Why You Should Trust Epicurious Product Recommendations
At Epicurious we are, first and foremost, a recipe database. But to make any of our recipes, you need tools—perhaps even the tools we used to develop and test those recipes. With all our experience, across cuisines, techniques, and cooking situations, we’re uniquely positioned to make the best kitchen product recommendations.
At Epi when we recommend a product as “the best,” it’s because we’ve used it…a lot. And it means that, in using it a lot, we’ve determined that it is, in fact, better than all the similar products we’ve also used a lot. We get paid a commission for anything you choose to buy from our stories, but we’ll be honest: We opt not to recommend lots of items that could make us money because we just didn’t like how they performed. We retest all our top picks regularly against products and tools that are new to market (or at least new to us), so when we change our recommendations, it’s because our experience with those products has changed, or we tested a new product that performed better.
Who we are
Unlike some review sites that do their testing under more laboratory-style conditions or that rely on a list of credentialed industry professionals to make their choices, we aim to make recommendations from a true home cook’s perspective. Lots of us are self-taught in the kitchen, or were taught by family members growing up. So in many ways, we are you (or at least we are that friend from the group chat you’re always asking for cooking advice, because we really love to cook). We just have an extra 10 hours a day to spend geeking out over kitchen tools because it is literally our job. We can take entire days trying to find the hotspots on a saucepan or figuring out if a vegetable peeler can handle a heavy squash as well it can an apple, but we bring a home cook’s point of view to our testing.
We think this perspective is valuable because industry pros, as much as we love and respect them, often use equipment in different ways, at different intensities, and under different circumstances than you would at home. For example, a chef who needs to chop 50 onions a day for her mise en place might prize a very light knife with a particular geometry, but a home cook who rarely needs to chop more than three for that night’s dinner (and doesn’t have professional culinary training) might be better off with a knife that is heavier and more stable. We want to consider and reflect the broadest set of cooking situations we can.
How we test
Whenever possible, we try to test kitchen tools and appliances as we would use them in our regular lives. That means we often use our own home kitchens as the testing ground: We want to see what it’s like working with a product in a cramped kitchen or around a tornado of small children. Many of the products we like stay with us for years, not only so we can test their long-term durability, but also so we can see what it’s like to use them to put dinner on the table on a Wednesday, or to make an urgent cup of coffee before running out to catch a train. We aim for consistency, but not sterility, in our tests.
Factors we consider
The factors we use to evaluate the best performer in every category naturally change depending on the product category. For example, for coffee makers, it’s important to judge how evenly the showerhead dispenses water over the grounds, but this isn’t the case with chef’s knives. You can find specific criteria upon which we’ve judged each product in the “Factors We Evaluated” section of every individual review. However, here’s a rubric we keep in mind, no matter what the product is:
- Ease of use/setup
- Affordability compared to efficacy
- Durability
- Ease of cleaning
Why do we recommend multiple products?
A question we really do ask ourselves regularly: If a story is framed as The Best Coffee Maker or The Best Dutch Oven, or the best…anything, does it make sense to recommend more than one item? Doesn’t that undercut the meaning of the term “best”? When we include multiple items as “the best” in any of our Tested and Reviewed stories it’s because we believe they will fill a gap in the shopping experience of real people—people working within a specific budget or who might have less comfortability in the kitchen, for example. It might make sense to recommend a personal-sized blender, a high-powered blender, and a budget-friendly blender, but if it doesn’t make sense, we won’t do it. We don’t ever recommend multiple items as a way to plug particular brands or serve algorithmic needs.
Most importantly
We really love this stuff. We have fun finding out what performs well and what doesn’t. We enjoy diving down rabbit holes around the past and present of nonstick coatings or the rise of mass produced generic products that pop up under different names. We learn more about our own cooking by trying so many different pieces of equipment. Ultimately, we think you’ll learn more about yours, too.