"cutlery" news and stories

Too lazy to use a knife? Sick of switching back and forth from fork to spoon when you eat your Ramen noodles?

Ah, yes. These dining conundrums have befallen even the best of us at one time or another. The solution?

Enter, crazy new cutlery. The Washington Post's Jane Black reviewed a few new designs that promise to rid us of our dining woes (or, at the very least, provide us with fodder for our next dinner party conversation).

Among the new designs:

• The "Knork," designed to serve as both knife and fork. A little awkward, but helpful for those parties where the you're perched in a corner, attempting to eat off of a tiny paper plate with just a fork.
• Mono Zeug Tools are based on primitive Neanderthal designs, in that the knife is designed to be a piece of honed flint, and the spoon, a variation of a curved oyster shell.
  
• Curvware is designed to be ergonomic so that you don't strain your hand or grip too hard when attempting to, say, cut your steak. Black pronounced it "very comfortable."
• Ramen spoon - Admit it: Ramen noodles can be annoying to eat. This design changes all that, with a spoon for the broth and fork tines for those slippery noodles. And while I wouldn't go so far as to call it "genius," as Block does, it is pretty neat. Unfortunately, you'll have to wait 'til May before you buy it.
  

Check out the video of Black testing out these new tools here.

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Designboom, a mod blog devoted to the latest and greatest in product design, recently came out with the winners of its 2006 Dining in 2015 contest. The challenge was exactly as it sounds: to design a food-related product that would be useful in 2015 at work, in travel, or at home.

Chefs and designers from Italy and Japan judged the entires and came up with the top three and an honorable mention.

Let's start from the bottom and work up. The honorable mention [ed. note: shown in photo] was an eco-friendly solution to dinner prep: silicone and nylon triangle-shaped buckets that allow the cook to boil three different foods all in one pot, thereby saving energy, time, and water. I totally expect it to be selling out on QVC in no time.

Third place? A creative ceramic salt and pepper shaker that forces you to physically break open the canister to access the spices inside. The goal of the project? There isn't any, really, but we bet it's really, really fun to break open. Save it for a day when you're really pissed off at someone, and then smash away. (But don't get carried away - - then you'll just have a mess of salt, pepper, and white ceramic shards to clean up).

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Like many classic kitchen tools such as the cast-iron pan, old-fashioned pastry blender and our good friend the mortar and pestle, the mezzaluna has a simple design that gets the job done. Whether chopping chocolate, chervil or nuts, all you need to do is rock the crescent-shaped blade back and forth.

The mezzaluna is a tool that has no need to be reinvented with a whimsical design. The last time I checked, nobody looked at a knife and said, "Aw how cute." As far as I'm concerned the handle should be wood, stainless, black plastic or antler if you want to get fancy.

So why one earth would anyone want a mezzaluna that looks like a grinning frog? Beats me. I'm sure it works fine. It does have a rubberized antimicrobial handle and is made by Austrianalian knifeworks Füri. Lest I be called out for being a hater, I'll just say that the Froggy Mezzaluna is an RR product and leave it at that.

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Sometimes you just want to eat your pizza with a knife and fork, especially jumbo-slices or those weighed down by extra toppings, which can be impractical to eat out of hand. But isn't using a fork AND a knife a hassle? Why not combine the two implements into one pizza fork?

Officially, the product is called a Nyfork ($12) and it can be used to cut anything you might normally use a knife for, including veggies and meat, leaving your other hand free. The package notes that the fork was "kept secret from the American public for years" (no doubt as some sort of two-handed cutlery conspiracy), but also has a warning that the cutter wheel is very sharp, and caution should be used when eating from the fork.

I'll give it points for aesthetics, but I'll stick to using a regular knife and fork for my pizza - or anything, for that matter.

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I saw this book in my local bookshop last week; but it was shrink-wrapped and the spotty herbet wouldn't let me unwrap it to look inside!

Still what I can tell you about Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Trade 1550-2005 is that it is all about cutlery. Yep a book on spoons. Oh and knives and forks too. The book has been produced to accompany an exhibition at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum which runs from now until the end of October. Feeding Desire showcases the Museum's permanent collection of American and European cutlery. Expanding on the content of the exhibition the book offers seven original essays, accompanied by over two hundred colour and black-and-white illustrations, that relate the different histories of the humble knife, spoon, and fork, and reveal how cutlery has influenced food, fashion, design, mobility, hygiene, and consumption over the centuries.

The book is available on Amazon UK for £31.75 and Amazon USA for $40.95

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