I Just Ordered a Ladle from Amazon | Hacker News Reader

I Just Ordered a Ladle from Amazon

abtinforouzandeh.com

161 pointsabtinf65 comments

I just read what someone I've never met wrote about the experience of buying a ladle, then read what a few other people thought about it, and finally wrote something myself on the subject.

What the hell is wrong with ME?

(Sorry, down vote button is too close to up vote button on a touchscreen. Someone please up vote the heck out of parent.)

Maybe you need the chubby-fingers HN extension.

Did you also look up ladle reviews out of curiosity? This is an untapped gold mine.

Ladles are important.

I just read all of the above and then realized i am not sure what a ladle exactly is.

Google it!

The intrinsic beauty of the post aside - this sort of in-depth, but cheaply available product insight simply wasn't available before and it is pretty damn useful.

What if it's a cheap Chinese ladle that is made of led?

What if the handle is too thin and it heats up when left in a hot soup?

What if the shape of the bowl is odd?

What if the rubber grip falls off after the second use?

Any utilitarian gadget could certainly use an usability review. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. How often do you buy ladles? Exactly. Why not pick a good one then?

Just get OXO. They're the Apple of the kitchen. Their steel bottle opener is a personal favorite. Most of their stuff will last for decades.

OXO seems to be durable stuff, but the "ergo" handles are too bulky for me- I prefer something with a low profile in the cluttered utensil drawer.

This is generally true, but just as Apple produced a couple of dud Macs back in the day so does Oxo occasionally let me down. See above under "spatulas". ;)

So, in total seriousness: I'm an amateur baker, I own six spatulas, and only one of them is very good. My second favorite was doing great until I was making a double batch of muffins and the wooden handle came out of the silicone head, and then some muffin batter got into the slot where the handle used to be, and it was obvious that I was never going to get it clean again so I had to throw it away.

(Funny thing about this is I vaguely remember Alton Brown predicting this in his own review of spatulas. And then it happened just like he said.)

The good one is from Zyliss and is a silicone spatula firmly fused to its plastic handle. I have stirred some pretty viscous tubs of stuff with this spatula and it holds up, plus it's flexible enough to scrape well. My only problem with it is that it's wearing out after a few years; silicone isn't permanent and it develops nicks on the edge. I should go order three more while I'm thinking about it.

So I don't think reading ladle reviews is that farfetched at all. (Though for ladles, as for many things, I'd start at the local restaurant supply store. Those stores are big on utility and not as big on hype and markup. And, truthfully, ladles are not a hard thing to get right. Now dishers, on the other hand...)

(For some reason I am now having fond memories of Weird Al Yankovic's movie UHF. Fans will know why. ;)

Speaking of spatulas, I've utterly fallen in love with these machete-shaped ones: http://www.amazon.com/Good-Cook-Touch-Spatula-Spreader/dp/B0...

They get more stuff out of more things better than anything else I've used, conform to more weird shapes so they scrape better (a huge amount of that is flexible), a different handle/scraper setup that hasn't even remotely started to separate, all that good stuff. My only complaint is that the tip of one has cracked after a year or two or so of use.

Why not just dunk the spatula head and handle in a 5% bleach solution?

We do a fair bit of sausage and charcuterie stuff here; there's usually a bowl of bleach solution somewhere in my kitchen with something disinfecting in it.

Well, I suppose I could have done so, then reinserted the handle. Then there'd be thoroughly disinfected organic material somewhere inside of the head of my spatula. ;) This would probably not be fatal, but it was distasteful.

Or I could have attacked the problem with Q-tips and patience.

But another, different problem is that I anticipated the spatula coming apart again. I do a lot of stirring of dough with spatulas, and it's annoying when you have to constantly guard against pulling them apart. I guess I could have gotten into the whole "which glue holds wood to silicone?" materials science problem but it was easier to just switch to Zyliss.

I have a Zyliss spatula. I'm surprised at how durable the edge has proven to be, so far.

I wouldn't have thought as much of choosing a spatula, until I happened by chance into the Zyliss.

Just recently, I happened upon a sub-Reddit named BIFL (Buy It For Life). I don't know yet whether it's a good sub-Reddit, but I like the idea.

I inherited some old cookware (including a couple of ladles) from the wrapping up of a few family estates (in the small sense, not the Vanderbilt sense). The quality of the "everyday" items is unmatched by much of U.S. contemporary "everyday" kitchenware. I could go to Williams Sonoma and spend $40, $80, or whatever, to get something comparable. But for a reasonable amount of money, one is kind of SOoL with respect to the contemporary marketplace. There are some good items out there, but often they are obscured, drowning in a sea of crap. Corresponding to this, the crap outweighs and often displaces them on the store shelves, so that you can't even find them in a bricks and mortar environment.

