My Kitchen Would Be Incomplete Without My Beloved Spootle

Spending hundreds of hours in the kitchen — first at culinary school and then as a line cook — turned me into a spoon snob. Now, as a journalist, I’ve cornered the spoon beat. In fact, of the 70-some-odd cooking utensils in my kitchen, 22 are spoons, which might sound excessive, but each one serves a purpose.

My ladle carefully cradles chili and other hearty stews into a bowl, my measuring spoons ensure that my cakes always rise to perfection, and, of course, my shiny Kunz spoon bastes steaks with sizzling-hot butter and drizzles sauces with exacting precision.

To earn a place in my treasured collection, a spoon must be multipurpose, worth the expense, and built to last a lifetime. And though the Kunz spoon tends to steal the limelight (so much so that it’s currently sold out), my wooden Spootle is actually the most-used kitchen tool in my crowded crock.

A cross between a spatula and a spoon, this cooking utensil is just as good at scraping stuck-on bits from a pan as it is at stirring ingredients in a pot.

I discovered Jonathan’s Spoons in a boutique kitchen store in Austin, Texas, about a year ago. The Spootle is a hybrid of a spoon and a spatula.

This somewhat silly spoon might not be riveting to many people, but for me, someone who obsesses over kitchen tools regularly — personally and professionally — discovering the Spootle felt akin to spotting a unicorn in the wild. It was unique, unlike any other wooden spoon I had seen before, with its nifty, flat spatula-like edge. I instantly knew it was coming home with me, despite its nonsensical-portmanteau name.

Since joining my collection, it’s become an everyday cooking essential. I reach for it almost daily, whether to stir a pot of cinnamon-apple oatmeal for breakfast or to scrape the stuck-on bits of charred meat from my frying pan after sautéing chicken breasts for lunch or to prepare a batch of creamy risotto for dinner.

The flat-bottom edge is ideal for scraping the brown bits off a pan without scratching the surface. And it has a carved bowl for scooping or tasting a spoonful of tomato sauce for seasoning as you cook.

Thanks to its sturdy handle and distinctively curved profile, it’s much more ergonomic than any other wooden spoon I’ve used, which makes it supremely nice to hold, even when I’m babysitting a pot of risotto, stirring nonstop for an hour. (It’s available in a left- or right-handed configuration for optimal comfort.)

In fact, it’s so versatile and comfortable that I used it to prepare just about every dish on my family’s Thanksgiving table except the turkey.

The sturdy handle made it easy to vigorously stir potatoes and cheese for the creamiest pommes aligot and to smash simmering cranberries into a jammy sauce. The flat edge helped me evenly toast breadcrumbs in a pan to garnish mac and cheese and to scrape creamy béchamel sauce to prevent it from scalding at the bottom of a pot. The shallow belly was perfect for taste-testing the pan-dripping turkey gravy and scooping heaps of my mom’s famous sweet potato casserole onto plates.

The Spootle is made of high-quality cherrywood and is also available in a blackened finish. So it also looks nice when it does double duty as a serving utensil. And unlike the splintered and shoddy wooden spoons I grew up using in my mom’s kitchen, the Spootle is meant to last. With a bit of oiling and waxing now and then, mine has remained in tip-top shape.

Like any wooden utensil, the Spootle requires a bit of maintenance to keep it in good condition. The wood naturally soaks up oils as I cook, but to ensure that it stays well-hydrated from top to bottom and to prevent splintering, which can harbor bacteria, I immediately wash it with unscented dish soap after each use. And I never, ever run it through the dishwasher, which could cause the wood to warp or crack.

The Spootle has appeared in Wirecutter articles a couple of times before: once as a staff pick in our plastic-kitchen-tool alternatives roundup and again in our best gifts for mom guide.

Gift-guide writer Mari Uyehara told me why she strongly recommends the Spootle. “When it comes to giving gifts to people who cook a lot, I like to get things that they likely don’t already own some version of or have some deeply held preference for already — no chef’s knives and the like,” she said. And she even owns one herself: “I can’t remember the last time I reached for a rounded wood spoon.”

I had a culinary professor who once half-jokingly told me that chefs are crazier about spoons than they are about their knives. Much like a hammer to a carpenter or a scalpel to a surgeon, a spoon is an essential tool for a cook, for everything from drizzling sauces to basting liquids to plating ingredients.

And the Spootle is by far the best wooden utensil I’ve ever used, not to mention the prettiest. I have my eye on Jonathan’s Cat Tail Little Wiggle Spootle next — because I still can’t help myself with a spoon.

This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Catherine Kast.