The Best Kitchen Tools for Summer Entertainment, According to Our Tests

If you want to make the most of the abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables available this time of year, consider making your own fresh juice. A masticating juicer (also known as a slow or cold-press juicer) slowly presses and crushes produce, making it your best bet for silky juices that retain more of the healthy vitamins and minerals found in fruits and vegetables. The Omega 43 RPM is our favorite masticating juicer — while on the expensive side, it’s easy to set up and use and produces smooth, high-quality juices with minimal foam or pulp. The powerful motor effortlessly breaks down tough ingredients like carrots, ginger, and kale yet stays quiet enough not to disturb the rest of the house while making your morning juice.

A backyard barbecue might not be the best time to break out your delicate high-end wine glasses. Instead, reach for this set of two Gabriel-Glas StandArt Crystal Wine Glasses, which are elegant enough to impress guests but still durable enough to use on patios, picnics, and in the backyard. Made in Austria with lead-free crystal, this all-purpose wine glass features an old-school bell shape with a subtle flare in the bowl. Deceptively light and delicate, it’s actually quite solid, sturdy, and even dishwasher-safe, making cleanup a breeze after big events. This high-quality glass performed so well for sipping Beaujolais and Cava during our testing that our experts were shocked by its lower price tag. It’s a great, durable, universal wine glass to break out for all your outdoor entertaining this summer. 

This summer, don’t settle for the lackluster grill at the park or communal campsite — bring the grill with you. A portable grill can offer all the benefits of a full-sized grill in terms of heat retention and capacity in a lightweight package that’s easy to use and take on the go. Sleekly designed like a briefcase, the Nomad Grill & Smoker folds easily for transporting and storing, and snaps closed after use to keep any lingering ash and embers contained on your drive home. As the name implies, it can also be used for both smoking and grilling meat — up to two racks of ribs or 15 burger patties, to be exact. The charcoal barbecue grill and smoker’s patented heat-dissipating technology also keeps the temperature of its outside shell cool so it can safely be used on surfaces like wooden picnic tables.

Cold brew is our favorite way to caffeinate in the summer, and making barista-quality cold brew at home is a cinch if you have the right tools. The Mueller Cold Brew Coffee Maker is an affordable model that’s easy to use — simply fill the detachable cylindrical filter basket with grounds, pour in water, and screw the lid on top while the coffee steeps in the fridge. The filter basket can come out when the cold brew is ready, leaving you with a pitcher of up to 2 quarts of coffee that fits nicely in the refrigerator door.

When making cold brew at home, Tashawna McHenry, coffee lead for Messenger Coffee Co. in Kansas City, says to have fun with it. “You can use any coffee, including single origins, to make really great cold brew,” she says. “Another thing to keep in mind is the brew time — the sweet spot for brewing time sits around 12 to 18 hours.”

Before you fire up the grill this summer, it might be time to invest in a new set of grilling and barbecue tools. While barbecue tool sets range from the simple to the splurge-worthy, we find the Cuisinart Deluxe BBQ Grill Tool Set has everything we need and then some, including tongs, a spatula, a temperature probe meat fork, corn holders, skewers, a grill brush, and a basting brush. The grilling fork has strong, narrow tines (compared to thick tines, which create larger holes and allow more heat to enter the food, resulting in uneven cooking) and also includes a built-in digital thermometer to measure doneness on meats.

“If you are smoking or grilling in an enclosed pit, you want to take temperatures as fast as possible without losing any heat,” says Leonard Botello IV, owner and pitmaster of TRUTH BBQ in Brenham and Houston, Texas. Botello recommends also keeping a few other items handy, including cotton knit and nitrile gloves, a spray bottle, aluminum foil, a butane torch, and a sheet pan with an elevated wire rack.

A wireless meat thermometer makes it easy to dial in grilling and smoking meats, and you can’t go wrong with the ThermoWorks Smoke Thermometer. The leave-in-style probe thermometer has a wired base with two probes — one for the internal temperature of the meat and one for the ambient temperature of the grill or smoker — paired with a wireless remote receiver for tracking the temperatures from up to 300 feet away. The dashboard-style display on the base unit is easy to read, with minimum/maximum temperature tracking and alarms for monitoring high or low temperatures in the pit. Perhaps most importantly, we found the ThermoWorks Smoke Thermometer to be highly accurate, with less than half a degree variance in our fixed-temperature testing.

When the sweltering days of summer roll around, a good cooler is a must for keeping drinks icy cold and storing hot dogs, burger patties, and other meats destined for the grill. While the Yeti Tundra 65 Cooler has a slightly higher price tag than other coolers on the market, it keeps perishables cold for days on end and is durable enough to serve as an extra table or seat when gathered on the beach or around the campfire.