Reviews are one way of getting past the crap. And, to some extent, I'm not spending copious amounts of time for a $4 ladle. I'm spending it on the $4 ladle that performs like the $40 ladle at Williams Sonoma.

A really well made utilitarian thing -- a ladle, a drill, a car -- gives me the joy of discovering its excellence and the design behind it. If I have a really good ladle, that works noticeably better than any other ladle I have ever had, then each time I pour soup, I get to contemplate the many flashes of brilliance and care that went into designing and making this ladle. As I pour soup and contemplate the design of the ladle, I become a better engineer myself even, pondering how the makers thought to curve the side just so, etc.

And that is EASILY worth $20.00 and 15 minutes looking at reviews.

Yes, in the abstract, this is fairly ridiculous. However, having tried to use kitchen utensils purchased from a dollar store, it's my experience that there are some that are completely useless.

So, I too would read reviews before purchasing a ladle online, because the handful of images wouldn't give me a good idea of the quality of the item I was purchasing.

Although, I personally would probably buy a ladle at a local store (thrift store if you're looking for a deal), instead of getting it shipped to me.

Amazon Prime eliminated the shipping charges on my $6.15 ladle. And it's snowing outside.

And the physical store has no reviews!

Yeah, but someone in the store might be able to outline the pros and cons..

Its like the electronics stores of yesteryear. Any piece of equipment you ask about, regardless of how expensive it might be, will be met with the response "this is a great x, why I have one myself and it is just fantastic".

This. I clearly remember the day my mental default switched from "trusting sales people" to "ignoring sales people". It was the day my mom was trying to buy a two-line phone, and she had three sales people trying to tell the three different things that she actually wanted ("this cordless phone has two handsets", "this phone has a flash button", "one phone can't have two lines, you need two phones").

If I was buying a ladle on amazon, I'd maybe check the reviews (by force of habit if nothing else). But I'd feel silly asking about pros and cons of ladles at the store.

Those stores are so rare.

It shouldn’t be the case that reading up on something for twenty minutes before going to the store makes me much more knowledgeable about that something than the salesperson.

The only time in recent years I can remember when someone could actually tell me something I didn’t know was when I was buying glasses†.

—

† It was a spontaneous decision, so I didn’t read up on it beforehand but I did some reading afterwards and was utterly confused. There doesn’t seem to be much good information about glasses on the web.

Those days are long gone. The big box store killed commission-based salespeople, now you have "sales associate" which really just means associates making 8-10 dollars per hour and are there to look helpful and run the cash register occassionally. Best Buy, Bed Bath & Beyond, those types of stores do not train their employees on the products at all (except a tiny bit on whatever item they are pushing for the season).

This is for some reason one of my favorite articles I've read on HN in awhile. Probably because it is so (personally) profoundly true, and reads almost like poetry.

Does that make me a programmer poet?

nothing there hinted at the programmer part...

I felt the same. The personal note, has touched me in a way I cannot remember. We are so used to search stuff, read about stuff and buy stuff, that we forgot how the buying process was not so direct little years ago.

I sort of read it as something you'd clinically describe to your psychiatrist as the point at which you think you went off the deep-end. I do the very same thing, and their reaction to doing it cracks me up to no end, and I love how it's written!

£42 / ~$60 seems to be the most expensive pure Ladle I can find: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Alessi-Mirror-Finish-4180-10/dp/B000...

Special mention goes to a £172 / ~$230 Exoglass Spatula: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Matfer-Exoglass-Spatula-utensils-kit...

I was curious what "Exoglass" is, apparently... "It is a special hi-tech plastic developed by Matfer of France. It is used in the handles of their pastry utensils. It is extremely durable, hygienic, and heat resistant. (Both hot and cold extremes)" but there is no reference of the material outside of cooking, is that strange or interesting I'm not sure.

How is a spatula that's 1.2m long a "simple utensil for your kitchen"?

Sure, I guess the design is probably simple, but what type of kitchen do they imagine you're running where you need a spatula that's over a meter long?

I did a very similar thing while buying an ironing board for my mother for Christmas. I thought I was crazy, reading reviews for ironing boards.

Two days later, one of them arrived on my doorstep (thank you Amazon Prime…), and the moral of the story is that my mother loves the new ironing board, mainly about how quiet it is compared to the old one, which rivals my age.

Technically speaking that's the conclusion of your story, not its moral. The moral might be that spending time looking at what seems like basic utilities results in happier users or something.

edit at 0 points 5 minutes later: :D

Oh you haven't learned amazon yet? Let me help you. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/227408/how-to-amazon.png

I look at the 1-star reviews first to see just what so bothers people. Often it's something random ("I could not open the plastic wrap") that really has no bearing on the product itself.

