WHY OUR EQUIPMENT RATINGS ARE DIFFERENT

For many viewers, the equipment corner is the most valuable part of the TV show. Why? Besides the fact that we save you big bucks (more often than not the expensive model is beaten by a much cheaper option), viewers know they can trust our ratings. That’s because we’re independent (we don’t accept advertising) and because we put equipment through real-world tests.

On the television show, Adam asks Chris to re-create some of the tests he and his team use in rating kitchen equipment. For example, Chris will wash dishes with various brands of liquid dish detergent to demonstrate which ones cut the grease and which ones don’t. But that’s just a sample of the work involved in our tests. Often, hundreds of kitchen hours go into each of our equipment ratings.

In testing blenders, Adam and his team whipped smoothies, crushed ice, pureed soup, ground peanuts into peanut butter, and processed pesto. (In all, they performed 11 separate kitchen tests to determine which blender you should own.) And to evaluate chef’s knives, Adam enlisted four additional testers—a cook with large hands, a cook with small hands, a skilled cook, and a kitchen novice—and asked them to perform the same series of tasks. Each tester spent weeks working with eight knives, accumulating data that Adam analyzed to determine our winner.

And in case you’re wondering, Chris doesn’t regularly do the dishes in the test kitchen—lucky for him, there are professional dishwashers on hand to do the job.