Dan Pelosi, lifestyle creator, and cookbook author of Let’s Eat, keeps a Tundra cooler in his trunk at all times for transporting ingredients while traveling and also uses one as a satellite refrigerator next to the grill when entertaining outdoors. “A lot of times on Fourth of July, I grill four or five times during a barbecue — I don’t just grill everything and let it sit there and get cold,” he says. “I am able to pace things out and have everything where I need it to be instead of running inside. It’s absolutely worth the splurge because you are not going to need another cooler. The longevity, the return on investment, is huge.”

With an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables available at the farmers’ market each week, summer is peak time to whip up a smoothie. A good blender can produce smooth, creamy smoothies in a fraction of the time of other models, and our favorite is the Vitamix E310 Explorian model. The most affordable of the Vitamix models, it harnesses the brand’s signature power and features ten variable settings — plus a pulse feature — great for blending up smoothies, shakes, and juices, as well as hot soups and sauces.

Pelosi reaches for his frequently in the summer to make a blender pizza sauce that’s easy to pour over fresh dough during backyard pizza parties. “The difference in range of what a regular blender can do versus a Vitamix is huge — there’s so much more control and precision in the actual blend-ability of it all,” he says. “The power and the capacity of the vessel for blending is just a game changer.”

Pie — especially when loaded with fresh, peak-season berries, cherries, or peaches — is the quintessential end to any summer barbecue or outdoor get-together. And luckily, you don’t need a fancy pie plate to make a delicious summer pie. Our go-to pie plate from Pyrex is the cheapest and simplest of the pie plates we tested but consistently turned out evenly baked, golden crusts, and thoroughly cooked fillings. The 9-inch, 1.5-inch-deep pie plate conducts heat evenly, yielding crisp, uniformly golden layers of pastry, and slices came out of the dish neatly when time to serve. Plus, unlike metal or ceramic pie plates, the clear glass allows you to easily check browning on the sides or bottom of the pie.

With all those fresh fruits and vegetables showing up at the market each week, you’ll likely be doing a lot of chopping this summer, making a quality knife essential. Our favorite knife specifically for chopping vegetables is the Mac Knife 8-Inch Hollow Edge Chef’s Knife, which has dimples above the cutting edge to prevent foods like apples and summer squash from sticking. The versatile knife has a super sharp, double-beveled blade that easily cuts through everything from juicy tomatoes to dense sweet potatoes to leafy herbs without leaving any uncut bits behind. It’s also well-constructed, with a comfortable handle and enough clearance between the handle and blade that our fingers stayed clear of the cutting board as we chopped.

We’ll never turn down one of our favorite pints, but there’s just something special about making your own ice cream at home, especially in the summer. We particularly like the Ninja Creami Deluxe 11-in-1 Ice Cream Maker, as it’s efficient and easy to use. The machine achieves delectably smooth and creamy results through a unique process — you’ll first pre-freeze the base mixture (instead of just the bowl) the day before, then use the machine’s powerful spinning blades to finely shave ice crystals and whip up air. And the versatile machine is good for more than just ice cream — its 11 easy-to-use presets make it a snap to whip up all manner of frozen desserts and drinks, including sorbet, gelato, frozen yogurt, slushies, frozen cocktails, and more.

Once you know how to build a great charcuterie and cheese board, summer picnics will never be the same. Charcuterie boards come in many shapes and sizes, but the Uncommon Goods Compact Swivel Cheese Board is especially suited for packing up and taking on the go. Its unique round, tiered construction allows it to collapse neatly into a wedge, saving you more room in your picnic basket to load up on meats, cheeses, crackers, and other accouterments. The compact board also features a built-in drawer of cheese knives for slicing up all of your favorite cheeses, so you don’t have to pack a set separately.

Turning out restaurant-quality pies in your own backyard is easy if you have the right pizza oven. Ooni is one of the best-known names on the market for good reason — the tabletop pizza oven heats up to 932°F, consistently cooking pizzas with gooey cheese and crispy, charred crusts in less than 90 seconds. It’s extremely easy to use and put together, and its lightweight construction makes it well-suited for taking on the go. We like the larger opening on the 16-inch model, which makes it easier to maneuver the pies while they cook, but the slightly smaller Ooni Koda 12 Pizza Oven is just as consistent and reliable with a lower price tag. And while lightweight and easy to transport, the Ooni is built to last.

“I’ve put hundreds and hundreds of pizzas through my Ooni at home for R&D, and it’s been a tank,” says Wayne Sieve, co-owner of Noto Italian Restaurant in St. Peters, Missouri. “I would never put a wood-fired oven like I have at Noto at home; it takes so much time to heat up and is a massive commitment just for a pizza night at home. The Ooni is much more convenient. Even if you’re not a professional chef, having a simple and easy-to-use oven like the Ooni makes pizza night at home much more enjoyable.”