Gift gadgets.

Byline: Jim Boyd The Register-Guard

Kitchen supply shops have a lot of innovative cooking tools to go under the tree this holiday season. We found local retailers pretty much agreed on what's new and what's hot.

The Garlic Twist

This gadget (shown at top right) allows you to mince garlic to the exact texture you desire.

Eric Teng, 54, who was born in Hong Kong and earned an engineering degree from the University of Minnesota, had to learn to cook when divorce left him a single parent of two children.

Chopping garlic with a knife is laborious and messy, and a typical garlic press produces garlic puree, not chopped garlic, he discovered. So Teng spent 2 1/2 years perfecting a new design that he began marketing in May 2003. It's a cylindrical polycarbonate container with two rows of merging teeth that his company, NexTrend Products, manufactures in California.

To operate, whack a garlic clove with the container to crush it, remove the skin, place the peeled clove in the bottom of the container and twist the top to mince. Colors: red, blue and clear. Suggested retail price: $13.95 (priced at $15 locally).

Microplane graters

Lorrane Lee of Ottawa discovered in 1994 that her husband's new wood rasp was the perfect tool for zesting an orange, and she wrote the manufacturer to share her discovery.

Since then, the Microplane Division of Grace Manufacturing has continued to improve the design for kitchen use. A rotary grater suited to either right- or left-handed cooks and a Nutmeg Grate-n-Shake which both grates and stores nutmeg are Microplane's new products this year.

Also new, plastic storage sheaths to protect the blades and your hands.

The Microplane 40020 Zester/Grater (shown at right, second from top) retails for $12.95

The Pin

The main advantage of this solid aluminum rolling pin (shown at right in three colors) is that it can be chilled in the refrigerator and will remain cold while working pastry dough.

Michael Christy, the CEO of Chef's Delight in Dallas, Texas, says he developed The Pin because chefs said a standard wooden, French-style rolling pin is too light. "At first we tried to do it in stainless steel and it weighed about 12 pounds," Christy said. Introduced in February, the aluminum model is a perfect 2.2 pounds and incorporates both the tapered French pin design and the ball-shaped ends of an Italian pasta pin, he said.

Colors: red, white, blue, black, and a clear finish that allows the aluminum to show through. Suggested retail price: $34.95.

Santoku knives

Rachael Ray's fans have flocked to cookware stores after watching her slice and dice with an Asian-style santoku instead of a European-style chef's knife during her Food Network show `30 Minute Meals."

Introduced to the United States about 10 years ago, the santoku is a knife whose Japanese name translates as "three virtues" because it can cut meat, fish and vegetables.

The santoku often is made with a series of hollow ground ovals in the blade called "kullens." The kullens reduce friction and create air pockets so moist foods don't stick to the blade.

Pictured here are Wusthof's's new 5-inch Classic model santoku ($80) and the standard 7-inch knife ($90).

Silicone basting brushes

New products by William Bounds Ltd. - the Sili Gourmet barbecue brush, basting brush and pastry brush (all pictured) - have silicone bristles that don't shed into food or absorb odors. And they are heat resistant to 500 degrees.

The silicone bristles on the Sili Gourmet basting and barbecue brushes have ball heads that are designed to carry an even flow of oil, butter or sauce.

Because ball heads might tear delicate phyllo dough or puff pastry, they've been eliminated in the pastry brush design.

Suggested retail prices: $14.99 for basting and pastry brushes, $19.99 for the long-handled barbecue brush.

Silicone pot holders

There's a lot of competition among manufacturers of pot holders made from heat-resistant silicone.

Lamson & Goodnow Manufacturing Company markets square and round HotSpot pot holders and HotWave wave-shaped holders designed for easy gripping of pots.

Le Creuset seemed to have thrown down the gauntlet, however, when it introduced it's Cool Tool, a design Le Creuset says outperforms any product in the market.

Round in shape, with molded ridges, the Cool Tool supposedly allows a person to hold a hot object longer than do other silicone pot holders. The Cool Tool serves as a pot holder, jar gripper and surface protector.

Available in red, white, blue and citrus (yellow). Silicone pot holders: about $8 each.

Orka Silicone Oven Mitt

You can pluck a potato from a pot of boiling water or pick up a burning briquette while wearing a protective Orka mitt from iSi North America. The mitt is 11 inches long to protect both hands and wrists from contact with a hot grill or spattering fat or oil.

Available in blue, red and clear translucent. Priced at $19.95. (Black mitts in 11- and 17-inch lengths are made, too, for restaurant use.)

Epicurean Cutting Surfaces

What do skateboarders and cooks have in common? It's a wood fiber composite laminate called Richlite that's used to make ramps in skate parks and cutting boards for kitchens.

Knowing that Richlite had been used as a cutting surface in commercial kitchens for more than 30 years, TrueRide Inc., a designer and manufacturer of skate parks, developed these cutting boards for home use as the way to utilize its scraps of Richlite.

Introduced six months ago, the cutting boards caught on quickly, with approximately 500 stores now carrying them, said Tony Ciardelli, an owner of Epicurean Cutting Surfaces.

The cutting boards are light, knife friendly and dishwasher safe. They carry National Sanitary Foundation approval.

Available in six kitchen series sizes of 1/4-inch thickness, three gourmet series sizes of 3/8-inch thickness and two chef series sizes of 1/2 -inch thickness. Kitchen series boards are priced from about $15 to $35, depending on size. (A tiny corner of one cutting board is shown at the lower right in the photo.)

Chef's Planet Ovenliner

Made of Teflon-coated fiberglass, this nonstick sheet (not pictured) is designed to fit in the bottom of an up-to-30-inch oven and can be trimmed to fit smaller ovens. Just pull the mat from the oven to clean up a spill.

"What this is, is sheeted Teflon," said Michael Romley, vice president of the 2-year-old company. "Sheeted Teflon has been used in the commercial baking industry for about 30 years, and what we're doing is bringing this down to the consumer level. We make this about seven or eight different sizes to complement the most popular cake pans and cooking sheets, and then we also realized that it would work very well as an oven liner. So it was almost an afterthought to the bakeware liner that we came out with and started the company on."

Ovenliner retail price: about $25.

OXO Good Grips Mandoline 

New this holiday season with a $69.99 suggested retail price, the OXO Good Grips Mandoline Slicer (not pictured) is well designed and far more affordable than high-end French mandolines. It makes straight, crinkle cut and waffle cut slices in a wide range of thicknesses.

A side note: Sam Farber, OXO's founder, chose the name OXO because whether it's horizontal, vertical, upside-down or backward, it always reads OXO.