Let's Learn English! Topic: Kitchen Appliances! 👨🏾‍🍳⏲️👩‍🍳 (Lesson Only)

Well, hello and welcome to this

English lesson about kitchen appliances.

Now, I don't know how many of

you spend time in the kitchen.

I spend a lot of time in the kitchen.

I firmly believe that anyone who likes to eat

like me should know how to make food.

So I am quite familiar with how

to make a variety of different things.

And in order to make things in the

kitchen, you use a number of appliances.

So appliances, first of all, are not utensils.

Utensils are things like forks and spoons and knives.

But appliances are the machines that you use.

They're usually things that you plug in, and then they

help you prepare the food or cook the food.

So, once again, welcome to this

English lesson about kitchen appliances. A blender.

So a blender is something that you

use to blend different ingredients together.

Notice the name blender also relates

to the verb to blend.

So for us, we primarily use our

blender to make something called a smoothie.

We'll put frozen bananas, frozen peaches, frozen

spinach, frozen strawberries, and a little bit

of water in the blender.

And then we will make a smoothie out of it.

So a smoothie is when you take frozen fruit and you

blend it together to make kind of like a nice cold

drink that's also a little bit healthy for you.

Although some people think that smoothies aren't

as healthy as they should be because

you're not chewing the fruit.

But we definitely use our blender quite often.

We buy peaches in the summer

and slice them and freeze them.

And then we also have usually

bananas and strawberries and spinach.

The spinach is the green part to

make the smoothie a bit healthier.

So a blender used to make blended

drinks, there's also something called a juicer.

We do not have a juicer.

A juicer is something you use where you put fruits and vegetables

in, and all of the juice from the fruits and vegetables comes

out one side so that you can drink it, and then all

of the rest of the fruit or vegetable comes out the other

side so you can, I guess, compost it.

I don't actually use a juicer because if I'm going

to have fruit, I want all of the fruit.

I want to eat the fruit so that I get

not just the juice, but the rest of the fruit

as well, because I think that is very, very healthy.

But a juicer is a machine that's used to

get the juice out of fruit and vegetables.

Coffee maker.

This is something I used to use a

lot more, but I don't drink coffee anymore.

Coffee is this wonderful hot beverage that people drink sometimes

in the morning because it wakes them up, it gives

them energy because coffee has caffeine in it.

A coffee maker is something where you put water

into the coffee maker, you put a coffee filter

in, and you put your coffee grounds in.

And then you push a button and the

water heats up, goes through the coffee grounds

and makes you a nice cup of coffee.

So anyways, a coffee maker, something

that some people can't live without.

We have two coffee makers and both

of them are in our cupboard.

And we only take them out when someone

visits and wants a cup of coffee.

So we don't use them very often.

A kitchen timer.

So our kitchen timer is actually digital.

But this is a very traditional kitchen timer.

You turn the timer.

Let's say you have decided to bake bread, and it

says, put the bread in the oven for 35 minutes.

You would turn the timer to 35 minutes, you would set

the timer, and then 35 minutes later, the timer would go

off, the timer would go ding, and you know it's time

to take the bread out of the oven.

Very, very handy.

Kitchen timers are very handy.

If you follow the recipe closely, it will tell you

how long you need to cook or bake something.

And you can use the kitchen timer to do that.

So you set the timer and when the time is

up, the timer will go off, it will go bing.

And then you know it's time

to stop cooking what you're cooking.

A kettle.

So this is something we do actually use a lot.

In fact, I think this is the

exact kettle we have in our kitchen.

I like it because it's clear.

A kettle is something that you use to boil water.

If you like to drink tea or if you like

to drink hot chocolate, you will have a kettle in

your kitchen and you will put water in the kettle

and you will turn the kettle on.

Some people say put the Ketle on.

We usually say turn the kettle on.

And then after a while, the water will boil,

it will start to bubble violently, and you know

that the water has gotten hot enough that you

can make tea and you can make coffee.

So a kettle is a very, very common

thing to find in kitchens, especially in countries

where people like to drink tea.

Probably that is what it's used for

the most often, a bread machine.

So this is handy.

We have a bread machine in our house.

A bread machine will make bread from start to finish.

