The Best New Kitchen Gear from the 2023 Inspired Home Show

As members of the America’s Test Kitchen Reviews team, it’s our job to stay on top of kitchen trends. One way we do this is by attending the Inspired Home Show (IHS), a massive convention held yearly in Chicago where vendors, manufacturers, and buyers converge to check out the latest and greatest in the homewares space. 

This year 1,600 exhibitors displayed everything from thousand-dollar pizza ovens to devices designed to better store kitchen twine.

In one day, we walked a combined total of 58,513 steps, combing the carpeted aisles for noteworthy gear. With more than thirty years attending IHS between the four of us, we’ve seen it all. 

Sixteen products, in four categories, made our list this year. Said innovations range from small tweaks, such as a device to cut roll cookies more evenly, to new appliances that promise to make your life easier or better. 

We’ll be testing everything this year, so stay tuned for our results.

We’ve tested reusable food wraps, finding some great versions that replace single-use plastic wrap. A new company, The FreshGlow Co. caught our eye for having an interesting innovation in the category. Their food storage papers are infused with spices that promise to slow the degradation of your food, making it last from two to four times as long (allegedly). 

The idea came to the founder when she was a kid visiting her grandmother in India. When she accidentally consumed some contaminated water her grandmother made her a beverage to prevent her from getting sick. It worked, and when she got home she did a school science project on the concoction and found that the spices inhibited bacterial growth. She tested the concoction on strawberries and says they stayed fresh for days longer than usual. 

This spice blend has been infused into food wraps and slips of paper that you store with your food, like in a pint of strawberries, or tucked inside a bag of bread, to make them last longer. Both products are compostable.

The food storage papers seemed to offer the perfect middle ground of flexibility as our top products do – not too stiff to form a tight seal, but not so soft that they leave residue behind. We look forward to seeing if the spices truly keep foods fresh for longer.

All-in-one appliances have been gaining traction for a while now, whether the pitch is saving space, money, or streamlining your life. The Black + Decker Kitchen Wand 6 Kit, caught our eye this year by combining tools we hadn’t seen combined before. 

One base and a bevy of clip-on attachments promises to be electric versions of the following: an immersion blender, a wine opener, a milk-frother, a pepper and salt grinder, a can opener, and a whisk. It comes with a stand to keep the base handy on your counter and a case to store the attachments. 

Company reps told us that a version with even more attachments, such as a hand mixer and a food chopper, is coming soon. Oh, and did we mention it’s cordless? When machines try to do everything, they often struggle to do everything well but the concept here seems doable, if the cordless design can get enough power to execute its tasks, and if the attachments are well-designed. We’ll be putting it to the test to find out. 

If you’re big on canning and preserving, Presto’s new digital pressure canner is an exciting new option. With pressure canners, you can preserve not only jams and jellies and pickles, but also lower-acid foods such as chicken or vegetables that you typically can’t do in a boiling-water canner, such as asparagus or corn. (Foods with lower acid levels are more vulnerable to developing toxic C. botulinum bacteria that won’t die in boiling water; the toxin is only killed at the higher temperatures that a pressure canner can achieve.) This is the first digital pressure canner that meets USDA home canning guidelines for safely processing these foods, promising to make the process simpler and safer than it is on the stovetop.

Pressure canners can be a bit intimidating—pressure, very hot water, and glass are a volatile combination. This new digital canner takes away some of the fear factor, making it easier to maintain proper temperatures automatically. As a bonus, since it doesn’t require you to heat up your stove at all, it’ll also keep your kitchen cooler than when you use other canners.

If you often cook for crowds, you’ve probably used large rectangular disposable foil pans. And if you have, you also know they’re floppy to transport, and look more functional than festive for serving. 

Enter Fancy Panz, a name and concept that made us laugh until we thought about it a bit more. These colorful containers, which come in a wide variety of patterns, hold and support disposable aluminum pans during transport, with removable covers and serving spoons built in. One model includes a pad to freeze or preheat that tucks under the foil pan to keep food colder or warmer longer.

As longtime fans of AeroPress’s manual coffee makers we were psyched to see a couple interesting innovations from them this year. First, a new filter designed for longer infusion times. If you’re a Press-head you may be familiar with the inversion method where you use the press upside down to extend infusion time. Not only does this new filter promise to slow infusion time without inversion, it applies additional friction to coffee as it passes through the new, more variegated design, allegedly whipping up that foamy layer of crema so coveted by espresso lovers. We can’t wait to try this one.

Two more innovations on the way: a metal and glass AeroPress for the anti-plastic crowd and a larger-capacity version. These products are expected to launch in June; we’ll be putting them to the test as soon as they’re available for purchase. 

The Carbon8 One Touch Sparkling Water Maker and Dispenser doesn’t work like the rest of the soda makers on the market. You don’t fill a bottle from the machine; instead, it has a built-in water tank. You wave your hand over the top of the machine, signaling it to dispense a stream of bubbly water into whatever cup or container you’d like. 

Soda water at the ready (and no bottles to keep track of) is an innovation we look forward to testing. The inventor told us that a second-generation model that carbonates to a higher rate is about to hit the market, so we’ll be holding off to test until it becomes available. 

The Technivorm Moccamaster KBT has been our favorite coffee maker for many years, and the company has a particularly strong reputation within the coffee industry. So we were especially excited to learn that Technivorm is introducing its own burr grinder this year! While we’ve found that you don’t need a burr grinder to make great coffee, good ones can help ensure an especially even grind, giving you a perfect, consistently good cup every time. 

