Basic kitchen equipment * how to season a cast iron skillet * care of wooden spoons * food staples * baking soda and baking powder

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this is a bonus episode. I didn’t want to run it as a regular episode since there’s no recipe involved, although I do give some information about baking soda and baking powder toward the end.

A lot of people are graduating right now, from high school or college, and may be thinking about moving into their first apartment. If you’ve never lived on your own, especially if you don’t have much experience with cooking, you may not be sure what you need to equip your first kitchen. So let’s talk about kitchen equipment.

But first, keep in mind that what one home cook considers a vital piece of equipment that no kitchen should be without, the next home cook has never even used that piece of equipment. You can find lists of kitchen necessities all over the internet, and each one will be different. Here I’m only talking about the truly bare necessities. I don’t even bring up small appliances like mixers and food processors. This is a list you can build on to make your own kitchen work for you.

At bare minimum, you’re going to need a pot big enough to boil water for spaghetti noodles and a skillet big enough for a couple of good-sized pork chops. A skillet is the same thing as a frying pan. Both your pot and your skillet should have lids. Ideally, the pot should be heavy steel, with a copper bottom if you can afford it, and the skillet should either be heavy steel or cast iron. I own a good cast iron skillet, but I actually use a steel one for preference just because it weighs so much less. I don’t recommend that you get nonstick, because even modern nonstick coatings are easy to scratch up and ruin. You need pots and pans you don’t need to baby.

If you buy a new cast iron skillet, don’t worry too much about all the information online about seasoning it. Just oil it well, and when you’re done using it, instead of washing it out with soap, scrape it clean with hot water and a spatula or a scraping tool. Wipe it dry with a cloth, then set it on the stove over the lowest heat your burner will manage until all the moisture evaporates off the metal. If you do this every time you use it, it’ll become seasoned nicely after a while and you won’t need to oil the skillet every time you use it. But if you wash it out with soap, you have to start the seasoning process all over again.

My mom never understood this. She was a little bit of a germophobe and could not stand the thought of not scrubbing out a skillet with soap and hot water. When I was in my 20s, sometimes I’d come home from work and discover that Mom had cleaned my apartment for me. That was really nice of her because I was a complete slob back then, but she would always scrub my skillet with soap and ruin the lovely natural coating iron develops.

Anyway, one pot with a lid, one skillet with a lid. It’s also nice to have a second pot, maybe a smaller one you can use as a saucepan. If storage is an issue, the small pot will probably nest in the larger pot and you can put the lids in the drawer underneath your oven, if it has one.

You will also need at least two mixing bowls, one large, one medium-sized. Mixing bowls often come in sets of three or four, with the small one being barely larger than a big cereal bowl and the big one being huge enough to hold rising bread dough. If you have room for the whole set and can afford it, I recommend you buy them all. I don’t use the giant-sized mixing bowl very often, but when I need it I absolutely need it and nothing else will do.

Your mixing bowls should not be plastic. Plastic is too hard to keep clean, since bacteria hide in scratches in plastic. Metal bowls may react with some foods, especially eggs, causing a nasty taste in the finished