Budget Kitchen Essentials to Get You Cooking for Just $200

An everyday pan plus a spatula (pick a set)

A great cast-iron skillet is the perfect cornerstone for a new kitchen. Whether you’re sautéing vegetables on the stovetop or making cornbread in the oven, this deep, heavy skillet holds heat well, cooks evenly at any temperature, and can last a lifetime.

The original Lodge cast-iron skillet is still made in the USA and comes with a good factory seasoning. Contrary to what you may have learned, you don’t need to baby your cast iron—just cook in it regularly, clean it with soap, dry it immediately, and wipe a thin layer of neutral oil into it when it’s dry.

One downside to cast-iron pans: They’re heavier than stainless steel and nonstick pans. This skillet, for example, weighs around 8.5 pounds and may be challenging for some cooks to lift. You could instead opt for the Lodge Chef Collection 12-Inch Cast Iron Skillet, which is about 2 pounds lighter and performs similarly to the original, but that model is more expensive and a bit shallower.

Since cast-iron pans don’t have fragile nonstick coatings, you can pair yours with the most versatile, all-purpose spatula around: a metal fish spatula, whose thin, angular, slotted blade slides under steaks or crepes more easily than silicone or plastic spatulas. When you’re done frying bacon or roasting chicken, don’t be afraid to use the spatula to scrape up cooked-on gunk. The Winco FST-6 6.5-inch Blade Fish Spatula is more sharply angled than our top-pick fish spatula, which can make flipping a fish fillet or something similarly delicate a little trickier, but it’s a durable, easy-to-maneuver spatula at a great price.

A cast-iron skillet is the best all-purpose pan. But if you’re daunted by cast iron or partial to nonstick cookware, or if you need a lighter pan, turn to Tramontina’s Professional Fry Pan, our pick for the best nonstick pan.

In our tests, the nonstick Tramontina Professional 10-inch Restaurant Fry Pan heated more evenly than others and released food well, with the sloped sides of the pan making it especially easy for us to flip eggs or pancakes and slide food onto the plate. The pan is made of cast aluminum and has a nonstick coating that, with proper care, should last for years.

If you plan to cook regularly for more than one or two people and want to avoid needing to halve recipes, consider the larger Tramontina Professional Nonstick 12-Inch Restaurant Fry Pan, which costs about $8 more.

A key component of proper nonstick care is using only silicone or wooden tools with your pans, to avoid scratching the nonstick surface. Our favorite tool for this purpose is the GIR Mini Flip Silicone Spatula, which has a fiberglass core and a seamless silicone exterior with a sharply angled, thin edge that slides under food cleanly.

A midsize pot and strainers

If you’re building a barebones cookware set, a 5-quart pot represents a happy medium between a saucepan and a stock pot—not too big for making instant ramen or oatmeal yet big enough for a pound of pasta or a batch of soup.

The IKEA 365+ Pot With Lid Stainless Steel 5 Qt has stainless steel walls and handles, as well as a tri-ply base of aluminum sandwiched between layers of stainless steel. Pots with layered bases and thinner walls are more susceptible to uneven heating and sticking than more expensive fully clad pots are. But compared with other pots we tested that have thin walls and a tri-ply base, this IKEA pot overperformed.

In our tests, water boiled evenly and quickly, with no obvious hot or cold spots, and neither pasta nor oatmeal stuck to the interior of the pot. Any uneven heating or sticking wouldn’t hinder more basic tasks like making pasta or soup; it would more likely affect tasks such as searing meat, which you might opt to do in your cast-iron pan, anyway.

You need some sort of strainer to drain pasta, and a fine-mesh strainer is a multipurpose tool that can also dust a delicate layer of powdered sugar on top of a confection, sift flour for a perfectly crumbed cake, and even serve as a container for washing your produce.

Cuisinart’s Mesh Strainers, which come in a set of three, are inexpensive and dishwasher safe—which is great, because mesh is a pain to clean. The smaller sizes are ideal for tasks like straining out solids as you transfer used cooking oil to a jar or pour a shaken cocktail into a glass.

Good blades and a cutting board

No kitchen is complete without a sharp, serviceable chef’s knife. Though you can find better knives in our guide to the best chef’s knife, IKEA’s 365+ stainless steel chef’s knife is an impressive knife for its low price. In our tests, it was sharp enough straight out of the package to cut through a sheet of paper. It cut thin slices of tomato, apple, and red onion with ease, minced cilantro cleanly without crushing or tearing, and created a satisfying dice through a carrot. It was also large enough, and tough enough, to cut the rind off a watermelon.

The knife we picked up from our local IKEA to test had a tiny imperfection on the blade, a half-millimeter notch on one side of the edge, but it didn’t affect performance. (With proof of purchase, IKEA allows you to return new, unopened products up to a year from purchase, or opened products up to 180 days, for a full refund.)

The IKEA 365+ knife isn’t perfectly balanced—the handle is a little heavier than the blade, preventing the knife from feeling like a seamless extension of your hand. The all-metal handle is ridged for grip but could become slippery when oily or wet. But those flaws are not noticeable enough to be dealbreakers.

