Are these weird kitchen gadgets worth the price?

Many culinary experts like to advocate a minimalist kitchen, one with relatively few appliances—just a few essentials. You don’t need a knife block with a dozen knives, they say—just a chef’s knife, a paring knife, and a bread knife. That $1,000 pot and pan set? Skip it: All you need is a frying pan, a saucepan, a stock pot, and maybe a cast-iron skillet. Gadgets and specialty tools like cucumber pickers and banana slicers are universally derided for taking up space.

The general philosophy of minimalists in the kitchen is that if a tool is only good for one purpose, it is not worth the price.

But we were intrigued by some of the gadgets sold on Quirky.com, a hub for amateur inventors looking to get their products out into the open. Users submit product ideas to the community, and if enough people buy a product, the company will manufacture it and sell it through the site, with the inventor getting most of the profits. The community has produced such ingenious products as a flexible power strip that bends around furniture and a dustpan that sweeps dust and dirt off brooms.

The site has also come up with some really cool inventions for use in the kitchen. For example, the Stem, a small nozzle that you insert into a lemon or lime to spray the juice onto your food: not only does it save you from having to get out your cutting board and knife, it also promises to more evenly coat your salad or salmon with juice. It costs $4.99.

There’s the Pluck, which lets you separate eggs quickly without getting your hands dirty. It costs $12.99.

There’s also the Glide, a plastic clip that attaches to the base of the knife and lets you quickly remove chopped garlic or onions that get stuck to the side of the blade while you’re slicing. It costs $7.99 for a pack of two.

We liked the idea behind all three products. But at the same time, it’s hard to deny that they’re great examples of single-purpose products that you could probably do without. You can separate eggs with your hands. It’s not that hard to cut a lime in half and squeeze the juice with your hands. And if you have garlic or onion stuck to your knife, you can scrape it off with your finger, a butter knife, or even the side of a cutting board.

So we decided to give them a try. Sheri Silver, curator of our sister site KitchenDaily and founder of the lifestyle blog Donuts, Dresses and Dirt, visited the AOL Test Kitchen to test out these gadgets and see which ones are worth the money. Watch the video above to find out which ones made the cut.

Matt Brownell is a consumer and retail reporter at DailyFinance. You can reach him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @Brownellorama.