Here are three more of my favorite non-obvious kitchen tools (following last month’s Part 1).

LACERATE YOUR MEAT. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts deserve a comeback. They have a bad 1990s-era Cooking Light reputation, and almost no one cooks them right, so they’re usually bland and dry. But handled properly they stay tender and juicy and they can be better than thighs.

Getting that right requires good heat-control technique (or sous vide cooking, but that’s a topic for another day) and it helps to salt them overnight. But I’ve been getting great results the last few years by using a jaccard.

A jaccard has dozens of tiny sharp blades that tenderize meat by slicing through connective tissue. The cuts are small enough that the meat doesn’t totally fall apart, but it makes a noticeable difference, especially with leaner pieces of meat. The tiny cuts also make little channels into the meat that allow salt or marinades to penetrate deeper. It’s really effective. I cooked two boneless, skinless chicken breasts side by side when I first got one and the jaccarded meat was like a totally different cut.

However! There are two drawbacks to jaccards: they’re a pain to clean, and they have lots of moving parts that can break. The first one I owned needed to be completely disassembled to be cleaned properly—and since you’re dealing with raw meat, you really need to clean it thoroughly every time you use it—and I immediately lost one of the springs inside the mechanism and had to throw it away. The one I have now, from OXO, is dishwasher safe but the blades have started catching on the safety guard and I’m worried it’s going to stop working altogether. But it’s been enough of a game-changer that I will buy another one if it does.

SCRAPE YOUR BOARD. People who don’t use them roll their eyes when I suggest getting a bench scraper, but I have two and they’re legitimately my most-used kitchen tools. I use them constantly to ferry piles of chopped ingredients from cutting board to pan or prep bowl. It’s faster, more efficient, and cleaner than using your hand or the flat of a knife. (I also use them for bread dough.) Lots of people like the OXO version, which has a chunky, comfortable grip. Traditional bakery models look cool and have credibility-enhancing wooden handles, but they’re not dishwasher safe (wood). Personally I prefer the cheap kind with a rolled handle that can sit flush on your cutting board. Don’t pay extra for one with ruler markings on the blade—those wear off after a few washes. (Get a separate kitchen ruler instead.)

PROD YOUR VEGGIES. Having a fancy stainless steel cake tester might feel like an affectation—it’s basically a $12 replacement for a toothpick—but I know no better way to check vegetables for doneness. Cake testers, which are designed to be poked into a cake to see if the batter is still wet, are thin and sharp enough to quickly penetrate any vegetable, and they transmit enough tactile feedback to help you understand exactly how much give your potatoes have. Better than a knife and more practical than just taking a bite. I have a fancy Japanese model that I adore, but I bet even this commercial one that costs less than a dollar works fine.

Note: For what it’s worth, I don’t make commissions from any products I recommend or link to.

I have a pretty good routine going these days for turning cooking scraps into soup for the week while minimizing dirty dishes and stove time. This week I made two batches from scratch with completely different flavor profiles, a creamy kohlrabi soup and a curried squash soup, and used a few techniques to passively multitask.

We had a few other families over for dinner Friday night. While I was prepping the meal, I saved all my root vegetable trimmings (carrot and celery ends, onion skins and roots, some garlic nibs). Then, after I carved the whole chickens I’d grilled, I added the chicken carcasses, backs, and wings into my Instant Pot with the veggie trimmings. I also threw in some bay leaf, peppercorns, thyme sprigs, and any other soup-adjacent vegetable that was sitting around feeling sorry for itself. Then I topped it off with water and set it to pressure-cook for an hour and went to eat dinner and enjoy my guests.

After the dishes were done and the guests had left, the broth was ready. Sometimes at this stage I’ll strain everything and simmer it down until it’s deeply concentrated and can fit into whatever vessel I have available. But in this case I just let it cool on the counter overnight.

Saturday morning before the kids were up, I roasted cubed kohlrabi (tossed with oil, salt, and pepper) and halved, seeded winter squashes in a 425°F (220°C) oven on the same sheet pan. The kohlrabi was done sooner—as confirmed with my cake tester—so I scraped it off of that half of the sheet pan and let the squash go another 20 minutes.

While the vegetables finished roasting I prepared the rest of the ingredients for the soups: onions, garlic, celery, carrots for both, and then some Indian spices and coconut milk for the squash soup and more fresh thyme and bay leaf for the kohlrabi. Then it was just a question of setting up two pots, sweating the vegetables, toasting the spices for the squash soup, adding the roasted vegetables, and then ladling the broth directly from the Instant Pot through a strainer into the soup pots. I let everything simmer and meld for 30 or 40 minutes before puréeing and adding the coconut milk to the squash soup.

In the end I had two delicious soups before 10am. I froze half of each one and refrigerated the other half for lunches. Using a single sheet tray and straining the broth straight from the Instant Pot into the soup pots was a real reduction in dirty dishes, and going straight from the Instant Pot to the soup meant I didn’t have to free up a big chunk of refrigerator space for the broth overnight.

Don’t have an Instant Pot? You can do exactly the same thing by simmering the broth on a very low flame overnight, if you’re comfortable sleeping with the range running, or putting all the trimmings in the fridge until you’re ready and then simmering from breakfast before making soup for dinner.

I’m bad at making smoothies! Or so my children tell me. I’m working on a system for getting better at them, but I need your tips. Do you have a good recipe or technique or just a quick tip? Send it to me, please!

The jeon recipe I published two weeks ago had some errors in the conversions to metric, which I’ve now fixed in the web version. I regret the errors.

Via @mollytempleton.com on Bluesky.

More sourdough bread, inexpertly divided between two pans. And I dehydrated lemon verbena from the garden to use for tea this fall. There’s nothing better.

A kitchen song is a song I like to listen to in my kitchen.

“Jazz on the Autobahn” by The Felice Brothers. Listen to it when you keep setting off the smoke detector while you’re broiling something.

If you have questions, complaints, or want me to explain any of the jokes, mail me at [email protected]

Simmer Down is a weekly newsletter about cooking real food at home for people who want to do that but think they’re too busy to, written by me, Yossi Langer, a busy person with kids in Los Angeles.

I don’t use AI to write or research Simmer Down, but I do use Claude to review the text for factual errors and copy mistakes. Any emdashes are my own. I also use Claude to generate an SEO summary for the web version. This is not a statement of belief, just a personal preference: I’m writing this because I like to write. Any mistakes are my own.