With the right preparation and setup, your kitchen can be a magical place where you create the most amazing gustatory sensations. Without the right preparation? That space could become, at worst, the scene of a culinary disaster – and at best, a messy place where you just cooked a mediocre meal.
The 14 infographics below have one main purpose, above all: to help you find the right tools for your kitchen and enable you to cook in it the culinary feats you’ve always imagined yourself preparing.
➜ One of the most common reasons a recipe fails is because of incorrect quantity conversions. To help keep that from happening, these next few guides can help head off those calculations.
1. The Kitchen Volume Conversion Aid by Plainworks focuses entirely on volume and imperial units.
2. The Cooking Conversion Chart by mhars covers volume and weight measurements, and shows the difference between Australian and US measurements.
3. There are so many connections between all the different volume units, that when it comes to visualizing them, a network diagram like The Common Cook’s Guide to Kitchen Conversions by ShannnonLattin might be most appropriate.
4. Sometimes recipes call for weight instead of volume. In that case, Kitchen 101 Mass & Volume Equivalents can help out.
5. For the ultimate guide to conversions (plus some extra tidbits), try The Kitchen Cheat Sheet by shellshockuk.
➜ Conversions aren’t the only important information to have in the kitchen, though. Knowing which tool to use can make a big difference in both the quality and the safety of your cooking. These next few graphics will show you just how to slice, mash, mix, or toss your next creation.
6. The Splendiferous Array of Culinary Tools shows how wide of an array there is of kitchen gadgets, and the general purpose each of them serves.
7. Know Your Knives gives a great visual list of each type of kitchen knife, with a text description of its purpose.
8. Knives of the Kitchen by BladeHQ illustrates all kinds of knives and the foods for which you can use them.
9. The Chef’s Guide to Knives by ShannonLattin covers knives in much more detail, going over the different parts, general safety, and how to chop with each.
➜ It’s also important to know what food to stock and how long it lasts. Not having the right ingredients come cook time can be detrimental to your favorite recipes.
10. Our Mother Earth is nurturing a huge variety of vegetables. They have different flavors, colors, textures and nutritional content. This is all far too much to learn, but The Various Varieties of Vegetables can give us a good overview of some of them.
11. The kitchen isn’t just a place for creating tasty things (otherwise we would always eat cake). It’s also a place for putting together nutritious meals that, ideally, taste good as well. Essential Vitamins and Minerals by HealthCentral shows where you can get a lot of those nutrients.
12. Veggies don’t come with nutrition facts labels, but the Vegetable Calories Chart shows the calorie content of some of our favorites.
13. Food spoils eventually, but different foods spoil at different rates. The Shelf Life of Food by LindsaySnowOsborn (and Visually) shows approximately how long your fresh food will last.
14. While we can never recommend eating food off the floor, The 5 Second Rule might be a good guide to follow, or at least use to scare your kids into handling their food carefully.
Drew Skau is Visualization Architect at Visual.ly and a PhD Computer Science Visualization student at UNCC with an undergraduate degree in Architecture. You can follow him on twitter @SeeingStructure