So you put all of your

ingredients into the bread machine.

And then on the front, you indicate what

kind of bread you want it to make.

And then it mixes the ingredients.

It kneads the dough, it lets the dough

rise a couple of times, and then it

bakes the bread all inside of one machine.

We love our bread machine.

We don't always use it just to make bread.

But I do know that we've used it

probably the most often to make pizza dough.

That is the most common use.

So instead of letting it finish, we put

all the ingredients in to make pizza dough.

When the pizza dough is done, we take it out.

Sometimes we put it in the fridge for a

few hours and then we will roll it out

and we will make a pizza with it.

But a bread machine, a very cool machine that

you can use to make bread, a toaster.

This is very common.

This is an appliance that most people

leave on their counter all the time.

We don't put our toaster away because

we use our toaster so much.

That would just be silly.

A toaster is something where you can

put bread in a toaster or bagels.

I think these are bagels.

Bagels are like a round form of bread and

then it will make it hot and crispy and

it will turn brown a little bit.

It's really nice when you toast bread and then

when it comes out as toast and you put

butter on it, the butter will melt and it

just makes for a yummy, crispier form of bread.

We also use the toaster quite a bit

if our bread is a little bit stale.

If bread tastes really good when it's fresh, but after a

day or two it might be a little bit stale, but

it will still taste really good if you toast it.

So a toaster, you put the toaster down,

the toaster will eventually pop up and the

bread will be hopefully just right.

A microwave.

So I did mention this one.

A microwave is a way to reheat

food or cook food really, really quickly.

A microwave uses microwaves.

It actually shoots microwaves at the food and this causes, I

think, the moisture in the food to get hot and that

by its very nature, heats up the rest of the food.

We use our microwave mostly for reheating food.

If I come home late from work and Jen and the

kids have already eaten, there's usually a plate of food in

the fridge and I will reheat the food in the microwave.

We also use it to thaw things.

If something is frozen and you need it to be

thawed quickly, you can thaw it in the microwave.

Very, very handy tool or appliance.

So this is a slow cooker and

we sometimes call it a crock pot.

This is designed to cook food, usually

meat or soups or stews or chili.

But it's made to cook it really, really slowly.

If you're familiar with cooking meat, some of

the cheaper cuts of meat aren't very tender.

But if you cook them in a slow cooker, if you cook

them for five or 6 hours at a lower temperature, it will

make the meat a lot more tender and easier to eat.

We use our slow cooker often to cook

chicken as well because it's just very simple.

You put a chicken in the slow cooker, you turn it

on and then a few hours later the chicken is done.

It's important to check the temperature

though, when you cook a chicken.

So a slow cooker generally used to cook food over a

long period of time, maybe 4 hours or 6 hours, or

even 8 hours, and usually used to cook meat.

And then there's something called an instant pot.

We do not have an instant pot, but generally this

is used to cook a variety of foods very quickly

because I think it cooks them under pressure.

I think the lid locks on and the instant pot

is able to cook using heat as well as pressure.

I don't actually know a lot about instant pots,

although a couple of colleagues of mine have instant

pots and they love them and they keep telling

me that I should buy one, a toaster oven.

So I'm not sure if you've seen one of these.

These are very common, sorry, these are very

common with college students or university students.

A toaster oven is a very, very small oven.

You can't cook or bake a lot in a toaster oven, but

you can reheat things or you can cook some frozen food.

So that's one of the reasons

it's popular with university students.

It's very small.

They might live in an apartment that doesn't have an

oven and so they might buy a small toaster oven.

You can use it to make toast, but

mostly people use it to make frozen pizza

or to heat up like small meat pies.

It is a small oven that you can plug into the

wall and use it to cook, bake or heat up food.

And then there's also something called a waffle iron.

There we go.

Something called a waffle maker or waffle iron.

It has two names.

Basically what you do is you make a batter and you

plug the waffle maker or waffle iron into the wall and

it heats up and you pour the batter in and you

close the lid for a minute or two.

And when you open it, there's a

beautiful lightly brown waffle ready to eat.

If you don't know what a waffle is, you

make a batter from flour and water and eggs

and sugar and a bit of oil.

