Kitchen Tool School: The Flippin’ Awesome Spatula

The spatula deserves more respect. This little kitchen tool has so many useful functions.

In addition to turning delicate, flaky fish, a spatulz is also excellent for flipping, transferring, and scraping off various foods. Seek out a version that’s long, flat and sturdy, yet exceedingly thin and manipulable, with wide slots for draining off liquids like oil.

Use a slotted turner as an all-purpose breakfast tool to flip pancakes, crusty hash browns, oversized crepes, and delicate eggs. They’re also great for Mexican meals: turn a quesadilla over to brown it on the other side, then use the spatula to do double duty serving messy baked dishes like enchiladas.

I also use them when browning chicken cutlets, to gently apply a light amount of pressure to a piece of piece of steak as it cooks, melting the buttered side of a grilled cheese, lifting out casserole dishes, like lasagna or manicotti, and extracting sticky vegetables or parmesan cheese fricos from a baking sheet. If you’re pan-frying something like fritters, simply lift up the item from your sauté pan, let the oil drain out from underneath it, and dab it with something absorbent before transferring it to serving plate. Just make sure you wash yours before dessert; you’ll need it to get cookies off that sheet pan, and it comes in really handy when you’re serving tiramisu at a dinner party.