The Ranting Chef does not get paid or receive any revenue from manufactures or retailers of products reviewed. I occasionally receive products that I am asked to use and see what I think. I take a look, try them out and tell you all about them.

Last week I came home from a long day at work and I had a nice surprise waiting for me.

One quick look at the label and I knew I had some new toys to play with.

I couldn’t wait to open the box.

The good folks at Chef’s Planet sent me four products to take a look at: nonstick oven liner,

oven glove,

nonstick kitchen mat

and a food scoop.

So over the next few days I put these tools to the test. First the scoop.

After I cut on my cutting board, my most common method of transferring the chopped food is to scrape it up with my knife, slide my knife under some of it and lift. If I am steady, I usually make it into the bowl, pan or pot without spillage. I know this is bad for the knife and unless I have a small quantity, it takes me three or more times to get it all.

The scoop fits comfortably in my hand, has a little heft (which I really like) and slides easily along the surface of the cutting board.

The scoop has sides to keep food from spilling out over the edge.

 it holds 1-2 cups of chopped food.

It makes it easy to deliver your food to its intended place.

MY TAKE: Love it. I’ve used it for four meals so far. I went to grab it out of the drawer to use it and it wasn’t there. I found it in the dishwasher that had not yet been run. I took it out and washed it, because I knew that I’d want it for the chopped nuts above (from the Vietnamese Spring Rolls)

Next up, the nonstick kitchen mat.

First off, the mat is a good size. 24″ x 16″. One side is made to stick to the counter.

It is not sticky, but the silicone gripped onto my countertop and didn’t move….until I lifted it up.

The nonstick surface is as advertised. I  put it to the test with both wet rice paper wrappers (Vietnamese Spring Rolls)

and tacky cannoli dough. In fact, I rolled out the dough into the exact shape of the mat. One edge carried over to the countertop and it stuck to the countertop but not to the mat. Clean up was simple with a damp cloth.

MY TAKE: It works great. Easy to put out, easy to use and easy to clean. My kind of product. I’ll use it every time I bake or work with other sticky items.

Next, the oven glove.

I recently purchased a new set of what I thought of as oven gloves. In reality, they are oven mittens. Thick mittens where all of my fingers are together and my thumb is separate. I was interested to see how the oven glove compared.

I have relatively big hands, but it easily fit my left and my right.

The first test was taking out a cookie sheet that had been in a 425 degree oven. Wearing the oven glove I could hold the sheet for six seconds before I needed to put it down. That easily made it out of the oven and onto the stove or cooling rack, or from the stove to the table. The oven mitt fared equally as well.

Where the glove really made a difference is where dexterity became important. A 13×9 Pyrex dish being taken out of the oven can be very difficult to handle with an oven mitt. I need one on each hand to be confident that I wasn’t going to drop it. I could handle it with a single glove. Here I made Maggie’s Cinnamon Roll Cake.

 Working with hot oil and afraid of a drop or two being splashed back? The glove protected my hand.

By far, making cannoli showed how important the glove can be. As the cannoli tubes are in 325 degree oil and very hot to touch, making any quantity of shells can take a long time. With the oven glove, you can hold the tube and get the next circle of dough rolled on the tube much faster than if you would have to wait for it to cool. Notice both the wax paper (which always moves on me and does not compare) and the nonstick kitchen mat in the background.

MY TAKE: For grabbing something small or easy to handle that is hot, it works just as well as an oven mitt. For anything that needs a little (or a lot) of dexterity, the oven glove is a must.

Finally, the oven mat.

I’ve used an oven mat for years. They are great. As I often have something in my oven bubbling over and falling down to the bottom, the oven mat saves it from being baked on. It is easy to remove and clean and keeps the smoke from burnt on stuff from happening.

MY TAKE: Guess what??? This one is for you, my readers. I love it and have one, so want to pass on this one to you . As indicated in a previous post, I am randomly choosing from my list of subscribers to give the Chef’s Planet nonstick oven liner. Using Excel to generate my random number, I found the corresponding subscriber and it is….

LetsGetBasted

As that subscriber is actually a blog with four different authors, I’ll leave it up to you to determine the final winner. Congrats!!

I want to thank Chef’s Planet for sending me some of their great products to review. You can find all of these, and their other products at chefsplanet.com and some of their products at retailers like Bed, Bath and Beyond and gourmet stores like Williams-Sonoma.