Setting Up an Irish Kitchen: The Kit Worth Buying and the Sink Zone Everyone Forgets
Oct 09, 2026
Setting Up an Irish Kitchen: The Kit Worth Buying and the Sink Zone Everyone Forgets
Most “kitchen essentials” lists run to forty items. You will use about eight of them every day, another eight most months, and the rest will migrate to the back of a drawer within a year. Buy the eight properly and add the others when a recipe forces you to.
And before you spend anything on the room itself: check that your largest pot fits under the tap. It is the one measurement nobody takes, and it is the one that annoys people daily for the next ten years.
We fit out the sink end of Irish kitchens for a living, so this is written from that corner. The cookware advice below is just advice — we do not sell pans, and there is nothing here trying to make you think otherwise.
The eight you will use every day
Spend here. These get handled constantly, and the difference between a cheap one and a good one is obvious within a week.
- A chef’s knife, 20 cm. One good knife beats a block of six bad ones. It wants sharpening, not replacing.
- A paring knife, for the jobs the big one is clumsy at.
- Two chopping boards minimum. More on why below — this is a food safety item, not a convenience.
- Tongs. The single most underrated tool in a kitchen. Turning, lifting, serving, retrieving pasta. Get the locking kind.
- A wooden spoon and a silicone spatula. One for stirring and scraping a hot pan, one for getting every last bit out of a bowl.
- A heavy frying pan, 24–28 cm. Weight matters more than coating; a thin pan has hot spots and warps.
- A medium saucepan with a lid, around 2 litres. The workhorse.
- A colander that will actually sit in your sink. Measure the bowl before you buy.
That is a functioning kitchen. Everything after this is widening the range of things you can cook, not making the basics possible.
The next eight, as you need them
- A large stockpot, 5–8 litres — for stock, pasta for a crowd, and batch cooking.
- A box grater or a rotary grater. A rotary one is genuinely better for hard cheese and for anyone with sore hands.
- A baking tray and a roasting tin, heavy gauge so they do not buckle.
- Digital scales. Baking is chemistry and cups are a guess.
- A dough scraper. Costs very little, and it does the one thing nothing else does — lifting wet dough off a worktop cleanly.
- A fine sieve, for flour, for stock, for rinsing grains.
- A thermometer. Meat, bread, jam, oil. It turns guesswork into a number.
- Storage containers that stack and whose lids match the bases. This is a surprisingly high bar.
And the ones that quietly die in a drawer
Not because they are badly made — usually because they do one job that a knife already does, and washing them takes longer than the job.
- Single-fruit gadgets. Pineapple corers, avocado tools, strawberry hullers, banana slicers. A paring knife does all of it and lives in the same drawer anyway. The exception is if you genuinely eat that fruit several times a week — then it stops being a gadget and starts being a tool.
- Gadget sets. A boxed set of twelve utensils is a way of selling you nine things you did not want in order to shift three you did.
- Novelty cutters, with one honest exception: if there is a small child in the house who will eat a sandwich cut into a shape and will not eat a square one, the thing has paid for itself. Parents know which category they are in.
- A garlic press. Contested, this one. It is faster than mincing and much harder to clean. Flat of the knife and a pinch of salt is free.
- A dedicated steriliser, a blowtorch, a pasta machine. All brilliant if you do that thing often. All dust collectors otherwise. Be honest about how you actually cook, not how you intend to.
If you want a sanity check on what a genuinely minimal kit looks like, ILoveCooking’s budget kitchen kit is a sensible Irish take on the same question.
The sink zone — where the time actually goes
Here is the thing that gets planned last and used most.
Think about an ordinary evening meal. You wash hands, rinse vegetables, fill a pan, drain it, rinse a board, fill a glass, scrub a roasting tin. Almost none of that happens at the hob, and nearly all of it happens within arm’s reach of the tap. The sink is the busiest square metre in the room — and in most kitchen plans it gets whatever tap was in the showroom package.
Three things decide whether that square metre works:
- Can you turn the tap on and off with dirty hands? A single lever you can nudge with a wrist or forearm. Two small twist handles you have to grip with raw-chicken fingers are a genuine hygiene problem, not a styling preference.
