When it comes to cooking dinner every night, one tool I can't live without is my kitchen tongs, which I use to flip meat, toss stir-fries, serve salads, and much more. But I had no idea there were four more surprising uses for this everyday tool — including one that is especially helpful for short cooks like me.
Cook's Illustrated recently shared four ways to use kitchen tongs beyond the usual flipping and turning of food. My favorite: Use them to grab hard-to-reach goods. If you are cursed with high kitchen shelves and short limbs, you can use tongs to reach up and grab boxes and other light, non-breakable items from the top shelf.
Three other unusual uses for tongs:
- As citrus reamers: Hold the tongs closed and push the end into cut citrus halves to juice them.
- As bottle openers: Use the inner edge of a metal tong arm to catch and pop off bottle caps.
- In place of meat forks: When carving a piece of meat, use tongs to steady it instead of a fork, and you won't puncture the meat as you cut it.
Do you have any other offbeat uses for kitchen tongs?
Related: The Kitchn's Guide to Essential Cooking Tools & Utensils
(Image: woodygraphs/Shutterstock)
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I use them for everything, including getting things that have been dropped into hard to reach places. I might keep a daily log of tong usage and repost in a week!
I have wooden kitchen tongs, and I use them all the time for freeing bread that's got stuck in the toaster - saves me having to lean in to the awkward socket and unplug it!
They are awesome for dressing a salad (not just serving it). Use a decent sized bowl and add your dressing, (i end up using a lot less if i use the tongs this way) and mix while shaking the bowl simultaneously and you will get a well dressed salad.
I use them to lift bunt pans out of the pressure cooker. Insert closed in hole, then let them snap open and pull up!
i use tongs to lift my steamer basket out of the pan i'm steaming veggies in.
At the coffee shop I work at, we keep an extra-long pair of tongs by a high shelf and use it to grab and pull down the five-pound bags of coffee stored up there without using a step ladder. Everyone yells, "go go gadget tongs!"
I use my kitchen tongs to reach things from the high shelves in my cupboard!
I use them to retrieve items that I accidentally drop down the garbage disposal. It happens more often than I'd like to admit. :)
awesome tips!
when i bought a pait of tongs (after having been without for a month after moving into a new apartment) i was so thrilled that my shopping partner dubiously regarded me as insane. i told him, "but they're so USEFUL you have no idea!"
in addition to the obvious uses, i use my metal, no-frill tongs to pull the slimy food detritus from the bottom of the sink as well as to pluck spices from my hard-to-reach shelf by the cooktop.
I used my tongs just this weekend to transplant a cactus.
I sometimes use mine with the stainless steel scratchy pad in hot water when I've burned stuff in my stainless pot(s), like last weekend when I accidentally let the chicken stock boil away when cooking brown rice. I had black rice stuck to the bottom of the pan.
It won't get all of it, but will get the worst of it. Then once cooler water is in the pot, I can then finish scrubbing with said scrubbie and my hand to restore the pot to usefullness again.
This weekend I used tongs to catch wires my husband was pushing up through the floor behind the entertainment center, so we didn't have to move it.
Kitchen tongs work perfectly for lifting creme brulee (or other custard-type desserts baked in small ramekins) out of a water bath. It's so much easier to check if they're done baking than trying to lift the whole pan out when the ramekins are too hot to touch!
I use mine for reaching the high up shelves all the time, and definitely always use them when slicing meat. I don't think it would have occurred to me to use a fork for that.
As a citrus reamer is genius, definitely filing that away for later.
I never fry with anything else. Tongs satiates the control freak in me. It allows me to position my meat on the pan the way I want it. It also allows me to dip certain portions of the meat that I want cooked more before I finally take it out.
Quite handy for fishing the unexpected from the lav.
Never to be used again of course.
Let's not forget, they are the best back scratchers around. I'm single, so they get a LOT of use in the winter.
No one pointed out speculum??
I live in nyc, and I have a good friend who is cursed with a pretty bad mouse problem. She uses a pair of extra long tongs to pick up the mice and drown them in a bucket if they don't die when they get caught in the traps. Useful, yet horrifying.
Ha! The tongs pictured are the exact tongs I use to pluck cat turds from the litter box.
When I finally bought some for cooking I had to get some that looked utterly, completely different for the sake of my mental health.
(transplanting a cactus, that cracked me up!)
My garden has it's own set of kitchen tongs. I pick the stink bugs off my citrus trees and dump the bugs into a bucket of water.
Yes, I am with everyone who loves their tongs for reaching things! I keep two kinds in the kitchen. I hadn't thought of using them for stuck toast, thanks for that one. :)
Oh,, I meant to add that I also use tongs for dealing with the once-a-year dead critter the cats manage to get off the balcony every summer. So far three birds and two bats. I can't touch them with my hands. I feel so guilty the cats actually got something off the balcony.