The Most Popular Kitchen Gadget In California Might Not Surprise You
We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.
What are your go-to kitchen gadgets, the countertop tools you reach for day after day, meal after meal? Is it the coffee machine that compels you from your bed each morning? The kitchen scale that helps keep your diet on track? The air fryer, a food processor, the slow cooker? There is no shortage of tools and gadgets for every kind of cook — from the quirky, like the Loch Ness Monster soup ladle (via Amazon) to the ingenious, such as Bee's Wrap tight-fitting, reusable food wraps (at Food52), and even the indulgent, like the $1,200 Cirrus Ice Ball Press Kit that produces spheres that melt less quickly (per Williams-Sonoma). There's even the petty, like this Customizable Pizza Slice Toppings Divider, which keeps your SO's mushrooms from touching your pineapple (seen at This Is Why I'm Broke).
According to Eat This, Not That!, the insurance agency Surety First got curious about which kitchen gadgets are most prized in each state in the U.S., so they used Google Trends to find out which cooking tools were the most searched in each region. Most of the findings were conventional: Food thermometers, air fryers, and ice cube trays; but there were a few head-scratchers, too. We're still wondering about the favorite butter churners in Louisiana, hot dog toasters in Missouri, and sous vide cookers in North Carolina. And who would have thought that residents of Alaska were on the hunt for ice cream makers above all other gadgets?
Others results on the list were less surprising, such as Washingtonians' searches for espresso machines and Californians' quest for this morning staple.
Californians still really love their juicers
California basically gave birth to the juice trend in the 1970s, according to the website Well Pared. But, Californians' relationship with juicers goes back to a man named Norman Walker, who invented and manufactured the first electric contraption in the 1930s in Anaheim. Although manual tools existed to extract the juice from fruits and vegetables, Walker believed these left vital nutrients behind (via The Atlantic). His machine, called the Norwalk, ground vegetables and fruits more finely than existing manual tools. Interestingly, his company was still making high-end juicers (costing around $2,500, per The Atlantic) up until 2021 when it went out of business.
There are four types of juicers, according to the website Goodnature: masticating, twin gear, cold press, and centrifugal. Most home options fall into this last category. Quick and relatively inexpensive, a centrifugal juicer allows the user to push fruits or vegetables through a tube, where a spinning blade chops them. At the same time, the pieces spin in a strainer, which extracts the liquid. Amazon has a large selection of centrifugal juicers that cost less than $100.
If you are looking for the best option, however, cold press juicers are superior, according to many experts at Tech Radar. Better at extracting juice from leafy greens and berries than centrifugal machines, they work by using a hydraulic or pneumatic press to exert pressure on the food fruits or vegetables — though, they cost about $500 or more. Oh, and the second state googling juicers the most? That's Nevada. Must be a West Coast thing.