Testing Vintage Kitchen Gadgets – Have We Over-Engineered Tools?
I bought a mystery box of vintage kitchen gadgets off eBay for £25. Inside were twelve bits of old-school kit that looked equal parts brilliant and dangerous — everything from a Mouli grater to a manual egg whisk that felt like it could take your arm off.
The challenge? Test each one against its modern-day equivalent and see if our shiny new gadgets are genuinely better… or if we’ve just over-engineered cooking for the sake of it.
Twelve tests later, the results surprised me: the modern tools might’ve won 8–4 overall, but my vintage box still saved me over £100 compared to buying everything new. Some of the old gear, like the rolling pin and spatula, worked just as well — proof that sometimes simple really is best.
Watch the full video above (or here on YouTube if you prefer) to see which gadgets held their own and which ones should’ve stayed in the museum drawer.
If you like this sort of kitchen chaos, have a look at my Fish & Chips Pizza experiment next — another bit of culinary madness that probably shouldn’t have worked… but did.
And if you fancy finding your own box of retro kitchen wonders, have a browse on eBay UK — though maybe skip anything that looks like it belongs in a torture chamber.