When I moved to my apartment four years ago, I was faced with the daunting task of building an entire kitchen’s worth of wares from scratch. Thanks to a generous shipment from my mother that consisted mostly of cast-offs from her kitchen (pots missing a lid, a lobster cracker, and at least two meat tenderizing mallets), and a few quick purchases of my own, I cobbled together a functioning collection of things that worked well enough. But I always knew there was better out there on the horizon.

There’s a wide range of DTC brands out there touting kitchenware, so much so that it can feel overwhelming and hard to parse. Our Place, whose Always Pan comes in a variety of soft, millennial-friendly colors, sells kitchen tools as well as cookware; Great Jones, besieged by drama in 2021, only makes bakeware and cookware. Caraway completes the trifecta, but stands out from the pack for me because of the practicality that seems to be baked into their products. Every item has its place and everything they sell seems to be maximized for efficiency. I am inefficient at best and sloppy at worst, so their offerings appealed to me the most. And subsequently, over the course of a year or so, all of my kitchen tools have been replaced with Caraway’s and I’m never looking back.

A fine surface for cutting

Cutting boards are the sort of thing that you don’t want to think about when you’re actually using it, and if you are thinking about it, well, you probably need a new one. Caraway’s set comes in three sizes—large, medium, and small—and are made of FSC-certified birchwood, so you can rest easy knowing that the tools you’re using were made sustainably. The sizes in question are, somehow, perfect for my needs and likely yours, too—both the large and the medium have a recessed indent at the top that spans the width of the board, which is very useful for keeping stuff out of the way while you use the board. The smallest board works as a charcuterie platter in a pinch and its recessed indent is a round divot, which acts nicely as a place to hold olive pits. And because storage is generally an issue in apartment kitchens like mine and counter space is precious, the cutting boards come with their own stand that stores them like files in a filing cabinet. After a few months with these cutting boards, I got rid of the motley assortment I’d been using—most of them warped and all purchased from a dollar store in my neighborhood—and do not miss them at all.

Throw away your knives (and then get some new ones)

Knives and other kitchen tools, like spatulas, tongs, and the like, are more persnickety; and, if you consider yourself a “food person,” this category is where you’re most likely to want chef-quality materials. I do consider myself such but I also know that I don’t need a cleaver, a $200 chef’s knife, or those big tweezers fancy chefs use to plate on Top Chef. Caraway’s prep set is bare bones, so much so that every tool must be both essential and multipurpose. The set comes with four knives and a pair of kitchen scissors, and then five separate utensils, all contained in a very smart and sleek storage unit that takes up little space on my counter.

The utensils are serviceable—the spatula included is great for flipping whatever you might want to flip, but also works as a tool for wok cooking, and while the tongs won’t replace my metal tongs, they’re great for tossing and serving salads and pulling very hot things out of the toaster. The best thing about the utensils is their little storage container, because I no longer have to open the drawer that houses all my other kitchen stuff to find what I’m looking for.But I was most surprised by the knives, as the ones I’d been using for years were roughly the same sharpness and quality of the kind you’d find at a middling AirBnB and were becoming a source of frustration. Caraway’s knives make a strong argument for minimalism in the kitchen and are a pleasure to use. Instead of a traditional knife block, which takes up space and is often too big for the amount of knives you might actually have, Caraway’s is small and sort of genius—there’s a spot for every knife, a separate slot for the very sharp kitchen shears, and the whole thing fits onto a storage tray, right next to the utensils for ease.

A sexy can opener does exist!

The brand’s latest kitchenware offering is the one that I was the most excited about. Kitchen gadgets are extremely fun to purchase but they are often ugly and also, don’t work well or are used so infrequently that they just become clutter rather than anything else. Caraway pared down the gadgets to the absolute essentials: a pizza cutter, an ice cream scoop, a vegetable peeler, a garlic press, and a can opener, all rendered in shiny, bulbous stainless steel. There’s a pleasing heft to each tool; the ice cream scoop, pizza cutter, and vegetable peeler do what they’re supposed to and do it very well. But the real standouts for me are the garlic press and the can opener; the former is a tool I didn’t know I needed and the latter, a tool that I used to hate but don’t anymore. The large chamber of the garlic press means I can crush two or more cloves at a time and the whole thing comes apart for easy cleaning; as for the can opener, it does its one job very well, and looks good while doing so. The tools come with a storage tray that fits each item perfectly and makes it so you can find what you need when you need it.

Surely I could’ve cobbled together a set of kitchen tools and knives myself—but doing it piecemeal means that it wouldn’t be perfect and when perfection is so hard to find elsewhere, I’m going to take it where I can get it.

Top image courtesy of Caraway

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I’ve Replaced All My Kitchenware With Caraway and Have Not Looked Back