A home-cooked meal can be many things: comfort, creativity, therapy, procrastination, an excuse to open a bottle of wine on a Tuesday. It can be a slow Sunday project built around a ragù or a thrown-together bowl of noodles eaten standing at the kitchen counter after work. However it looks, cooking at home remains one of life’s great pleasures – capable of grounding us, connecting us and, occasionally, impressing the people we live with. In this issue, foodism explores the ingredients, stories, techniques and kitchen kit that turn everyday meals into something memorable, from Korean banchan and Iraqi food traditions to the knives, oils, pans and pantry staples that make cooking feel less like a chore and more like a way of life.
16cm chef’s knife, WÜSTHOF
WÜSTHOF knife
For more than 200 years, WÜSTHOF has been forging knives in Solingen, Germany – and the new Partner range feels like the ideal gateway into the world of properly serious kitchen kit. Designed for home cooks who’ve outgrown flimsy supermarket blades, the 16cm chef’s knife is fully forged from a single piece of steel, giving it the sharpness, balance and reassuring heft that makes prep work feel less like a chore and more like part of the pleasure. Built for busy weeknight cooking rather than chef theatrics, Partner combines WÜSTHOF’s trusted craftsmanship with a lighter, more approachable feel. Ergonomic handles and a practical half-bolster design make the knives comfortable, durable and easy to control, whether you’re slicing herbs, breaking down vegetables or tackling Sunday prep. It’s an everyday upgrade you’ll notice from the very first chop.
£89; wusthof.com
Small barbecue box, Knepp
Knepp barbecue box
Packed with a selection of regeneratively farmed meat from the Knepp Estate in West Sussex, the small BBQ Box from Knepp champions bold flavour, proper animal welfare and the kind of quality that doesn’t need much more than fire and good company to shine. Expect deeply flavoured burgers, sausages and barbecue-ready cuts raised on pasture as part of Knepp’s pioneering rewilding project, where free-roaming cattle, pigs and deer help restore biodiversity across the estate. The result is meat with real character and a story worth telling around the grill. Ideal for long lunches, sunny evenings and anyone looking to upgrade from packet burgers to something far more memorable.
£55; knepp.co.uk
OneTouch vacuum sealer eco-set, CASO Design
OneTouch vacuum sealer eco-set
For the home cook constitutionally incapable of producing a meal smaller than a Tudor banquet, this vacuum sealer with bags and containers is your new best friend. CASO's Vacuum OneTouch is a hand-held, USB-charged sealer with unfussy single-button operation and 150 minutes of battery life – ample for a batch-cooking Sunday of ambition. The stackable glass containers are both freezer- and dishwasher-friendly, and food stays fresh eight times longer, meaning the chilli you made on a Tuesday survives until that Sunday hangover.
£59.99; casodesign.co.uk
Organic seasonal salad and veg box, Abel & Cole
Abel & Cole seasonal salad and veg box
Most supermarket leaves arrive pre-exhausted, sealed in plastic with the wilt of a freelancer during tax season. Abel & Cole's Organic Seasonal Salad & Veg Box is the corrective: eight portions a week, organically grown, curated to whatever the season is actually offering rather than what's been flown in from a polytunnel in Almería. Spring beans, heirloom tomatoes when their moment comes, leaves with structural integrity. Returnable box, no needless plastic, fairly paid farmers, and for every box sold, Abel & Cole donates a portion of fresh, nutritious fruit and veg to those food charities.
£20.95; abelandcole.co.uk
Chilli vinegar dressing bundle, Poon’s
Poon's chilli vinegar
At Foodism, we spend a fair amount of time loitering in our own kitchens, which means when we find a product we love, we'll generally try to bootleg it at home for less. Poon's chilli vinegar dressing has thwarted every attempt. It is, frankly, like crack – completely unreplicable, even using the exact same ingredients. Some sorcery (decades in professional kitchens, presumably) makes it tread the perfect tightrope between chilli heat, sharp vinegar and the funk of fermented black beans. Stir a spoonful into noodles with peanut butter and shredded roast chicken – there's no hangover cure like it.
£21.06; poons-pantry.com
Non-Stick ceramic sauté pan and lid, Circulon
Circulon non-Stick ceramic sauté pan
Cooking on a knackered pan is a special kind of demoralising – the eggs welded to the base, the onions catching unevenly, the realisation that dinner is now a salvage operation. Circulon's Halo Ceramic Sauté Pan offers a way out: 4.7 litres of capacity, induction-friendly, finished in a laser-etched ceramic coating that claims six times the stain resistance and nine times the scratch resistance of its rivals. PFAS- and PFOA-free, oven-safe, lid included. Searing, braising, shallow-frying, the dispiriting Monday stir-fry – all handled.
