It can be hard to choose the right small appliances for your kitchen — especially with so many options available and so little space on your countertops.
We’ve found the best small kitchen appliances that are worth investing in. We looked for kitchen appliances that are easy to use, maintain, and clean, and their overall efficacy. More importantly, we took into consideration general convenience; these are all devices that we would use in our own kitchens. Here are the top 5 appliances that ranked the best.
Crock-Pot Manual 7-Quart Slow Cooker
The Crock-Pot Manual Slow Cooker is excellent for making large meals without heating up your entire kitchen. It holds up to 7 quarts (just over 6.5 liters), which makes it great for a large pot roast for 8+ people. In case you want to use your oven, or quickly heat up a dish, the stoneware is also microwave- and oven-friendly, though we don’t recommend using it under the broiler.
The slow cooker is pretty simple to use, without any fancy preset programs. It comes with two primary settings: Low and High. We’ve found that the Low setting is ideal for “all-day” cooking, and the recipe book details how long a dish cooks on either setting. It also has a useful Warm setting, too, that keeps a cooked dish at serving temperature.
Both the stoneware and the lid are dishwasher-safe, and the manual also explains how to wash the components by hand. We also recommend that you wait for both the stoneware and the lid to cool off before washing it, since sudden contact with cold water could damage them.
AROMA Digital Rice Cooker
The AROMA Digital Rice Cooker is great for everyday rice or grain dishes — if you follow the provided instructions, the dish will never come out burnt or overcooked. The cooker has preset programs for white and brown rice, as well as a Flash Rice program that’s optimized for getting white rice done in a pinch.
The cooker comes with other great presets, too, such as Keep Warm (which maintains the ideal serving temperature for a cooked dish), Delay Timer (which lets you pre-soak the grains and time the preparation so it’s ready exactly when you need it), and Steam (which lets you use the steam rack to prepare all sorts of healthy side dishes to go with your rice).
The inner pot and the accessories (steam tray, rice cup, and serving spatula) are all dishwasher-safe, although we’d recommend hand-washing the inner pot. While it’s perfectly safe to wash on the top rack, it might get slightly discolored. This is a purely cosmetic change, but it might hide some other damage to the pot.
Nutribullet Personal
The nutribullet Personal Blender is a compact and powerful blender that’s great for making smoothies or protein shakes in under a minute. It comes with 2 cups, a 24-oz one and an 18-oz one with a handle, both of which fit on the same Extractor Blade base.
We find it very convenient that the blender includes a recipe book for various smoothies, dips, spreads, dressings, and even cocktails. The blender is quite simple, and you can easily get exactly the texture that you want with practically any set of ingredients.
The cups are safe to wash on a dishwasher’s top rack, but they’re also super easy to clean by hand. We also suggest that you don’t use sanitization cycles or other super high-temperature wash cycles, since that can warp the plastic, rendering your cups more fragile or even unusable with the motor base.
NINJA AF101 Air Fryer
The NINJA AF101 Air Fryer is a great way to reduce the amount of oils you use when cooking. It has a wide temperature range (105°F–400°F, or roughly 40°C–200°C), which makes it ideal for both slowly dehydrating various spices, to quickly air frying your ingredients to a crisp with little-to-no oil used.
We tested out its dehydration power with various chopped vegetables (like carrots, celery, and onions). They came out perfectly dry and easy to grind into a fine powder. We also tested its air frying with about 2 lbs of sliced potatoes, and they came out crispy and delicious.
The basket, crisper plate, and layered rack are all dishwasher-safe, but they’re also super easy to clean by hand, so you can just clean it and keep using the air fryer instead of waiting for the dishwasher to complete its cycle.
Comparison of the Top 5 Small Kitchen Appliances
Bottom Line
All these appliances are great for every kitchen, our favorite is the Crock-Pot Manual 7-Quart Slow Cooker, because it’s amazing for 1-pot dishes and it doesn’t heat up the entire kitchen like a traditional oven does.
The AROMA Digital Rice Cooker is great for preparing simple meals, and both the nutribullet Personal Blender and the Cuisinart Mini-Prep Plus are super useful for cutting down on prep time. Lastly, the NINJA Air Fryer is a great way to prep healthier meals because it cuts down on oil use for frying, and it even doubles as a dehydrator.