- Can you reach every part of the bowl? A swivel spout, and ideally a spray head that reaches the corners and the far side of a big roasting tin.
- Does your biggest pot fit underneath? The measurement in the next section.
Get those three right and the room works regardless of what the units cost.
Hygiene, in the three rules that matter
Food safety advice tends to arrive as a wall of text. In a home kitchen it comes down to three habits, all of which happen at the sink.
Separate boards, properly
One board for raw meat and fish, one for everything else. Colour-coded or just different shaped — what matters is that you never have to think about which is which. A single board washed in between is fine in theory and fails in practice on a busy evening.
Replace a board once the cuts are deep enough to hold water. Plastic and wood are both fine; a scored, permanently damp board is not.
Hands, and the tap you touch after
Twenty seconds with soap, and — the bit everyone skips — think about what you touch to turn the water off. If you opened the tap with contaminated hands and close it with clean ones, you have just undone the wash.
A single lever solves it: open it with an elbow before you start, close it the same way. This is the one place where tap design and food safety genuinely meet.
Do not wash raw chicken. It does not make it safer — it sprays bacteria around the sink and up to a metre onto the worktop. Cooking it through is what makes it safe. safefood and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland both have the full guidance, and it is worth ten minutes if you have never read it.
Rinsing vegetables and salad, on the other hand, is worth doing, and it is where a spray head earns its keep — a jet dislodges grit that a stream just slides over.
Will your biggest pot actually fit under the tap?
This is the measurement nobody takes, and the one people complain about for years afterwards. It is not complicated, but you have to look at two numbers rather than one.
| What you are filling | Roughly | In practice |
|---|---|---|
| Kettle | 250 mm tall | Fine in the bowl. Awkward on the drainer under a low spout. |
| 5 L saucepan | 200 mm tall, 240 wide | No trouble either way. |
| 8 L stockpot | 230 mm tall, 280 wide | Fits in the bowl. Will not go under a 224 mm spout on the drainer. |
| Preserving pan | 150 mm tall, 320+ wide | Short, but too wide for most bowls. Pull-out head or a jug. |
| Large roasting tin | 400 mm long | Will not sit level in a single bowl at all. A spray head is the only comfortable answer. |
So the rule is simple. If the thing fits inside the bowl, spout height barely matters. If it is too wide for the bowl, spout height is all you have — and that is the case a pull-out spray head solves completely, because you stop bringing the pot to the water and start bringing the water to the pot.
Measure your widest pan and your bowl before you order anything. Two minutes with a tape.
Batch cooking and storage
If you cook once and eat three times, the kit question changes. You need the big pot above, and you need containers that behave.
- One size, stackable, lids that interchange. A drawer of mismatched tubs is the reason people stop batch cooking. Buying a single size in quantity fixes more than any clever gadget.
- Straight-sided and square rather than round — they waste far less space in a freezer.
- Cool before freezing, and freeze in portions you will actually eat. A two-litre block of stew is a block of stew; four 500 ml tubs are four dinners.
- Label with contents and date. Same rule as the jam. You will not remember.
- Dry goods in sealed tins or jars, not in opened bags folded over. Flour and rice both pick up moisture and smells.
ILoveCooking’s batch cooking tips cover the cooking side properly. And if you are getting into preserving, our guide to sterilising jars for jam picks up where this leaves off.
One more thing: your water
Much of Ireland sits on limestone, which means hard water, which means limescale on the kettle, a film on glassware and spotting on the tap. It is worth knowing your number before you buy anything with a heating element or a shiny finish — Uisce Éireann lets you check hardness by Eircode in about a minute.
If it comes back hard, two practical consequences: a brushed finish will hide spotting far better than a polished one — our guide to brass and gold finishes goes through which survives it — and a filtered tap is worth considering if you drink a lot of tea.
And before ordering any tap at all, check your pressure. Older Irish houses on a cylinder in the hot press can sit well under 1 bar, which rules out most pull-out sprays. Our water pressure guide shows you how to measure it with a bucket and a timer.