If your budget has a little wiggle room, a higher-quality chef’s knife is the first thing we suggest investing in as an upgrade. The picks in our guide to the best chef’s knife range from $50 to $200. Our current budget pick, the Victorinox Swiss Classic Chef’s Knife 8-inch, is more comfortable in the hand than the IKEA 365+ knife thanks to its grippy plastic handle, and its blade may be more durable.

Also keep in mind that all knives eventually need sharpening, whether you opt for a knife-sharpening service, invest in a knife sharpener, or borrow a sharpener from a friend.

A paring knife is a necessary tool for performing in-hand knife work like peeling shrimp or hulling strawberries, for mincing small things like shallots or a single garlic clove, and for completing delicate tasks like segmenting citrus.

The Victorinox Swiss Classic Paring Knife is a reliable, beloved, sharp little tool more than capable of tough cuts like coring apples or gentle feats like cutting away orange pith. For around $8, it’s a classic, great-value tool.

Made of hard plastic with a lightly textured surface, the OXO Good Grips Utility Cutting Board is a durable but lightweight cutting board that grips the blade of a chef’s knife. The rubber feet on either side hold it in place on a dry counter; placing a towel under the board helps it stay in place on a wet counter. A channel around the cutting board catches liquids and prevents messy runoff.

For anyone who has the budget and space, we typically recommend the larger OXO Good Grips Carving & Cutting Board. But as long as you’re fine with scraping prepared ingredients into bowls as you go and aren’t regularly looking to carve a turkey, this smaller size should suit you just fine.

A Y-shaped vegetable peeler makes it easy (and kind of fun) to peel fruits and vegetables, and the Kuhn Rikon Original Swiss Peeler deftly tackles any piece of produce you want to peel.

Sharp, lightweight, and durable, this beloved peeler is ubiquitous in the kitchens of all sorts of cooks. The Y-shape, the swiveling blade, and the lightweight handle give you ample range of motion as you negotiate produce with the blade.

Gear for baking (that you’ll reach for at other times, too)

A great whisk comes in handy when you’re mixing cake batter, combining dry ingredients for cookies, preparing eggs for omelets or meringues, or making mayos and sauces. The Winco 12-Inch Stainless Steel Piano Wire Whip is a springy, efficient whisk at a great price. With two more wires than the average whisk of this size, it offers extra power and speeds up tasks like whipping cream.

Though this whisk’s all-metal handle isn’t utterly comfy in the hand, its lack of meltable parts makes it a great tool to use over heat. Just remember that the handle will heat up in that case.

You need a sheet pan to bake cookies, roast veggies, catch meat drippings in the oven, and make sheet-pan meals. Nordic Ware’s half sheet pan has been our favorite for so long for a reason—it heats evenly, creating trays of perfectly browned sugar cookies or uniformly crisp oven fries, and it’s durable, lasting for years. It doesn’t warp, buckle, or bend at high temperatures. It’s consistently the least-expensive high-quality sheet pan we’ve found, too, and Nordic Ware offers a limited lifetime warranty.

You need a mixing bowl for cooking, baking, and sometimes even serving. Commonly found in commercial kitchens and restaurant-supply stores in a variety of sizes, Thunder Group Standard Weight Stainless Steel Mixing Bowls are durable and useful for any cook.

The 5-quart size is especially versatile, as it’s big enough for whipping up a full recipe of cookie dough or cake batter or tossing and serving a salad but not so big that you’d feel silly eating said salad directly from the bowl. The wide, shallow construction provides ample room for tossing ingredients or whisking air into a mixture. These versatile stainless steel bowls are oven and dishwasher safe, as well.

Instead of buying a pricey and easy-to-lose set of measuring cups, go for a digital kitchen scale and score the added benefit of more accurate measurements and fewer dishes to clean.

The Ozeri Pronto Digital Multifunction Kitchen and Food Scale measures as accurately as the more expensive Escali Primo Digital Scale, the top pick in our guide to kitchen scales, and has just the minor downside of a shorter auto-off cycle. It shuts down after about two minutes of inactivity; if it turns off while you’re still measuring, it will reset to zero when you turn it back on, and you’re likely to lose your progress.

If you want the most accurate possible measurement of small quantities, you may want to throw in a set of measuring spoons. The Ozeri scale can measure down to 1 gram, but amounts less than that don’t register on the scale, and fractions of a gram don’t register accurately. Using spoons can be faster and easier, but for anything other than baking, such as seasonings, it’s fine to just eyeball quantities.

A digital scale has you covered for measuring dry ingredients, but measuring liquids is often easier with a liquid measuring cup. Such a tool also works well for slowly drizzling oil into a mixture, keeping water on hand to add gradually to a dough, or even watering plants.

Made of durable tempered glass and labeled with clearly printed, legible measurement markings, this Pyrex measuring cup is another of our longtime favorite kitchen tools. Its spout pours a smooth stream, and it stacks well with other Pyrex measuring cups.

A sturdy can opener

You may be tempted to skip adding a can opener to your list, as they seem to just automatically exist, crusty and forgotten, in the back of any kitchen’s junk drawer. But even if you use canned goods only occasionally, you don’t want to be stuck at dinnertime with a can in your hand and no way of opening it.

The EZ-Duz-It grips cans securely and cuts through them smoothly, removing lids entirely rather than leaving you with a sharp disk clinging to the can. Stocking your kitchen with this can opener also ensures that you’ll never be without a bottle opener in a pinch.