If no one has a legit killer complaint I look at the middle-star reviews.

Sometimes, though, the 1-star reviews point out some flaw or omission that you'd never know about until you owned the thing for a bit, and you end up feeling duped if you bought it (hence the 1-star venom).

There's a point, though, where you have to ask yourself what's the worst that happens if you end up with a piece of crap. How much time/money are you out?

The problem (as the ladle purchase shows) is that it can become a sort of personal challenge; "I will get the best item for my money!" Even when it make no sense.

I started reading reviews online when I wanted my first toaster oven. See, the thing is, I had no idea what I wanted from a toaster oven, or how to judge them. So I read reviews until I found out all the ways they could go wrong, and then I looked for ones that didn't do that. At least, so far as I thought I cared. "Not tall enough" isn't a problem for me because it's for toast and bagel bites. Not really going to be a problem.

Ever since then, I read the negative reviews to judge products by their deficiencies. It has worked wonders. I've never had such good appliances and footwear, and I'm not spending an arm and a leg on them, either!

This is just one of the ways that the internet is changing our daily lives and we don't even notice. It's quite amazing.

Reminiscent of "Spatula City".

Ah, but Amazon sells almost everything.

Spatula City sold spatulas,

and that's all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XbCWmY0eqY

There are some freakin beautiful cheap-as-dirt Chinese made stainless steel ladles out there. Sometimes they show up in the grocery store for a song.

Funny. But really, you are looking at Amazon reviews because you probably care about the design of every day things. I wish more people did. The people that do tend to be very successful.

I think about all the ladles I have ever had. I don't think I have a single one I'd recommend. Here's a few things that pop into my mind as things I wish ladle makers cared about.

First, they all have the problem of not being able to catch anything when a bowl gets to the end. There's still stuff there, but a ladle becomes useless at getting the shallow stuff. Why are ladles are shaped like cups with handles? Why couldn't a ladle have a design to help sweep the bottom of round bowls?

Second, ladles are awkward to put anywhere after using. Their handles make them oddly balanced to lean on most things. They also tend to get very hot handles when spooning hot mixtures and you leave the thing in the bowl.

Third, I'm not sure I've ever successfully used a label to get a full ladle of anything in the target container (my cup) 2 times in a row. Inevitably I spill something somehow.

The illuminating thing about the internet for me is not that people comparison shop for simple objects like ladles. It's that there are enough unemployed or lonely(?) people out there who actually have the motivation to write a 250-word review about something as mundane as a plastic ladle.

Silicone, actually. World of difference.

Silicone is a type of plastic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic#Classification

wtf, how did this post ever get on the main page? I mean for real? Go buy your own ladles people.

In case anyone is wondering, the ladle that inspired my post is: http://www.amazon.com/Zyliss-42320-Ladle/dp/B0018IAHTM/

I don't blame you with going with this one. I mean, the first sentence of the first post reads "Wow, this is one great ladle."

Can we start a discussion on dish sponges/brushes.

This is by far my favorite:

http://www.amazon.com/OXO-Good-Grips-Squirting-Brush/dp/B000...

Yes we shall have a discussion on the merits of kitchen utensils on hackernews.

I'm not a big fan of these sponges with integrated soap dispensers, they puke soap all over your sink when you put them down.

dont like em. Too small for large pots. I prefer the brushes with longer handle.

The NYT has an article with how to buy all the kitchen utensils you need for under $200: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/dining/09mini.html?pagewan... (including a ladle)

You could go to http://www.americastestkitchen.com/ for in-depth reviews of ladles, they get really technical.

Hrm.. I did the same thing last week.

Your estimated delivery date is: Wednesday, December 21, 2011

OXO Good Grips Brushed Stainless Steel Ladle Sold by Amazon.com LLC (Amazon.com) $9.99

Having already put that much effort into it, I would have bought the highest-reviewed ladle, not the cheapest.

http://www.amazon.com/OXO-Grips-Brushed-Stainless-Steel/dp/B...

You can't go wrong with OXO. They put a noticeable amount of thought into the ergonomics of their kitchen tools that is sorely lacking in most other brands.

And now I'm reading ladle reviews on hacker news.

the highest reviewed of the cheap items is always the useless moneypit.

you want something in between. cost benefit.

I mid-read it as "ladie" at first!

I learned something new about US/UK spelling differences today...

That's enough of this nonsense on the frontpage.

Flagged.

> Flagged.

Careful. They took away my flag option when Steve Jobs died, and I still haven't seen it back.

I'm not anticipating a rash of ladle reviews requiring my (apparently unpopular) flagging.

Nonsense? I found the post perfectly interesting commentary on the recent cultural transitions that we've all had a hand in shaping. Even the mundane has been transformed.

You can read as much into it as you want to, but it is essentially a content-less post.

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