A paleo kitchen of today is well equipped. You may find:
Blender. For frozen desserts, sauces, and small quantities of flour from nuts. Wide jars better for chunky things. The KitchenAid 5-Speed Blender crushes ice at any speed. Will turn small pieces of jerky into powder. 48oz glass jar. The ultimate blender is the VitaMix. People that have them swear by them.
Chestnut Roasting Pan. You need an open flame to use this one (e.g. a gas stove, barbecure grill, or fireplace). And be careful, it will rust. A specialized chestnut knife to score and open them is safer than a regular knife. Of questionable utility is a chestnutter.
Coffee Mill, Krups Oval. Best for grinding spices. Designate one for this use only. Need not be a fancy grinder. Of the pictured Krups model, only the older style with high blades can also be used for a small amount of nut meal. See a comparison of old and new blades. They are only available used, like on eBay. Alternatively, the versatile and popular Magic Bullet Express comes with two blades, one high and one low. Simply used the high one for nuts.
Crock Pot. Useful. Can start before you go to bed or in the morning. The best way to cook pulled pork. However, long cooking times with acidic foods can lead to hydrolysis of proteins.
Deep Fat Fryer. A quick way to cook a piece of chicken, though not very paleo or useful in a paleo kitchen without potatoes. Coconut, palm oil, and beef tallow are recommended. For oils in large quantity see the PaleoFoodMall.
Dehydrator. A must for jerky and pemmican. Can also dry fruit. Inexpensive ones without thermostats are $30. Good ones with up to 30 trays can cost a couple hundred. A top brand is American Harvest which has a SnackMaster and GardenMaster. The one I have and recommend is the Excalibur 2900. Also see Dehydrators section of PaleoDiet.com.
Electric Frying Pan/Skillet. The thermostat allows for long unattended cooking. Good for chicken dishes and breakfast.
Food Mill. Useful for making applesauce, tomato juice/sauce, straining squash and pumpkin, etc, and various fruits and vegetables for juices. I have and recommend the Rösle Food Mill from Germany. I didn't buy the optional milling disks. Cheaper ones may do fine, but I tend to like the best.
Food Processor. It doesn't make fine nut flour, but good for all usual vegetable preparation. It can make paleo mayonnaise, but a hand blender is less to clean.
Food Strainer. It is a sauce maker for creamy applesauce, smooth tomato sauce, and with accessories: berries, pumpkins/squash, and grapes. Like a food mill but is cylindrical with an auger. Skin and seeds are discharged separately, without waste. Top of the line is the Squeezo.
Food Steamer. While a rice cooker can steam vegetables, one made for vegetables will be able to handle asparagus, so such is preferred over rice cookers. As we aren't cooking rice, I simply use a cheap steamer basket for my vegetables.
Freezer. We paleo eaters need good freezer space. A separate one is handy, but do not buy frost-free as they increase freezer burn. A chest freezer is the most efficient and is what I put in my cellar. Get one with a light when the lid is open. We can freeze fruit (strawberries, blueberries, peaches, and raspberries), nut flours, and meat bought through the mail or on sale. Though the only fruit I freeze now are blackberries, as I find for the others the store-bought frozen fruit is better and cheaper (especially Wyman’s Wild Blueberries).
French Mandoline. Stainless steel. It slices, dices or juliennes. Can do waffle cuts. Think carrots, radishes, cucumbers, zucchini, onions,
tomatoes, and lemons/limes for garnishes. They are dangerous -- suggest cutproof gloves. Can slice perfectly at any thickness, including paper
thin. It is large and a bit cumbersome, but unbeatable for large jobs and precision cutting. If cooking for two the smaller simpler Benriner
(Japanese slicer, see V-slicer) is better. The best/best-known in the US mandoline is manufactured by Bron.
Garlic Slicer. Like a small mandoline. Can also grate when the sliding mechanism is reversed. Works with garlic, mushrooms, olives and ginger. They tend to be flimsy.
Grill, Indoor. The tabletop George Foreman Grill is very popular. It originally came in three sizes. Get a bigger size, not the small one.
Grill, Outdoor. Can be charcoal or gas. If charcoal get solid pure charcoal and not briquettes (which use things like wheat starch to hold the briquette together). These days they are really inexpensive at Lowes and Home Depot. Or you can get a small Weber delivered by Amazon.
Grinder/Grain Mill. If you buy a grain mill to handle the oily nuts you need a burr grinder. Much fresher if you grind your own. Cheaper than one designed for grains would be a coffee burr grinder. A basic one will not grind fine enough for flour, so look for one with coarseness adjustability. Like the bestselling Cuisinart Supreme Grind Automatic Burr Mill, which has an 18-position grind selector, from ultra fine to coarse.
Hand Blender. Also called immersion blender. Large commercial ones existed long before consumer models. No commercial mayonnaise is paleo, so home making is required. One of these is the least to clean. They are great not only for mayo and dressings, but good for making almond milk, fruit shakes, thickening soups and sauces right in the pan by pureeing vegetables. Can grind nuts to make nut flour and nutbutters. Good for Steak Tartare and grinding the meat for Pemmican. Also can grind together raisins and nuts to make fruitnutballs. I use mine when rendering suet.
Kitchen Shears. Having grown up with an abundance of shears, I am always surprised when I find someone that uses a knife to cut everything in the kitchen. Handy for many tasks and especially for opening plastic bags. Specialized poultry shears for cutting poultry also exist.
Meat Grinder. It doesn't sound very paleo to grind up your meat. But if you hunt or are buying your meat by the side, you may want hamburger or homemade sausage, or even just to grind up leftovers for hash. The hand ones that clamp to the counter are apparently fine. Electric, which is what I bought, can run $70-90.