It's similar to a pancake batter.

So you can scoop it with a ladle and pour it.

So you put some of the waffle batter into

the waffle maker, close the lid, and then a

little while later you have a yummy waffle.

And you could put some butter or margarine

and syrup on it and it's very tasty.

This is what we call a mixer or hand mixer.

So sometimes when you're making a cake, you

put all of the ingredients into a bowl.

You put all the dry ingredients in like

flour and sugar and cocoa maybe, and salt.

And then you maybe pour all the liquid ingredients

in like water or milk and eggs and oil.

And then you will use a mixer or

hand mixer to mix all the ingredients together.

Generally you don't use a mixer to make things

like bread, because that dough is very sticky.

But if you are making a cake or you're making

muffins or cupcakes, you're making more of a batter.

When I say batter, it means

it's something you can pour.

It's more of a liquid than a solid.

So you would use a mixer or hand

mixer to evenly mix all of the ingredients.

And this is a stand mixer.

We would like a stand mixer, but we do not have one.

So if you notice this mixer is a hand mixer.

You hold it with your hand in

order to make what you are making.

And this is a stand mixer.

It has a nice bowl.

And you put all your ingredients in and you

turn it on and it will just on its

own, mix what you need to have mixed.

Very, very handy, but also a little bit expensive.

Maybe someday we'll buy one.

We also do not have a scale, but some people who

are really good bakers or cooks like to have a scale.

So one way to make something

is to measure the ingredients.

You could use a measuring cup or a measuring

spoon, but another way is to weigh the ingredients.

Instead of putting in one cup of flour, you might put

in 6oz of flour, or you might put in I'm trying

to think here, like a quarter kilogram of flour.

I don't know, I don't use a scale.

But you might weigh the things that you are putting in.

You might weigh the ingredients so

that you are more accurate.

And then here we have a deep fryer.

We talked a little bit about this earlier.

A deep fryer is something that has oil in it.

The oil is heated up to a certain temperature.

Here in Canada, we use fahrenheit.

So you might heat the oil to

300 or 325 or 350 Fahrenheit.

And then you will put in a basket

the thing you want to deep fry.

So it is a verb as well.

I'm going to deep fry some

French fries or maybe chicken strips.

These look like chicken strips to me.

The nice thing about a deep fryer is that whatever

you are, deep frying gets really crunchy and golden brown.

If you deep fry fish, or if you deep fry French

fries, they come out very crispy and yummy and tasty, but

also not exactly the healthiest way to cook food.

A deep fryer does use oil and you do end up eating

a little bit of a greasy oily food when you are done,

depending on if the oil is hot enough or not as well.

A rice cooker.

We do not have one of these.

My son at university has one of these.

And we would love to have a rice cooker.

A very, very handy appliance with one job.

And its job is to cook rice.

So you put water, you put rice, maybe you put salt in.

I don't know, I'm not an expert rice

cooker user because I don't have one.

And then you set the timer, close the

lid, and then when it's done, the rice

is done and it's all ready to eat.

We currently cook rice on the stove in a pan, but

sometimes we feel like it would be nice to have a

rice cooker, especially if we have people coming over for dinner.

It would be nice to have a rice

cooker because sometimes you don't have enough room

on the stove to cook everything.

So it would be nice to do a chicken in

the crock pot and do rice in a rice cooker.

That would be very handy.

This is a steamer.

We have a steamer.

We do not use it very often.

There are a number of ways to cook something

like vegetables, for instance, if you like broccoli or

carrots or asparagus, you can cook those by boiling

them, but you can also steam them.

So instead of putting the vegetables in

water, you allow the steam from boiling

water to cook the vegetables for you.

I really, really like steamed broccoli.

It's one of my favorite ways to eat broccoli.

Just have it lightly steamed.

It turns nice and dark green

when you steam the broccoli.

But just another way to cook food.

Usually vegetables, although you can steam

fish and other things as well.

In fact, I think there might be fish in

the bottom tray of this steamer right now.

Our steamer doesn't have multiple levels.

It just has one level.

Usually we use it broccoli, we

use it for mostly a refrigerator.

So a refrigerator is a large

appliance used for two things.