£99.99; circulon.co.uk
Extra virgin olive oil, Trulli Ulivi
Trulli Ulivi extra virgin olive oil
A great dish is only ever the sum of its parts, and no amount of culinary sleight-of-hand will rescue a panzanella propped up by sad supermarket oil. Enter Trulli Ulivi, a fresh, vibrant extra virgin from a family farm in Puglia, with notes of artichoke, green almond and a pepper kick that announces itself on the back of the throat. Green-fruited, gently bitter, properly balanced – equally at home glugged over burrata or doing the heavy lifting in a Sunday ragù. With a polyphenol count of 721 mg/kg, it's practically prescribable.
£22.50; trulli-ulivi.com
Laksa curry sauce, Yumm Singa
Yumm Singa Laksa curry sauce
There exists a specific tier of evening – too tired to cook, too proud to summon a man on a bike – for which this jar was clearly invented. Yumm Singa's Laksa Curry Sauce is the in-house alternative: a Katong-style paste of coconut, lemongrass, ginger, garlic and chilli, medium heat, capable of producing a bowl of laksa that would rival many takeaways. Stir through noodles, slacken with stock for soup, simmer with prawns or tofu and call it dinner.
£6.49; yummsinga.com
Camden green cutlery set, ProCook
Camden green cutlery set
Looking to transform your tableware into something plucked from a stone cottage in Provence? This 16-piece set, with its riveted sage-green handles and mirror-polished heads, is the natural companion to a gingham tablecloth and a piping tray of pissaladière. Forged from stainless steel and dishwasher safe, this set is weighty enough to feel considered, comfortable enough to wield through a long lunch, and handsome enough to leave out on the table between courses.
£39; procook.co.uk
Chopping board set, Brabantia
Brabantia chopping board set
If the London air doesn't get you, the microplastics shedding from your battered old chopping board into tonight's stir-fry probably will. Time to upgrade. Brabantia's set comes in a triumvirate of sustainable beech – one for veg, one for bread, one for meat – each a generous 40 x 25cm and clever enough to double as a serving board on the flip side. The meat board has grooves to catch wayward juices, the bread board catches crumbs, and the veg board tapers neatly for tipping a mountain of chopped onion straight into the pan. All aboard.
£89; brabantia.com
Birch Coffee
Birch Coffee
You wouldn't make a croissant with spreadable margarine, so why start the day with the brown, embittered dust masquerading as coffee that haunts most kitchens? Enter Birch: part café, part bean dealer, dreamed up by Niall after several pilgrimages to the coffee Mecca of the southern hemisphere, aka Melbourne. He's brought the wisdom home to Skye, married it to Highlands and Islands sourcing, and roasts speciality beans in small batches, traceable back to the grower. Case in point is the San Antonio – Peruvian beans grown in Huabal, perfumed with almond, mandarin, and roasted hazelnut, making for the perfect morning caffeine kick.
£18; birch.coffee
Polpa finissima, Cirio
Polpa finissima
There are certain things in life it doesn't pay to scrimp on: umbrellas, olive oil, beans and, crucially, tinned tomatoes. Your ragù will not sing, your chilli will not pop, if you're cooking with those 23p tins of flavourless red water sloshing about in the corner shop. Cirio's round tomatoes are picked and packed the same day, peeled, deseeded and chopped to preserve that vivid Italian intensity – the sort of fragrant, properly red tin that gives a Sunday lasagne, a midweek puttanesca or a slow-braised shakshuka a spine.
£9 for six tins; ocado.com
Maldon Salt
Maldon Salt
The secret to truly excellent cooking? Skill? Passion? Patience? Nah – it's nice salt. Maldon, long the seasoning of choice among people who take their suppers seriously, has expanded its hand-harvested flakes into a trio of cleverly blended flavours. The Garlic, spiked with wild and roasted bulbs, is heaven scattered over buttery new potatoes or tear-and-share bread. The Chilli, freckled with Aleppo and bird's eye, electrifies poached eggs, prawns or a margarita rim. The Pepper, laced with Tellicherry and pink peppercorns, transforms a steak or crisp calamari. All in 50g tubs – no need to restock every five minutes.
£2; waitrose.com
The Explorer, Giuliana Pimenta
Giuliana Pimenta
Brazil has given the world many things: samba, caipirinhas, football and the Brazilian wax. Giuliana Pimenta would like to add brigadeiros to that list. The Explorer – 24 Chocolates Box combines the country’s famously creamy chocolate treats with indulgent bonbons filled with raspberry caramel, toasted coconut and Nutella. Sweet, rich and gloriously over the top, it’s a box that disappears with alarming speed. Consider yourself warned – and possibly sugared.
