In Defense of Kitchen Tweezers
Kitchen tweezers are a polarizing tool. They regularly end up on lists of kitchen gadgets that you just don't need, and they have an association with snobbery and fussiness, associated with restaurants and cooks who are obsessed with foams, gels, and dehydration.
It's true that kitchen tweezers aren't an essential. I wouldn't put them in the same bracket as a chef's knife, or mixing bowls, or kitchen towels. It's roughly on the same level of a kitchen torch—something that's not essential but actually comes in handy in way more situations than you'd think. And not just for plating finicky greens or placing a single violet on an ice cream sundae, either.
The kitchen tweezers I'm taking about aren't the same size as the ones you might have in your medicine cabinet. Rather, I'm talking about a giant version of those that are much longer, ones you can purchase for less than $10 on Amazon. Think about them as tongs for finer kitchen work, or cooking chopsticks that are attached at the end. If you already have cooking chopsticks and are adept at using them, you can probably skip out on the kitchen tweezers, to be honest, but my dexterity with chopsticks leaves much to be desired.
Kitchen tweezers let you grasp and move things on a pan that a tong would otherwise tear. I found them useful recently when I was frying up a batch of falafel, and found the tongs and fish spatula that are usually my go-tos too clumsy to work with. Kitchen tweezers were perfect to reach into the cast iron pan and gently turn the balls of falafel without splattering oil all over myself or accidentally squishing the falafel into a patty.
But they're not just good for frying, an activity that I do pretty rarely. They're the tool i reach for when I'm trying to finesse something small, like plucking a bit of eggshell from a bowl without dirtying my hands or grabbing a cornichon or pickled jalapeno from a narrow jar. They're great for moving smoething delicate, like a scallop in a pan, without scoooping them up. They end up being much more useful than their reptutation, and they're slim enough not to take up a lot of extra room in the jar I have of utensils on the counter. Whie I woudn't go so far as to say that you need them, I'd say that you might want a set of kitchen tweezers around.
