5 Ikea Kitchen Gadgets And Storage Options You Didn't Realize Existed

Ikea is one of the places you can go to if you have a bare house and want to get everything you need to furnish it from just one place. So, if you have an empty room for a kitchen, you can just use the Ikea design and planner tool to plan everything you want to put into it — from shelves and cabinets to countertops and appliances — before heading to your nearest store.

But while you're used to seeing furniture and other home improvement items right on the Ikea Showroom, you might've missed the small items that the retailer still offers. These could be home improvement products that you'd typically look for elsewhere, like tools and paint, or smart home gadgets that let you control your home via your smartphone. So, we snooped around the Ikea catalog and picked out some Ikea kitchen gadgets that you might not have realized existed.

These tiny to medium-sized items would be useful around the kitchen, especially when you're cooking and preparing food. So, whether you're building or renovating your kitchen and are looking for tools to complete it or just casually browsing around the Ikea store, these are some of the kitchen gadgets you should look at and consider taking home with you.

Meat thermometers are crucial kitchen tools and are one of the simple electric gadgets that everyone needs in their kitchen, especially if you love cooking large meat portions. These gadgets help prevent undercooking, which can cause food poisoning, while also letting you monitor how well the meat has cooked, so that you do not overcook your chicken or steak and waste your ingredients. But aside from measuring temperature, the FANTAST meat thermometer can also serve as a timer, allowing you to track how long that turkey has been in the oven.

In fact, if you're just cooking on a stove or grill, you can stick the probe inside the food to track its internal temperature while also using its timer function. And because the probe connects to the device via a heat-resistant cord, you can place the gadget securely on a flat surface away from the pot. That way, you don't have to worry about the gadget falling into the food that you're cooking or into the fire itself.

While you will need to find a place to store the probe with its long cable, the FANTAST itself will easily stick to your fridge door because of its magnetic rear. That way, you don't have to go hunting around your kitchen when you finally need to use it, and it might even be useful for other timer-related stuff (like monitoring how much time your kid has left on their iPad while you're washing the dishes). It also only needs a single AAA battery to run, meaning you don't need a USB-C charger or other exotic power source just to use it every day.

You typically need space whenever you're cooking, especially if you need to deal with a lot of ingredients and prepare them before putting them in the pan. This might be a problem if you have a small kitchen without a lot of surfaces. While you can potentially use your dining table for prep work, it's often a hassle as you have to move between your kitchen and dining room just to get the things that you need.

This is where the FÖRHÖJA kitchen cart comes in. Ikea calls it a wheeled island, with two wheels on one side and two feet on the other. This ensures that it's easy to roll around your home from where you keep it to where you need it, while also staying stable enough that you can use it as a surface for slicing and dicing ingredients. It also sports two drawers underneath the counter for storing small items like these highly recommended cooking gadgets, as well as a couple of shelves, which should be enough to hold nine bottles each.

The top of this kitchen cart is solid birch, so you're assured that it can withstand the rigors of daily kitchen use. However, we still suggest that you use a cutting board for extra longevity and sanitary purposes. If you've decided on getting it, this movable worktable is available in either birch or birch and white color tone, allowing you to select a model that would fit well with your home's aesthetics.

One of the things that we hate when cooking is the hot oil splattering around the pan when you add food to it. While you can minimize the chances of this happening with proper preparation, like drying your food or adding a bit of salt to the pan, there will be a few times when you just can't avoid it. So, the best way to protect yourself is to use the KLOCKREN splatter screen.

This rather simple but ingenious gadget is a metallic mesh net held by a circular metal tube with a handle. All you need to do is place it on your pan when you're heating the oil (it fits most pans up to 13 inches in diameter), lift it a bit to insert the food you're cooking, and then drop it back down when the food is in the oil. The mesh will catch the little droplets of oil that splatter from the pan and let it drop harmlessly onto it, so you don't have to worry about getting burned or making a mess around the stove while you're cooking.

It's dishwasher safe, so you don't have to worry about manually cleaning all the oil from the mesh net after you've finished cooking. You can then store it by hanging it by its handle near your stove, ready to save you from burns and messes the next time you're about to fry something.

Shelves and cabinets are crucial for keeping your things organized and storing small appliances and food items. But if you have more large spaces than what you need, you actually end up with a lot of wasted air space in your kitchen. You could fix this by building extra shelves, which is one of the small woodworking projects for beginners, but if you don't have the time for that, then consider getting the PÅLYCKE clip-on basket instead.

This small accessory clips on your shelves, giving you extra storage space underneath them without needing to drill or glue anything. It's also quite secure and can hold up to four pounds in weight, which is good enough for storing jars of jam, tea, spices, or coffee, or a small box of biscuits. It's also available in a taller, narrower form factor for storing items like chopping boards, although its weight capacity is reduced to 3 pounds.

Aside from these clip-on baskets, you can get the PÅLYCKE as a set of three hooks for holding scissors, hand towels, and potholders under the shelf near your stove. It's also available as a wine glass holder, allowing you to securely hang them upside down over your plates for drying and storage.

Ikea offers a complete line of kitchen gadgets under the UPPFYLLD product line, and it has several interesting options like the vegetable brush or salad spinner. However, the one thing that we believe will be useful on the greatest number of occasions is the UPPFYLLD jar opener. It's a simple tool — a clamp with three different sizes and two unique surfaces, each for opening different types of jars and bottles. We're sure that we're not the only ones who have struggled with opening bottle caps in the kitchen, and this tool would make everyone's lives so much easier.

The handle and the inside of the jar opener are made of silicone, giving you a good grip of the tool when you're using it, and the three different sizes will let you use it for bottles and jars ranging from 1.2 to 2.75 inches. Aside from making it more convenient to open food items, it's also safer as it reduces the chance that the bottle slips from your hands and breaks on the floor. So, the next time you're facing a stuck bottle cap or jar lid, just grab the UPPFYLLD jar opener and put it around the thing you want to open, give it a good grip, turn it, and the cover should easily slip right off.