Home Tech This new designer kitchen tool is just a stick. So why are we obsessed with it?

This new designer kitchen tool is just a stick. So why are we obsessed with it?

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A person flipping a pancake with a wooden stick

In addition to making steel, brass, and wood sculptures, Richardt has created minimalist designs For more than a decade for Danish Design Studio Frama: a day bed, a lounge chair, chandeliers, a shelving system, a “very minimalist” lamp for the Noma restaurant.

Sophie Charara

However, Frama passed on tool one, so Richardt kept him at home until he stumbled upon the cooking studio Prowlalso in Copenhagen, which makes tools inspire professional kitchens. For co-founders Daniel Ronge and Christian Lorentzen, it was love at First Stick.

We joke about the sheer simplicity of this thing, but Richardt’s inspiration came, of course, in part from utensils in Asia. Cooking chopsticks, often made from bamboo, have long been used by professional stir-fry chefs for tasting and testing in the kitchen.

“I had some chopsticks at home that I used to stir my oatmeal in the morning for a couple of years, and I was too small to do it,” he says. “So I thought I could make it bigger in a design that could also flip a pancake. In Japan, they actually have some pretty big chopsticks, but they still use them in pairs when stirring, and they’re pretty fun to handle.”

And there is more practicality. Wooden utensils can last decades versus years for silicon alternatives (if cleaned and stored properly), and there has been a lot of discussion about how many toxic chemicals they could expose users to.

Sophie Charara

In terms of design, it’s clear that we’ve been heading in this direction for a while, prepared to crave more and less. Joseph Joseph Kitchen’s minimalist tools and stacked bowls have had a strange appeal to us for some time, while Jony Ive has done for computers what his industrial design predecessors did for, say, iconic chairs and lamps.

However, abstract wooden Scandi baby toys in beige, cream and cool grays can be quite infuriating. They should be bright red and bright green and make a lot of noise. And nativity sets without features that we cannot fulfill. Ridiculous. They are simply taking the urine. But I think we can safely say that you can’t be more minimalist than a stick.

As Wired senior editor Jeremy White exclaims, “How can something so ridiculous be so desirable?” Is a poignant stick inherently more sexist than a spoon, perhaps? More like something The bear Could Carmy Berzatto shoot through a kitchen?

“It is a humble tool. I was surprised at how simple it was to have a stick stirring your food,” Richardt says with a bit of a laugh. “It took me back to something… I couldn’t explain it, but it was a nice feeling. I felt like I was taken back to the Neanderthals.”

(Tagstotranslate) Kitchen (T) Kitchen (T) Food and drinks (T) Home (T) Design

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