Taps for the sink zone
Four that cover the situations above — the pot-filling problem, the long-guarantee option, an elbow-friendly single lever, and one that works where pressure is low.
Cato Chrome — Pull Out Spray
- The pot-filling answer — bring the water to the pan
- Spout outlet 224 mm above the worktop, 205 mm reach
- Stainless steel body, single lever
- Needs 1 bar — mains or combi
Deva Spring — Pull Down Rinser
- Pull-down rather than pull-out — taller clearance
- 12 year guarantee, the longest we stock
- WRAS approved, professional rinser head
- The one to buy if you cook a lot
Tivoli Chrome — Single Lever
- Needs 1 bar — mains or combi, not gravity
- Tall swan neck, good clearance over the bowl
- Single lever — the elbow-operable one
- WRAS approved, 304 stainless body
Walton Chrome — Square U-Spout
- Works from 0.3 bar — the lowest here
- High square spout, generous pot clearance
- 12 year guarantee, solid brass
- The budget answer for an older house
There is more in the range — the Newton twin lever for a traditional kitchen, the Cato in matt black or brushed steel, and a 3-in-1 boiling water tap if the kettle is never off. See them all in kitchen taps, or everything for the kitchen including wastes and accessories.
Not sure which suits your sink? Send us the bowl depth and the width of your biggest pan and we will tell you honestly whether a pull-out is worth it or whether a fixed spout will do.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the essential tools for a first kitchen?
Eight things cover almost everything: a 20 cm chef's knife, a paring knife, two chopping boards, tongs, a wooden spoon and silicone spatula, a heavy frying pan, a medium saucepan with a lid, and a colander that fits your sink. Buy those properly and add the rest only when a recipe forces you to.
How many chopping boards do I need?
Two at minimum — one kept for raw meat and fish, one for everything else. Washing a single board in between works in theory and fails on a busy evening. Replace any board once the cuts are deep enough to hold water.
Should I wash chicken before cooking it?
No. Washing raw chicken does not make it safer and it sprays bacteria around the sink and up to a metre across the worktop. Thorough cooking is what makes it safe. safefood and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland both advise against rinsing raw poultry.
What height should a kitchen tap be?
Tall enough that your biggest pan fits underneath, which depends on two measurements rather than one: the height of the spout outlet above the worktop, plus the depth of your sink bowl. A pot standing in the bowl gets both, typically around 400 mm in total. A pan too wide for the bowl only gets the spout height.
Will a stockpot fit under my kitchen tap?
An 8 litre stockpot is roughly 230 mm tall and 280 mm wide, so it will stand in a normal sink bowl and fill easily. It will not fit on the drainer under a spout whose outlet sits 224 mm above the worktop. Width is usually the real limit, not height.
Is a pull-out kitchen tap worth it?
It is if you regularly fill or rinse things too wide to sit in the sink bowl — preserving pans, big roasting tins, buckets, pet bowls. A pull-out head lets you bring the water to the item rather than the other way round. If everything you use fits in the bowl, a fixed swivel spout does the same job for less.
Single lever or twin lever for a kitchen tap?
Single lever is the more hygienic choice, because you can open and close it with a wrist or forearm when your hands are contaminated. Twin levers suit a traditional kitchen visually and let you set hot and cold independently, but they have to be gripped. In a busy kitchen that difference matters more than the styling.
What is the best kitchen tap for low water pressure?
Look for a stated minimum of 0.5 bar or lower and avoid pull-out spray heads, which restrict flow and usually need a full bar. If your hot water comes from a cylinder in the hot press fed by an attic tank you are likely on a gravity system, so measure your flow with a bucket and a timer before ordering.
Are kitchen gadget sets worth buying?
Rarely. A boxed set of a dozen utensils is usually a way of selling nine things you did not want in order to shift the three you did. Single-purpose fruit gadgets go the same way unless you eat that fruit several times a week. The exception worth making is novelty cutters for a child who will eat a shaped sandwich and not a square one.
What containers are best for batch cooking?
One size, bought in quantity, straight-sided and square rather than round, with lids that interchange across the whole set. Square containers waste far less freezer space, and a drawer of mismatched tubs with missing lids is the most common reason people give up on batch cooking.