Meat Slicer. To make jerky and pemmican you can ask the butcher to slice it, but bargains these days are at places with little service. Estate and garage sales are good places to look. New ones start at around $80. The Chef's Choice models ($150+) look pretty, but don't cut well or last very long. Small commercial style are $350-400. I've given up on them and I simply hand slice my meat while it is partially frozen.
Meat Thermometer. An instant one is okay to check how the meat is doing. For those busy with other things there are now electronic ones for $25-35 that have a probe and an alarm that goes off when it hits the set temperature. Especially useful when smoking meat. Owners of them like the convenience.
Mezzaluna Chopper. Also known as a rocking mincer or half-moon mincing knife. This is the traditional way to chop and dice herbs. Traditionally a wooden bowl would be used with it.
Muffin Baking Pans. For nut flour muffins, egg muffins, and pemmican cakes. You have a choice of full size and mini (2 1/8" diameter). The mini ones take more effort to clean. Non-stick ones make the most sense, but the surface may wear out with use.
Nut Chopper. They have a cylinder with two compartments and in the middle there is a crank. Can chop large amounts and is dishwasher safe. Some handblender models have a chopper option. It may work well for nuts.
Nut Crackers. You will find there are dozens and dozens. Some rather serious. Some just functional. Some whimsical. You do have to wade through some extraneous hits. Personally I buy my nuts shelled, and I can only see cracking open nuts if I had a nut tree in my yard. On this page Where do I get a Black Walnut nut cracker? you can scroll down to find information on nut cracking and storage.
Nutmeg Grinder. Resembles a pepper grinder, except the cavity is designed specifically to hold a whole nutmeg. Mandoline style graters also exist.
Patty Press. When I made my own sausage I decided to make patties. They cook faster than links. A cylinder has little contact with a hot pan and is not an efficient form to cook. You will also need patty parchment paper. Despite what you see in pictures of only one sheet between patties, I found to keep from sticking in the freezer you need a sheet on each side. A single sheet would work if you froze the patties one layer deep on a tray before stacking together.
Peeler. Useful for slicing hard root vegetables, e.g. carrots, for salads. A wide slot gets better slices. Get a carbon steel blade. It is sharper than a stainless steel one. Some like the OXO GoodGrips for ease of holding and it does have a wide slot, but has a stainless blade.
Pepper Grinder. French-made Perfex sets the standard, but really any will do.
Rotisserie Oven. A motor driven spit broils meat, fish and poultry to perfection, sealing in juices and draining fats. Some are combined with a convection oven for faster roasting. Takes up a lot of counter space, though there are a couple of vertical ones for $100 that takes up less. Hard to clean, take a long time, hard to tell when done, and people that have them rarely use them. Maybe get one in an outdoor grill instead.
Salad Spinners, both large and small. In addition to salad, the small one is useful for drying off rinsed berries. Recommended are Zyliss with a cord and Triumph with a knob. Not recommended is Hoan.
Sausage Stuffer. Generally attachments are used with the meat grinder. But dedicated stuffers are available. I prefer my sausage in patty form for faster and even cooking. See patty press above.
Scale. Well, not really needed for paleo, but they are convenient to have around for weighing mail. Be sure it has a tare capability. I use mine to split up the bags of frozen fruit evenly. Then I know just how long to defrost in the microwave.
Smoker. While not all paleos smoke their meat, some do. Can be charcoal, gas, or electric. Good ones are $80-150. Cheap ones will burn out with use. Non-stainless steel can rust out near the sea shore. If you are going to make your own sausage, then you really need an electric or gas model that you can set the temperature, and one of the square metal insulated styles like the Little Chief will hold that temperature more evenly. You can get round, tower shaped electric, gas, or charcoal smokers that use a water pan to help speed cooking and can also help flavor the meat if you add flavorings to the water. For smoking ribs and pork or beef roasts, and even the occasional turkey, recommended is a charcoal smoker with a water pan. Smoke at a fairly low temperature for anywhere from 6-10 hours depending on how thick the meat is. You will get more flavor in the meat using charcoal, then placing foil packets of water soaked wood sawdust or chips on the coals. In the electric or gas smokers, the sawdust is put into a metal pan over the burner, and smoulders away giving the smoke flavor, but not the flavor you get when some of the fat and juices from the meat hit the hot charcoal. The Sausage Maker in Buffalo, NY has a catalog with lots of smoke equipment and literature. See much on smoking equipment at: BBQ Mailing List Survival Guide and Smoke-Cooking FAQ.
Toaster-oven. A slice toaster has no use for us now that grain-based breads aren't eaten, but you can use a toaster-oven as a small oven or broiler.
V-Slicer. This is a plastic mandoline. Also dangerous. It can julienne, slice, shred, chop and dice fruit and vegetables. Use for onions, carrots and celery for salads. The thickness of the Benriner, a quality Japanese mandoline, is continuously adjustable but the maximum is only about 2mm. The Boerner V-slicer does an adequate job, but not as nicely as the Benriner. The V-slicer will do a thicker slice, but it's not continuously adjustable. Benriners come in small and large sizes.
Vacuum Sealer. This device vacuum seals your food. Things keep much longer. The Tilia FoodSaver gets excellent reviews in the newsgroups and comes in several models.
Vegetable brush. I use mine mostly to clean my eggs. I buy them from a farmer that does not wash his eggs. Not washed they last longer. This is also an inexpensive item if you need to get your Amazon.com order over $25 to get the free shipping.
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Also see: PaleoFoodMall for home delivery of paleo foods
Also see: PaleoDiet for links
