There are certain cooking utensils that you might not realize you need. Over the hundreds of thousands of years that man (and woman) has been cooking food, making sure a pot doesn’t boil over onto the nice clean stove surface is a relatively recent problem. Also, the clever Germans behind the Kuhn Rikon Spill Stop had to go ahead and invent it before you could think of it.
Now you can not only think of it, but you can get one, too. Kuhn Rikon is a Swiss company that makes all kinds of useful kitchen utensils, but most of them are design improvements on tools that have been invented before. For example, they make a whole line of kitchen knives and other items designed to be operated safely and appeal to children.
The Spill Stop is different. Before, when you had a pot threatening to boil over, even with a lid on it, you had to stand there, watch and be ready to quickly snatch it off the heat. Unless you timed it perfectly, you wouldn’t even be able to rescue it until it had already begun to boil over. The Spill Stop frees you from this responsibility.
Once it’s safely on the dangerous pot, you’re free to concentrate on whatever else needs to be done. You can even walk out of the kitchen for a few minutes with no worries. You can use it to steam small quantities of whatever on top of a boiling pot, and it is dishwasher-safe. It rolls up when you’re done and fits in a drawer, or stores flat.
If you’re not yet a loyal reader of this blog, and you Googled your way here past the wooden spoon theory, you might wonder why one would invest in the Spill Stop when an ordinary wooden spoon would do. Here’s why it won’t: as any cook knows, if you’re cooking rice, pasta, or potatoes — the starchy foods that are the most frequent culprits of pot boil-overs — you know that to cook them quickly, thereby saving valuable time in the kitchen, you have to COVER THE POT. You can’t cover the pot with a wooden spoon. We just tried it — no, not to cover a pot with a wooden spoon, but we compared a covered pot with an uncovered one crossed with a wooden spoon. The pot with the wooden spoon did not boil over, but it will require twice as much time to cook your rice.
Bottom line: the Spill Stop really does work. It comes in two sizes, 10″ and 12″, and your choice of red, green or purple. You might think the larger one would be the more logical choice, but it’s pretty big, and the smaller one might just work for most of the pots in which you boil things. In any event, the smaller one is $5 cheaper than the $29.95 MSRP of the large one. A bit pricey for a silicone disk, but certainly very useful for its intended purpose.
