Ultimate gift guide for home chefs and anyone who loves to cook or bake
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Need gift ideas for the home chef in your life? This gift guide will help you find the perfect gift!
We love good food and we typically practice cooking at least three times per day. To us, eating home-cooked meals is far more convenient and cost-effective than driving somewhere to purchase subpar food that’s often made with subpar ingredients.
Since our diets are highly seasonal with much of what we eat coming from our garden or foraging, we also enjoy experimenting and trying new things in the kitchen. We have no idea what category or label we fall under due to our eating patterns… Foodies? Kitchen nuts? Home chefs?
Whatever we’re called, there’s a good chance you might be shopping for someone special who also loves spending time in the kitchen — even if the kitchen in your own house is unused, neglected, and covered with a thin (or thick) layer of dust.
Not to worry! Our gift guide for home chefs will help you find the perfect gift for that special someone in your life…
Gift guide for people who love to cook & bake
The items listed in our home chef gift guide span a wide price range, so you can find the perfect gift regardless of your budget. Note that the items are not listed in any particular order.
Click on any of the links in this gift guide to learn more information about the product (current prices, color variations, etc).
1. Cast iron cookware
A kitchen without cast iron cookware isn’t a kitchen, it’s simply a room with potential. We absolutely love our cast iron cookware and use it daily. We have a mix of antique and new cast iron, and prefer it to enameled cast iron cookware because it doesn’t chip.
Why do we love cast iron cookware? They’ll last forever (some of ours are 100+ years old), they heat/cook beautifully, and they don’t contain hazardous materials like teflon.
If you have the time and interest, you can buy and restore antique cast iron cookware using our helpful guide.
Or you can choose from the new cast iron kitchen essentials (below) that any home chef will love:
- cast iron pan set
- cast iron waffle maker
- cast iron bread pan
- cast iron muffin tins
- cast iron dutch oven
2. Shun kitchen knives
About a decade ago, we bought a set of absolutely stunning Shun kitchen knives for Christmas. These hammered steel Japanese knives are stunning works of art, and they’re also extraordinarily functional in the kitchen.
If you’re having trouble choosing a knife, we recommend a classic Shun chef’s knife.
3. Food dehydrator
Wild-foraged chanterelle mushroom powder, black garlic, smoked pepper powder, candied homegrown Buddhas hand citron… We make and process a LOT of the foods we grow and forage in our 9-tray Excalibur dehydrator, which has the highest consumer ratings on the market for a reason. After decades of use and abuse, ours runs as well as it did on Day 1.
4. Ice cream, frozen yogurt, and sorbet maker
There’s often ripe fruit to be found in our garden or on a foraging adventure. When it’s blazing hot outside, that ripe fruit often gets transformed into frozen desserts… Guava & Meyer lemon ice cream and pawpaw passion fruit sorbet are two of our faves. And honeysuckle ice cream makes our hearts smile.
For the home chef who enjoys making delicious seasonal desserts, a Cuisinart ice cream/sorbet/frozen yogurt maker could be the perfect gift!
5. Kefir grains or powder
Most people have heard that yogurt is a good probiotic. However, as we’ve detailed elsewhere, milk kefir is a far better probiotic than yogurt. Plus, kefir tastes better (in our opinion) and is easier to make than yogurt.
There are two ways to make kefir (both of which could make a great gift):
- get living kefir grains(similar to a sourdough starter), or
- get kefir starter powder (doesn’t require continual tending like kefir grains do).
6. Mixers and blenders
Having good mixers and blenders is essential for the home chef (and home baker). Three that we can’t do without:
a. Immersion blender. An immersion blender lets you blend sauces, soups, etc right on the stove without cooling or transferring ingredients to a traditional blender.
b. KitchenAid stand mixer. Essential for sooo many baking recipes.
c. Countertop blender. Because immersion blenders aren’t ideal for all circumstances (example: making pesto), a countertop blender is another kitchen essential for home chefs. Ninja blenders are amazing. Yes, we speak from experience!