Usually in a standard refrigerator, the

bottom is for cold things, usually

around three or four degrees Celsius.

And the top is for frozen things usually

kept below zero, or definitely kept below zero.

So our fridge looks a lot like this.

In the bottom, we keep milk and eggs

and margarine and vegetables and the things that

you want to keep cold but not frozen.

In the top, we keep things like leftovers, by the way.

Leftovers we often put in our freezer so that you

can grab them a couple of days later for lunch.

If you don't know what leftovers are, you

eat a meal and there's food left over.

You didn't eat all the food.

So usually, like the other day, we

had potatoes and chicken and applesauce and

green beans, but we had leftovers.

So we make little meals with the leftovers and

put them in the freezer, and then I can

grab one when I go to work again. Refrigerator.

Short form is fridge.

We usually just use the word fridge.

Very handy.

Probably one of the coolest modern

appliances that I can think of.

I really like the fridge.

It helps you save money because

food doesn't go bad as quickly.

A dishwasher.

We do not have a dishwasher.

I've mentioned this a few times when our kids

all move out, we might get one again, but

then there will be so few dishes to do.

Jen and I will probably just do them by hand anyways.

A dishwasher is a large appliance as well.

Remember I talked about large and

small appliances, if you missed that.

Large appliances are things like the fridge,

the stove, the oven, the dishwasher.

And small appliances would be things

like a hand mixer, a toaster.

A dishwasher is something that will

wash your dishes for you.

You put your dishes in, you put some dishwashing soap in,

you set whatever cycle you want it to do, and you

hit start, and then it washes the dishes for you.

We do have a dishwasher in our staff room at work

that is very handy because there's 25 of us making dirty

dishes throughout the day, mugs and a few plates at lunch.

So it is nice to have a dishwasher instead of someone

doing the dishes by hand at the end of the day.

This is a stove and this is an oven.

It's important, though, to recognize the difference.

You cook something on a stove.

Generally you put something, let's see, like if you

wanted to cook potatoes, you would peel the potatoes,

put them in a pan of water, and you

would cook them on the stove.

If you want to fry an egg, you

would fry an egg on a stove.

If you're baking bread, though, you would

bake the bread in an oven.

So notice you cook things on a stove.

You cook things in an oven.

Now, generally, people sometimes get confused because if a stove

and an oven are part of the same appliance, you

know how you can have the top is your stovetop

and then the bottom part is your oven?

Sometimes people will just call that a stove, but to make

it more, the most correct way is this is a stove.

If you want, you can call it

a stovetop that helps you to remember.

And this is an oven.

Something that you cook or bake

things in an immersion blender.

So this is a blender that you can stick into things.

Usually people use this to make, like, cream soups.

So if you're making like, a butternut squash soup

or a potato carrots, like cream of potato and

carrot soup, you would probably use the immersion blender

to mix everything together inside of that soup.

This person looks like they're making

a smoothie using an immersion blender.

There's also something called a food processor.

A food processor is a machine that has

sharp blades in it that spin, and you

use it to make different types of food.

If you were going to make salsa or guacamole,

you might make it in a food processor.

You would put the avocado.

If you're making guacamole, you would put the

avocado and some lemon juice and some salt

and maybe some other herbs and spices.

And then you would use it to chop up the food.

We don't have a food processor.

I wish we did.

It would be handy for doing things like if

you're making carrot muffins or something where you need

to chop up a vegetable really finely, a food

processor would be a great thing to have.

And then there's the air fryer, which I think

we've mentioned a few times during this lesson.

You can use a deep fryer to fry things in

oil, or you can buy an air fryer, which kind

of does the same job but just uses air.

And the benefit is that the food

is somewhat healthier when you are done.

If you make French fries in a deep fryer, they

absorb some of the oil that they are being cooked

in or fried in, and so you end up eating

some of that oil, which might make you gain weight,

whereas with an air fryer there will be less oil.

Now, the problem is French fries made

in a deep fryer are extremely yummy.

So we do like eating greasy oily food.

And food made in an air fryer is also

yummy, but it doesn't have the same yummy taste.

So an air fryer is used to cook

things like French fries, or you can cook

meat and other things in there as well.

And it uses air and heat to cook the food.