You might have thought sticks had gone away. Oh boy, no. The game of Kubb? Throwing sticks. Conducting? Waving a stick around. Harry Potter merch. Fetch. Drumming. There’s even a stick appreciation movement, via Stick Nation’s “reviews” of cool finds in nature by “Stick Heads” that are posted on Instagram and TikTok. It makes you think.
Which brings us to the Veark Tool One. You already know what it is. But twist: There are three of them, they’re $68 (£55) for the set (yes), and they’re designed to be used as cooking utensils.
Tool One is the brainchild of Copenhagen-based designer and artist Kim Richardt. Around four years ago, deep in the pandemic era, Richardt says he simply got fed up with his spoons. “I was a little irritated, my spoons didn’t quite work with the casseroles I was cooking, so I thought maybe I could do something else,” he says.
Courtesy of Kim Richardt
“It was straight to this. I went out to the wood store, bought three pieces of wood around 30 centimeters, went to my workshop, and I just made a set of these for myself. First take. It felt right. It was so intuitive to work with.”
The Tool One is indeed a pimped stick—handmade from beechwood, the three cooking sticks are 1 centimeter, 1.6 cm, and 2.2 cm wide, with tilted sides on the lower half, rounded to grip at the top.
“The big one is actually fantastic to make an overnight sourdough,” Richardt says, “because when you use a wooden spoon to stir the sourdough, it’s very heavy and you get tired in your arm before you get the gluten effect.”
In his culinary experiments, he has used his new tools for everything from stirring cocktails to flipping fried fish in a pan: “It’s a tool that you just take out and maybe find your own needs for, actually. It’s not that dictated.” So universal functionality abounds! There is no specialist stick here, folks.
Alongside making steel, brass, and wooden sculptures, Richardt has created minimalist designs for more than a decade for Danish design studio Frama: A day bed, a lounge chair, candle holders, a shelving system, a “very minimalist” lamp for the restaurant Noma.
Frama passed on Tool One, though, so Richardt kept it at home until he stumbled on kitchenware studio Veark, also in Copenhagen, which makes tools inspired by professional kitchens. For cofounders Daniel Ronge and Christian Lorentzen, it was love at first stick.
We jest about the sheer simplicity of this thing, but Richardt’s inspiration came, of course, partly from utensils in Asia. Cooking chopsticks, often made from bamboo, have long been used by professional stir-fry chefs for tasting and sampling in the kitchen.
“I had some chopsticks at home that I used to stir my oatmeal in the morning for a couple of years, and it was a little too small for doing that,” he says. “Then I thought I could make it larger into a design that could also flip a pancake. In Japan they actually have some rather big chopsticks, but they still use them in pairs when they stir, and they’re quite fun to handle.”
And there is more practicality. Wooden utensils can last for decades versus years for silicon alternatives (if properly cleaned and stored), and there has been a lot of discussion of late over how many toxic chemicals regular black plastic spatulas might expose users to.
In design terms, it’s clear we’ve been heading in this direction for a while, primed to crave more and more of less and less. Minimalist Joseph Joseph kitchen tools and stacking bowls we’ve been strangely drawn to for some time, while Jony Ive has done for computers what his predecessors in industrial design did for, say, iconic chairs and lamps.
Abstract wooden Scandi baby toys in beige, cream, and cool grays, though, can be quite infuriating. They should be bright red and bright green and make lots of noise. And blocky, featureless nativity sets we cannot abide. Ludicrous. They are simply taking the piss. But I think we can safely say that you cannot get more minimalist than a stick.
As WIRED senior editor Jeremy White exclaims, “How can something so ridiculous be so desirable?” Is a stirring stick inherently more macho than a spoon, perhaps? More like something The Bear’s Carmy Berzatto might throw across a kitchen?
“It’s a humble tool. I was surprised at the simple thing of having a stick stirring your food,” says Richardt with a little laugh. “It took me back to something … I couldn’t explain it, but it was a nice feeling. I kind of felt that I was taken back to the Neanderthals.”