Cook Like Katie With Her Kitchen Picks

Katie’s Nespresso milk frother is perfect for jazzing up a cup of coffee in the morning. It can make both hot and cold froth at the touch of a button, so you can whip up your favorite Stabrucks cold brew drink at home. This one works great, but Katie has her eyes on an upgrade in the form of Breville’s Milk Cafe frother, which allows you to customize the temperature of your milk and even make hot chocolate.

Maldon sea salt is a special finishing salt that’s flaky, mild, and perfect for sprinkling on just about anything right before serving. Chef Bobby Flay brought some to Katie when he came to one of her parties and she’s been hooked ever since. Since the flakes are too big to fit through the top of a shaker, get a small salt cellar for your counter to keep it accessible.

Like a lot of us, Katie is working on eliminating single-use plastics from her house, and zip-top plastic bags are a prime culprit. W&P’s porter bags are dishwasher safe and have rounded corners that prevent hard-to-clean food buildup. You can use them to store food in the fridge or freezer, steam vegetables, or even sous-vide meat or fish.

Another wasteful kitchen item that’s easy to replace? Plastic wrap. Rather than buying roll after roll of wraps that don’t seal food well anyway, go for the genius Bee’s Wrap,  food covers made with organic beeswax. Katie gave them to friends over the holidays, but you can gift them any old time.

Katie’s Le Creuset Dutch Oven is one of her go-to’s, especially for winter cooking. You can make risotto, stews, pot roasts, soups, and even bread in this bad boy, and it looks absolutely beautiful as a serving dish as well. Check the Le Creuset website to figure out what size you’ll need.

Katie uses her Nutribullet to make her go-to smoothie: Frozen banana, almond milk, frozen strawberries and blueberries, chia and flax seeds, frozen cherries if she has them, and collagen (when she remembers). 

Using a mortar and pestle can seem like a lot of unnecessary work, but grinding herbs and spices right before using them brings out more flavor than you’ll get from the pre-packaged stuff. Katie uses hers to grind up dried herbs from her garden.

Using your normal dish sponges to clean vegetables will prematurely wear them down and force you to replace them more often. (And is, frankly, a little gross.) Katie just got a potato scrubber you can use to get the dirt and tough skin off other root vegetables, too.

Katie loves her Cuisinart food processor, which she uses to make fresh, herbaceous pesto in the summer. This small version is the perfect size to keep on your counter, and has four different settings for chopping, grinding, pureeing, and emulsifying whatever’s on your menu.

Katie’s been given a lot of fancy coffee makers through the years, but her default is still her basic Mr. Coffee. It’s easy to use, and, Katie says, “like an old friend.” This one is programmable so you can set it to brew automatically in the morning. Katie’s favorite coffee is hazelnut, but she’s not picky as long as she’s getting her caffeine!

Yes it’s true: Katie was using a paintbrush for her egg washes before she finally bought an actual basting brush. (She wants it to be known that the paintbrush had never been used for painting.) When it comes to basting, she prefers a brush one with natural bristles–like this set of three–rather than the silicone ones, for better application.

Molner does a lot of cooking, too. When he’s donning the apron, he loves The Barbuto Cookbook by Chef Jonathan Waxman, who owns the restaurant of the same name where Katie and Molner went on one of their first dates. It’s full of sumptuous, flavorful Italian dishes from the restaurant’s menu, and it’s the kind of cookbook you’ll want to sit down and read cover to cover.