You’ve already raided Sur la Table and Bed Bath Beyond for their culinary greatest hits and you’ve got the spatula, cutting board, and whisk collection to show for it. Now it’s time to set aside the clutter and embrace the five things you really need to turn your kitchen into the headquarters for your gastronomic prowess.

1. Microplane

We’re going to let you in on a little secret: Handheld graters are for chumps. Here’s another one: Zesters were dreamed up by kitchen sadists who want your drawers to be full of single-use gadgets and your knuckles to be scraped up to kingdom come. Enter the Microplane (an actual brand name, by the way, but generic versions are fine too).

It looks simple enough. A simple, sleek handle attached to a small typically rectangular surface covered in small angled holes. Much like a grater, the teeth on a Microplane tear the surface of food to itty bitty shreds, but unlike a grater, a Microplane is fancy and chef-like and useful for more refined applications.

Having over a lady friend for dinner and your skills are limited to spaghetti and, um, spaghetti? Use your Microplane on a wedge of fresh parmesan and suddenly your pasta is dusted in a fluffy layer of cheese that’s beautiful enough to hide all magnitude of sins. Scatter the zest of a lime over store-bought cupcakes and you’re an instant gourmand. Working on perfecting your béchamel? Running a whole nutmeg across your Microplane will release a fresh, warm smattering of nutmeg that transforms your entire dish.

2. Sheet Pans

In many ways, sheet pans are the unsung heroes of the modern kitchen. Sure, they’re rock stars at supporting a couple batches of cookies and they won’t judge you for heating up a handful of frozen pretzel twists for dinner, but that’s just the beginning.

Once upon a time, one-pot meals were all the rage, but now sheet pan recipes are a major trend in fuss-free home cooking. Flip on the oven, complete a modicum of food prep, and suddenly you’re about to bake, roast, or broil a full steakhouse dinner, mac and cheese, caprese chicken, party-ready fajitas, paella, slab pie, teriyaki shrimp and a couple sides, glazed salmon and bok choy… the options are literally endless, but the cleanup thankfully isn’t. A quick scrub of a single pan and the kitchen is back to normal and you can move on to more important things. Line your pan with tin foil and you’ve just hacked your way to an extra fifteen minutes of blissful free time.

Once upon a time, one-pot meals were all the rage, but now sheet pan recipes are a major trend in fuss-free home cooking.

There are other off-label uses for the handy-dandy sheet pan, too. Use it to hold ingredients you’re prepping for big batches of pasta salad or soup, soak skewers before assembling kabobs for the grill, flip it over and preheat in the oven for a makeshift pizza pan, sit it on top of tofu or a muffaletta and add some weight to press out water or condense flavors, or slide it under a bubbling blackberry pie to keep drips off the floor of your oven.

3. Cast Iron Skillet

Your collection of cookware should include a skillet, a sauté pan, and a large stew pot or Dutch oven at the very minimum. Got room for a fourth? Make it a cast iron skillet. This time-tested workhouse is considered a family heirloom in the South for a lot of great reasons:

• It’s naturally nonstick
• It heats evenly, so no hot spots and food browns and bakes beautifully all the way around
• You can take it from the stovetop to the oven
• It welcomes lazy cleanup routines (just wipe and go)
• The only way to truly damage it is to run it through the dishwasher or bury it in a mound of TNT

With a cast iron skillet at your disposal, you can make everything from fried chicken to peach cobbler to the most crispy-on-the-outside-tender-and-moist-on-the-inside cornbread you’ve ever had the fortune to shove in your mouth.

4. Mandoline Slicer

Developing good knife skills should be on every adult’s to-do list, but if we’re honest, we’ll admit that knowing how to cut a sandwich in half seems like a fair compromise. Instead of spending hours learning how to cut carrots into batons, get thee a mandoline.

Depending on the model, mandolins come with a straight blade plus a few alternatives so you can slice, dice, julienne, crinkle cut, and so on. Homemade potato chips are the obvious win here, but you can also pile up thinly cut vegetables for a gratin, prepare carrots and beets for the dehydrator, make a mega bowl of coleslaw, shave onions for pickling or the base of French onion soup, slice hardboiled eggs or radishes to top avocado toast, and so on.

5. Kitchen Thermometers

Anyone who has ever watched a cooking show knows that there are two culinary no-nos that can get you voted off the island at breakneck speed: undercooking a protein and overcooking a protein. From raw chicken to charcoaled steaks, wrecking the main part of your meal is frustrating in the extreme — and if you’ve got company coming over, your night may well be ruined.

Anyone who has ever watched a cooking show knows that there are two culinary no-nos that can get you voted off the island at breakneck speed: undercooking a protein and overcooking a protein.

A simple stick-and-check thermometer gets the job done, but there are now digital thermometers that you can leave inserted into your meat and an attached digital interface will let you know when your chuck roast or turkey reaches the desired temperature. No more guesswork, no opening the oven half a dozen times to see where you’re at, just set it and forget it until it’s time to get your grub on the table.

Bonus: In addition to your digital thermometer, grab one for your oven. Just because you set your oven to 350 degrees doesn’t mean that’s the actual temperature, and being a few degrees off either way is enough to make a cake deflate or the bottom of your butternut squash burn.