Four Kitchen Gadgets Put to the Test: One Clear Winner and Three to Skip

Introduction

Kitchen gadgets promise to save time, reduce mess or replace a drawer full of tools. We put four popular gadgets through real kitchen tasks: peeling, measuring sticky ingredients, pressing pizza dough and serving cold drinks at a gathering. Only one genuinely earned its place on the counter. Here is how each one performed, and what to buy instead where it fell short.

Quick Slice Knife: A Multifunction Knife That Tries to Do Too Much

The Quick Slice Knife is a three-purpose fruit knife with a separate spring attachment that coils around the blade. The spring acts as a spacer ring, and its position supposedly lets you peel or slice in two different thicknesses. The idea is that one tool replaces both a knife and a peeler.

In practice, it does neither job well. Used as intended, the spring attachment wedges into the fruit and carves out chunky, geometric wedges rather than clean peel. It is genuinely harder to control than a basic speed peeler, and the results look like something carved rather than peeled. A standard speed peeler gives more control, follows the curvature of the produce with its rotating head, and simply does a better job.

There is also a design contradiction worth noting: the pitch is that this removes the need for another tool, but the attachment itself is the gadget. You still have to buy it, and it performs worse than the tool it replaces. At around £7.91 for two spring guards and two unremarkable knives, it feels cheap, and it is sharp enough to slice, but that is about the best that can be said. If you need a peeler, buy a speed peeler and skip this entirely.

Dreamfarm Upcup: Clever Idea, Awkward Reality

The Dreamfarm Upcup is a four-in-one adjustable measuring cup. You press the base down to set one cup, half a cup, a third of a cup or a quarter cup, and the claim is that the sliding base scrapes itself clean, so wet, dry and sticky ingredients do not cling to the sides.

The cleaning claim was the most interesting part to test, so we measured half a cup of mayonnaise, a third of a cup of harissa and a quarter cup of honey. Mayonnaise did wipe away reasonably cleanly. Harissa, being oil-based, ended up everywhere and became a nightmare to clean. Honey sat stubbornly at the top. The sides of the cup do stay mostly clean, which is genuinely useful, but only the base or lid wipes rather than the whole cup, and with oil-based ingredients even that advantage evaporates.

There is also a bigger, more fundamental issue: measuring cups are largely obsolete. If you weigh your ingredients in grams, the Upcup solves a problem you do not have. And if you are working through a recipe that needs several different cup measures, you only get one cup, which means washing it between every single ingredient. That makes it an impracticality rather than a convenience. At around £13.95, it is not expensive, but the money is better spent on a kitchen scale.

Vevor Pizza Dough Press: Industrial Looks, Underwhelming Results

The Vevor Pizza Dough Press is a heavy, sliding metal press with a clamp-down lid and adjustable thickness settings. The pitch is simple: no more rolling or stretching, just place a dough ball on the plate, slide it in, clamp down, and get a perfect pizza base in seconds.

The reality required far more effort than advertised. Even with flour to prevent sticking and dough warmed briefly in the pizza oven, it needed serious sustained pressure to get anywhere near flat, and the results were still too thick. The official marketing shows dough going in and coming out far thinner and wider than what the press actually delivers, which raises questions about how those demo shots were made. To be clear, the dough itself was fine. When we rolled the same dough with an ordinary rolling pin, we got a much thinner base and a nicely charred, well-seasoned pizza. The dough was never the problem; the press was.

At £69.99, it is a significant spend for something that looks like it belongs in a workshop and underperforms a £5 rolling pin. With more adjustment and tuning it might improve, but as tested, it is not worth it.

Tanky: The Pressurised Drinks Tank That Actually Delivers

The Tanky is a compact pressurised drinks tank that lets you batch, chill and serve pre-mixed cocktails anywhere. You pour in your batch, twist in a CO2 canister, slowly raise the pressure to around 10 PSI (about 0.75 bar, roughly the fizz of a can of soft drink), and pour. It holds up to 12 standard 330ml drinks, and pressure keeps everything cold and carbonated, which is exactly what you want at the bottom of the garden or on a boat, where a jug of spritz goes warm, flat and watered down with melting ice.

Using it was straightforward: pour in the mix, screw in the canister until you hear the seal break, adjust the pressure knob and pour. The result was properly cold and properly carbonated, and the whole assembly feels robust and well built, with a satisfying screw mechanism and an appealing industrial look.

It is worth being clear about what Tanky is and is not. It does not refrigerate and it does not carbonate from scratch; it maintains temperature and carbonation for a batch you have already mixed. That is a real but narrow use case, and one canister covers one batch. It is also priced at £124, which is a lot for a drinks dispenser. But unlike everything else tested here, it claims to do something and then actually does it. If you regularly entertain outdoors and want easy, sociable, hands-off pouring of cold fizzy drinks, it has a genuine place.

Overall Buying Advice

If you take one thing from these four tests, it is this: buy the simple tool that already does the job. A speed peeler beats the Quick Slice Knife, a kitchen scale beats the Upcup, and a rolling pin beats the Vevor press. The Tanky is the exception, because it offers something a jug and a bottle opener genuinely cannot: cold, carbonated, pre-mixed drinks on tap wherever the party lands. It is expensive, but it works exactly as claimed.

Conclusion

Three of these gadgets solve problems that did not exist, or solve real problems badly. The Tanky is the only one we would confidently recommend, and even then only if outdoor batch serving fits your lifestyle and the price does not put you off. Everything else on this list can stay in the shop.