on the Food52 Hotline, we're sharing tips and tricks that make navigating all of our kitchens easier and more fun. 

Today: Scrub-a-dub-dub, all pots and pans in the tub. Er, sink. Here's how to take care of your most beloved kitchen tools. 

Your favorite tools: The ones that you reach for every day, the ones that get used more often than any other. You and you alone know which ones are the most valuable, the most useful. Maybe it's your beloved hand-cranked coffee grinder, or that gleaming copper pot you picked up on your last trip to Paris. Maybe it’s that Pyrex bowl set straight out of the 70s, the one you smuggled out of your Nana's kitchen when no one was looking. Or it's the first wooden spoon you bought when you moved into your first apartment.

Keeping our tools clean is hands-down the most important thing we can do for them. Believe us: Your kitchen will thank you.

• Wooden cutting boards: They warp, they split, they absorb colors and off-flavors. But they’re one of the hardest-working tools we have –- here’s how to keep them looking new and smelling fresh.

• Freshly ground spices are a cook’s best friend. They amplify and embellish the flavors of our favorite dishes, but their teeny-tiny particles clog your spice grinder, and their oils leave an invisible residue on the surface. Who knew that cleaning it is as easy as a handful of rice? 

• Copper pots and pans are what kitchen daydreams are made of -– the ne plus ultra of kitchen gear. With just a little know-how and elbow grease, you can keep them from tarnishing. Show ‘em off and make ‘em shine.

• And then there’s cast iron. Once it’s treated, there’s almost no other pan that will work harder or last longer. There’s a lot of confusion out there about what works and what doesn’t –- here are tried-and-true ways to keep it clean, for both regular and enameled pans. 

• Face it: Washing dishes at the end of the night –- or the morning after –- is a drag.  But it’s even more of a bummer if you wash haphazardly, only to later find them sporting leftover grease tracks and smelling suspicious. Put your best dishwashing skills forward, and you can do it right the first time, with both your regular dishes as well as your Tupperware.