Take your cooking to the next level with these five kitchen tools that make life easier for every at-home chef.

Rasp grater: This utensil is excellent for grating hard cheeses, chocolate, ginger, garlic and citrus peel, as well as tougher ingredients such as cinnamon sticks and whole nutmeg.

Pastry blender: Used for cutting hard fat (such as butter, lard or shortening) into dry ingredients to make flaky dough for pie crust or scones.

Potato ricer: This tool is used to make fluffy, light-as-air mashed potatoes. But don’t stop there! You can also use a ricer to mash up cooked vegetables such as carrots, squash and cauliflower. Cook your veggies until they’re soft enough to easily press through the ricer’s holes but not overcooked, which will ruin their texture.

Kitchen shears: Ultra-tough scissors which can tackle heavy-duty jobs like butterflying a chicken or shelling a lobster. They’re also handy for more delicate tasks such as cutting parchment paper or butcher’s twine; snipping chives; and trimming green beans or prickly tipped artichokes.

Mandoline: If you’re making fries, chips or julienne salad, nothing beats a mandoline for speed and precision slicing. This tool makes it quick and easy to uniformly cut firm produce like potatoes, carrots, cabbage, beets and apples. Blades can be adjusted or swapped out to create different levels of thickness and various cuts, such as julienne, baton or crinkle cut.