Two Japanese Kitchen Gadgets Worth a Second Look: Sesame Grinder and Tsuma Taro Turner

Introduction

Japanese kitchen tools have a reputation for doing one thing extremely well, and the two gadgets featured here are no exception. One is a simple, affordable sesame seed grinder designed for tableside use in restaurants and noodle bars. The other is a precision vegetable turner that produces thin sheets and decorative nets that would take years of knife practice to replicate by hand. They sit at very different price points, but both reward a specific kind of cook.

Slicky Sesame Seed Grinder

The Slicky sesame seed grinder is a small plastic unit that you load with sesame seeds and rotate to grind and scatter them over dishes. It is the kind of tool you will find in many restaurants and noodle bars, where sesame is a common garnish. The grind is not uniform: you get a mixture of some whole seeds and some ground ones, so it is as much a distributor as a grinder.

Its real strength is hygiene. At a shared table, everyone can pass the grinder around like a pepper mill rather than dipping fingers into a communal bowl of seeds. It works with white, black, golden or roasted sesame seeds, and could plausibly handle a furikake-style spice blend too. It is not going to change your world, but it does one thing really well, it makes food look better, and it adds that characteristic sesame aroma to noodles, ramen, glazed meats and roasted greens.

A Niche Classic: The Four Hole Sauce Pourer

Between the two headline gadgets, one more tool earned a mention: a four hole sauce pourer designed specifically for unagi teriyaki. Fill the reservoir with eel sauce, or tare, and the four spouts let you dip and drizzle an even, delicate flow of glaze over the eel before a quick blast with a blow torch. The name says it all: teri refers to the glaze and kaki means to drizzle, not pour.

The difference from simply pouring from a jug is flow control, and the result is a sticky, deeply coloured, evenly lacquered glaze. Tasted with rice and pickled radish, the glazed eel was genuinely impressive. The catch is specificity: a squeezy bottle can achieve similar results, and this only feels essential if you serve a lot of unagi and want it perfect every time. At around £29.99, it is a tool that lives in history and tradition more than everyday usefulness.

Also in the Roundup: Tempura Pan and Sauce Pourer

A Japanese-style tempura frying pan rounded out the selection and proved the most universally useful of the lot. Fill the shallow pan with oil, use the built-in thermometer (marked with a red line between 160 and 180 degrees) to check the temperature, then fry your battered vegetables and prawns. The detached, bolted-on handles stay cool, the lid has a lip that stops splashes, and the integrated draining rack lets fried items rest while excess oil drips back into the pan.

For anyone who fries regularly at home, the all-in-one design saves the usual plate-plus-rack-plus-paper arrangement, and the oil is well contained throughout. At £30.99, roughly a pound more than the sauce pourer, it was considered the clear bargain of the group: like a saucepan, but better.

Chiba Kogyosyo Tsuma Taro Turner

The Chiba Kogyosyo Tsuma Taro Turner looks, at first glance, like an over-engineered grater. Load a firm, straight vegetable such as daikon into the spindle, crank the handle, and the shaking blade produces a continuous, paper-thin sheet of vegetable in seconds. This cut, known as katsuramuki, normally takes chefs decades of practice by hand.

The side-to-side jiggle of the blade is also what gives the sheets their glossy, polished surface, so the tool improves presentation as much as it does knife skills. Swapping cartridges produces different results, including a woven net pattern that peels apart slowly to reveal the lattice, ideal for wrapping vegetables for steaming or dressing sashimi-style plates. Cylindrical vegetables like daikon, cucumber and carrot work best; rounder, starchier vegetables such as potato take more effort.

The blades are razor sharp and need careful handling, but the body is robust plastic with all-metal mechanisms, and early impressions suggest it is durable. It is undeniably a single-use, specialist investment, and the price reflects that. For cooks who care about precision Japanese presentation, though, nothing else does this job.

Buying Advice

If you want an inexpensive way to level up everyday Japanese-style dishes, the Slicky sesame seed grinder is an easy, low-risk pick that earns its place on the table. If you fry regularly, the tempura pan offers the best value of the group. The four hole sauce pourer is one for unagi devotees only. The Tsuma Taro Turner is the specialist of the bunch: expensive and narrow in purpose, but genuinely capable of results that are nearly impossible by hand.

Conclusion

The sesame grinder proves that a £9 gadget can still be a genuinely helpful addition to the kitchen, while the Tsuma Taro Turner shows the other end of the spectrum: a precision tool with one unforgettable trick. Choose based on how often you would actually use each one, and you will not go far wrong with either.