Top 10 Kitchen Essentials for a Traditional Foods Kitchen. What are my most used items in my kitchen where I make all our food from scratch?
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Y’all know by now that I am a huge believer in traditional ancestral foods.
Give me all the raw milk, sourdough bread, organ meats, lacto fermented vegetables, and I will be a happy camper!
But what supplies exactly do you need in your kitchen for this sort of a nutritional lifestyle?
Most American kitchens are just not equipped well for preparing traditional foods. They don’t even have mason jars for fermenting! The tragedy!
Top 10 Kitchen Essentials for a Traditional Foods Kitchen
Now this list doesn’t have the super obvious things like silverware, knives, plates, bowls, etc. There are also obviously a lot of other items I use in my kitchen on a daily or weekly basis, like my instant pot, crockpot, stainless steel pots, french press and more! But these 10 are some of my favorite ones…
1. Kitchen aid
This thing saves me so much time and energy. Although arguably I suppose I’d have bigger muscles if I didn’t have a kitchen aid. The time and elbow grease it takes to stir up a thick cookie dough is more than you might expect. I can just set this running and go wash some dishes while I’m waiting for it to do my work for me!
Also, it makes the best butter! Butter is another thing that would take AGES to do by hand, shaking milk in a mason jar until the fat separates from the buttermilk. This saves you so much energy and it makes it go much faster.
2. Mason jars
Mason jars are arguably my most used kitchen item. Canned good storage, dehydrated food storage, freezer storage, drinking glasses, fermenting food, my sourdough starter storage, and I use the bigger glass jars to pick up my raw milk every week!
At this point I have over 500 jars and depending on the time of year, sometimes almost all of them are in use all at once.
3. Giant stockpot
Stockpots are just a must-have for a traditional foods kitchen. Particularly if you have a bigger family. This is the pot I use every single time whenever I make meat stock or bone broth, I do huge batches at once and freeze the extra to have on hand. I use this for making big batches of food to can…jams, pickles and brine, soups, applesauce. Then just for on a regular basis all year I use this for big batches of nourishing soups for our family.
You really can’t go wrong with a big stainless steel heavy bottomed stock pot.
4. Cast iron cookware
I’ve completely stopped using any other pans. I only use my cast iron pans. Once you get the hang of it and are good at cooking with cast iron, you just can’t go back, even to stainless steel. They are so sturdy and non-stick! But yet healthy for you! You don’t need any of that Teflon for a pan to be non-stick. You just need to learn how to use it properly.
Here are my instructions on seasoning your cast iron.
5. Berkey water filter
Filtering your water is so important. Even if you live way out in the country like us, and are on your own well, its surprising how many toxic chemicals there are in the water. It is just a fact of life today. People have dumped so many toxins, sprayed so many fields, and just have polluted a lot of the groundwater.
Did you know that you can usually find estrogen and even birth control in the water? Listen to this podcast about it!
So it was a huge priority for our family to get a high quality water filtration system. I also love to leave my glass of water in the sunlight for awhile before I drink it to structure it. Someday when we can afford it I would love to get a Somavedic (use code WILSONHOMESTEAD for a discount), one of the benefits of those is that they structure your water for you.
Anyway. Rabbit trail! On to my next kitchen essential!
6. Food processor
I use my food processor ALL THE TIME! One of my favorite things to use it for is chopping up cabbage for sauerkraut. But you can finely chop veggies for soups or casseroles, and even make a good pie crust dough!
7. Blender
Every kitchen needs a blender, even non-traditional foods kitchens. We usually have a smoothie once a week on the weekend as a treat, I make my blended coffee recipes with this. Lately what I’ve used it for the most is making my daughter’s homemade raw milk formula recipe.
8. Espresso machine
Yes. Don’t make fun of me. A coffee machine IS a kitchen essential.
You can’t change my mind.
It brings enough comfort and joy that we will hopefully always have one 😉
Right now we have a De’Longhi All-in-One Combination Maker & Espresso Machine. I use the espresso side about 3 times a day, but I rarely use the drip side haha. I found it used on FB marketplace for like $50 (originally around $250 new). It leaks like a sieve and I have to wrap a towel around the base when I run it.
But man oh man does it make a mean espresso. So its worth all the trouble it causes. And someday we will be able to afford a fancier one.
9. Canner
For those who make food security a priority, a canner is a must. I can preserve over 500 jars of food in an autumn season. That makes me feel so much better because if our power ever went out and the freezers turned off we would still have all my canned goods.
For the first 5ish years of our marriage I used a super old presto canner that my mom gave me. She argues that she just loaned it to me, but it somehow became mine over the years 😉 haha
But this year Luke bought me the canner of my dreams.
The 30qt All American pressure canner! Now I can pressure can double stacked quarts or pints, and I can even water bath can double stacked pints! Saves so much time to be able to double the amount of jars like that!
Plus it doesn’t have any rubber gaskets or anything that needs to be replaced every year like the cheaper canners. I don’t have to take it to the local extension office every year either to have the gauges tested!!
It has been my first full canning season with the new canner, and I am in love.
10. End grain cutting boards
Now this might surprise you. Why “end grain” cutting boards instead of “long grain”?
Well besides the fact that my very talented husband made these for me and they are freaking GORGEOUS! End grain cutting boards actually stay nice so much longer because the wood can actually “heal” back together.
I have about 5 of these, which is excessive, but that’s one of the perks of being married to a woodworker.
So that is the list of my top 10 kitchen essentials for my traditional foods kitchen.
I hope you enjoyed seeing what I use most of the time, and maybe this could even give you some gift ideas for other women who work in the kitchen a lot like me!
And blessings!
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Top 10 Kitchen Essentials
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