7. Kitchen scale
A kitchen scale is a great small item gift or stocking stuffer for a home baker or fermenter. For example, when you’re measuring out a specific weight of salt to make sauerkraut, you have to be quite precise. Likewise, if you’ve ever baked, you might have noticed that lots of recipes list ingredients by weight, not by volume.
Hence the need for a kitchen scale!
8. Tagine
If you’ve ever had authentic Moroccan food or any food made in an earthen tagine, it’s pretty life-changing. The best tagine we know of (and the one we have) is the Flame Tagine by Emile Henry. Three reasons we love it: 1) it’s very easy to clean and can go right in the dishwasher, 2) it’s large enough to make 6-10 servings, and 3) it can go up to 900°F, so we can use it in our wood-fired cob oven.
9. Wood-fired oven
Speaking of wood-fired ovens…
DIY wood-fired oven option – If you want to give the ultimate gift to a food-loving friend, spouse, or family member, you could offer to cover the cost of materials for a DIY cob oven that you make together with a few other people (using our cob oven construction guide). Cob ovens make the most incredible food, and your gift recipient will think of you every time they fire theirs up.
Purchased wood-fired oven option – If you’d rather get a wood-fired oven you can gift wrap, the Ooni Karu is hard to beat. One of our best friends has one and absolutely loves it. (He used to be a chef.)
+Pizza peel aka bread peel:
- Oh, and when the wood-fired oven is ready, a 42″ wooden pizza peel will solidify your position as the all-time best gift giver!
- It’s not as sexy or authentic, but a stainless steel pizza peel is also great for indoor use and cleans easier (we actually use both when doing cob oven bakes).
10. Pizza stone
You can also make fantastic pizza indoors using pizza stones. Here’s a really good pizza stone that even comes with its own pizza peel.
11. Fermentation crock
Sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles… There are so many wonderful fermented probiotic foods you can make in a fermentation crock.
12. Swingtop glass bottles
We ALWAYS have jars of homemade fermented liquid concoctions in our fridge or bubbling away on our countertops. And we always use reusable glass swingtop bottles for storage, whether it’s for cider, kombucha, ginger bugs, or other tasty beverages.
13. Conical stainless steel fermenter + glass carboys
Continuing on the fermentation theme… We used to make a lot of homemade alcohol fermentations back before the research literature convinced us that we should cut alcohol out of our lives for improved health. During that time, our stainless steel conical fermentation tank was often bubbling away with elderberry wine, pumpkin champagne, and other concoctions.
If your food-loving gift recipient loves making their own homemade beer or wine, they’ll love this gift!
+Add-on gift – Transferring/racking the final fermented concoctions (such as beer, wine, or cider) into glass carboys after fermentation is also essential. We’d advise against using plastic containers (even if it’s supposed to be food grade) to store or make any high acid and/or fermented liquids due to the potential for plastic compounds leaching into the liquid.
14. Pressure canner
Water bath canning is fine for jellies and jams but if someone is serious about canning and wants to safely can things such as protein-rich soups and stews with zero botulism risk, a pressure canner is essential. The All American pressure cooker-canner is perfect.
15. Weck canning jars
In the US, we’re used to the metal-lidded canning jars. However, in parts of Europe, Weck canning jars are universally used. Why? 
1) Weck canning jars have reusable glass lids, and 2) they don’t have the BPA coating found on the underside of our standard metal canning jar lids.
Check out Weck’s full list of canning jars to find the ones that make the perfect gift for you!
16. Cookbooks
We can’t have a gift guide for home chefs that doesn’t include a few cookbooks! Here are a few of our absolute favorite cookbooks that any kitchen dweller will love:
- Any cookbook written byYotam Ottolenghi. If forced to pick one, we’d recommend Plenty.
- Forage, Harvest, Feast: a wild-inspired cuisine by Marie Viljoen (an awesome human, forager, and gardener we also happen to know).
- Shrubs: An old-fashioned drink for modern times.
- The NOMA Guide to Fermentation – a fantastic book for the fermentation-curious or expert fermenter alike!
We hope our gift ideas for home chefs will help you find the perfect gift for the special food-loving, food-making friend, partner, or family member who makes your world taste better!
KIGI,