The new KM5 is approved by the Specialty Coffee Association–a mark of distinction that gives us confidence that this new grinder will be great. But it’s not cheap, currently running north of $300, so we’ll be curious to see how it holds up to other models in that price range. In our original burr grinder review, we stuck to models that cost less than $200. Will this expensive grinder give us anything those models didn’t? We’ll soon find out.

SodaStream is one of the biggest names in at-home seltzer and soda makers. Up until now, you’ve always had to choose between a machine that uses plastic bottles or, less commonly, a machine that uses glass water bottles. The company’s newest model, the E-DUO, is the first that’s compatible with bottles of both materials. 

It’s a great idea. Many of us prefer to drink out of glass when we’re at home, but like the light weight and durability of plastic bottles when we’re out running errands or bringing water to work. Another perk: The machine uses “quick connect” CO2 canisters, which we’ve tested before and found really do lock into place easily. 

Travel mugs can be disastrous in transit. They spill and dribble, they burn our mouths (or fail to stay hot at all), they block our view of the road, and take two hands to open or close. That’s why we found Black + Blum’s Glass Travel Cup so appealing. It seemed easy to use, locking and unlocking with one hand. It has a direct-pour system, which claims to prevent surprises and scorched mouths, and a glass lining that won’t taint beverages with off flavors. The lid comes apart for easy cleaning, too. 

If you cook at all, your knives are going to get dull at some point. Electric knife sharpeners can bring your knives’ edges back to life quickly and efficiently. For decades, our favorite has been the Chef'sChoice Trizor 15XV Knife Sharpener. It does a great job of sharpening blades to a 15-degree angle. But what if you have a knife with a different edge angle? 

This fall, Chef’s Choice is releasing a new model that lets you sharpen knives with 10-, 15-, and 20-degree edge angles. The blades in the sharpener are fixed; all you need to do is swap in different cartridges that guide your blade at the correct angle for your needs. The new sharpener costs a little bit more than our favorite, but we can easily see this investment being worthwhile, as it gives home cooks much more flexibility in their sharpening.

This combination robot vacuum-plus-mop combines the two functions into one machine, cleaning and mopping simultaneously (not all “combo” robots do; you often have to pull off the vacuum component, replace it with the mop, and send it out again)—and then kicks it up another notch: Sure, it empties dirt into a bag inside its charging dock so you don’t have to handle it, just like our winning robot vacuum, the iRobot Roomba j7+. But the newest Roborock S8 Pro Ultra also takes maintenance of the mop and brushes off your hands: Dirty water empties itself, it cleans and dries its own mop and brushes, and refills the mopping tank with clean water, so it’s always ready to go. 

We’ll be testing this model plus the newest iRobot vacuum/mop, the Roomba Combo j7+ Robot Vacuum + Mop, which detects carpeting and lifts the mop neatly out of the way.  

There is no substitute for a good baking pan. The NordicWare Baker’s Half Sheet won our review of rimmed baking sheets, and we love the smaller quarter-sheet and eighth-sheet versions, too. 

Now we have our eyes on those pans’ big sibling: the NordicWare Naturals Big Batch Pan. With a bigger cooking surface and higher sides, this forthcoming pan looks like it will come in handy for roasting lots of potatoes, making supersize one-pan dinners when friends come over, or when cooking or baking at the holidays. 

In the past few years, Ooni and a handful of other companies have changed the backyard pizza game. Many models run on propane. Some can be powered by wood pellets, wood, and/or charcoal as well. Last week, the company announced its first electric oven. It’s also the first oven that can be safely used inside as well as outdoors. 

We’re eager to get our hands on the Volt ourselves (stay tuned for an official review!), but we’re encouraged by what we saw. The oven can reportedly get up to 850 degrees in just 20 minutes. The thick insulation is designed for energy efficiency and safety, so that you won’t burn yourself if you accidentally bump against the exterior of the oven while it’s in use. 

In restaurants, seafood is delivered in white plastic bins called “fish tubs.” Most are roughly the size of an extra-wide shoe box. One thing they’re great for is proofing balls of pizza dough; it’s what we use at the test kitchen, and it’s what many of us use at home. 

Now Ooni has released stackable dough boxes intended for home use. Similar commercial versions have existed for a while, and for good reason. They’re flat, uniform, easy to stack, and easy to clean. Each Ooni container in the two-piece set fits six dough balls (big enough for 12-inch pizzas) and is compatible with a pizza prep lid, which doubles as a cutting board. They’re simple accessories we think will help maximize space when prepping, baking, and portioning pizza. 

Stand mixers are great for making doughs and batters for bread, cookies, cake, and more. But some of us really struggle to get dry ingredients into the bowl of the mixer without making a mess, spraying flour and baking soda and sugar everywhere while the stand mixer motor is running. (The tiny ingredient chutes on some machines’ splash guards aren’t much help, either.) There are workarounds, of course—you could use a flexible cutting mat or a piece of parchment to help direct the flow of ingredients. 

But the new Chef’s Planet stand mixer funnel promises to solve the problem in a more direct way, creating a permanent pathway for your dry (or wet!) ingredients to travel so that they all make it into the bowl. For some of us, this is exactly the kind of innovation we need to keep our counters and floors clean.

We got a sneak preview of a clever product coming later this year from OXO: the Slice and Bake Cookie Helper. It’s a pair of silicone mats that help you roll slice-and-bake cookie dough (into a few choices of thicknesses), plus caps for the ends of the rolls to seal them up in the fridge or freezer, which also keeps the end pieces from getting smushed the way they do with cling wrap or parchment. Then there’s the piece de resistance: the mats have little rows of raised dots inside, which press lines into the chilled dough, giving you guidelines to slice cookies perfectly – so they’ll bake evenly and look more professional.