Michael Probert

Short answer: a pre-seasoned skillet has had its first coat of oil baked on at the factory. Lodge, for example, says its cookware comes “seasoned and ready to use” straight from the foundry and that you build seasoning every time you cook. Follow the instructions that come with your pan before the first cook. Below […]

7 bread and serrated knives worth buying in 2026 — loaf knives plus serrated utility and tomato blades, checked against ATK and Reviewed testing.

A chef’s knife handles the big cutting board work, but plenty of jobs are too small and too close to your fingers for an 8-inch blade — peeling an apple, hulling a strawberry, deveining shrimp, trimming fat from a chicken breast. That’s a paring knife’s job, and a genuinely good one is one of the […]

Setting up a first kitchen — a new apartment, a first house, a big move — comes with a long shopping list, and knives are easy to get wrong twice: once by buying nothing and making do with whatever’s in a drawer, and again by overspending on a set built for someone who already knows […]

Bakers and serious home cooks tend to be pickier gift recipients than most — they already have opinions about their tools. The safest bet is something that solves a real problem in their specific routine: a bread knife that doesn’t tear a crusty loaf, a bench scraper that actually cleans dough off a counter, a […]

Not every kitchen gift needs to be a knife. Between our gifts for cooks guide and here, we’ve tried to cover the occasions that actually come up — the wedding registry, the housewarming, the milestone splurge, the office gift exchange. Below are 6 kitchen gifts we’d genuinely recommend in 2026, organized by the occasion they […]

The flimsy little saw and dull “knife” that come free in most pumpkin-carving kits are the single biggest reason jack-o’-lanterns come out ragged. A genuinely sharp, correctly shaped blade turns carving from a wrestling match into fifteen easy minutes. Below are 6 knives (plus two non-knife tools worth knowing about) we’d actually recommend for pumpkin […]

Buying a gift for someone who loves cooking is easy to get wrong — a gadget that sits in a drawer, a set they’ll never use all of, a “chef” mug. The gifts that actually get used are the ones that touch a knife, a board or an edge: the tools someone reaches for every […]

A great steak deserves a knife that slices cleanly through it, not one that tears or drags. Steak knives are an easy category to overlook until you’re serving guests with a dull, mismatched set from the back of a drawer. Below are 8 steak knife sets we’d genuinely recommend in 2026, drawing on published tests […]

Wüsthof and Zwilling are the two names that dominate any “best German chef’s knife” conversation, and both are made a few miles apart in Solingen, Germany — the city that’s built cutlery for centuries. That closeness makes the rivalry personal but the actual differences are smaller than the brand loyalty around them suggests. This guide […]