This Kitchen Appliance Is Essentially Useless, According To Ted Allen

Ted Allen is a Food Network favorite. He just seems so nice and relatable when he is telling people they've been Chopped. In fact, according to Food Network Canada, Allen is also quite the jokester and has an adult sense of humor. He also has a lot of wisdom and opinions to offer up, especially as it relates to the kitchen and some of the strange gadgets we feel compelled to buy. The fact is, outfitting your kitchen with the right gadgets and gear is similar to outfitting a nursery for a new baby. You really need to sift through a lot of "stuff" to determine what you need and what you will probably never use. Ever. And let's face it: with all the cool tools that are on the market, along with a pot and pan for pretty much any dish you can dream up, it's easy to find your kitchen overwhelmed with useless items. 

Not to mention, according to Eat This, Not That!, you might eat a whopping 40 percent more food when your kitchen is cluttered than when it is nice and clean. So tidy up! There's no need for lots of big, bulky, items that take up space and are only used once in a blue moon. Allen seems to feel the same way and recently shared his thoughts about an appliance that not only doesn't give him the culinary warm-and-fuzzies; he finds it useless.

Apparently, Allen is not a fan of the anti-griddle – you know, that big metal top box that Chopped contestants fight to use to flash freeze elements of their desserts. In an exchange on Twitter, Allen tagged his fellow Chopped colleagues – Amanda Freitag, Marcus Samuelsson, Marc Murphy, and Alex Guarnaschelli – and tweeted that a "granita may be the ONE thing that could be an effective use of the otherwise useless Anti-Griddle." 

Perhaps Sunny Anderson is the inspiration for the use of the anti-griddle to make granitas. Anderson did an interview with Food Network several years ago about her first-round victory of Chopped All-Stars and said she wanted to avoid using unfamiliar equipment, explaining, "I can't see myself chancing $50,000 to show off on a piece of equipment I've never used." She noted, "The closest I got to using something I haven't before was the chill top (aka the anti-griddle) to make a granita. It's like a speedy freezer."

Allen isn't alone in his feelings about the anti-griddle. On the forum Chef Talk, one participant remarked that an anti-griddle will run you $1200, and another commented, "Eleven people in the cooking world use those stupid things, nine of them as doorstops and another as a press weight." Ouch. But if you are truly enamored with the anti-griddle, another commenter from Chef Talk offered up a cool hack: "you can re-create a basic antigriddle using dry ice and a baking sheet or the back of a spatula."