There are hundreds of gizmos and gadgets for your kitchen, letting you core and peel an apple, chop nuts, grind herbs or even strain a can of vegetables.

But take some advice from local chefs before you buy all those specialty items: Stick to the basics.

Take pizza maker Curtis Teate, cook and co-owner of Elmo's Italian Kitchen on the downtown Gainesville square. The tool that makes him the happiest? A simple pizza-sized wooden spatula called a pizza peel.

"Here I use my wooden pizza peel for putting pizzas in and out of the oven, but for home, use just a good spatula is what I use all the time," Teate said, adding that he doesn't use a lot of gadgets for chopping, either, because he cuts everything by hand.

"Everything I do, I chop everything by hand, so I don't use any choppers or processors or anything like that," Teate said. "I would love to have a little hand chopper, like those little onion choppers that you can chop up an onion with ... or a tomato slicer would be great at home."

Tina Robers said a hand chopper is essential in the kitchen.

"The food chopper is something that I use daily," said Robers, an independent advanced director and trainer for The Pampered Chef in Flowery Branch. "You can chop onions, all of your vegetables, you an chop meats and chicken for chicken salad, nuts, chocolates, cookies and crackers for crumb toppings or pie crusts."

The best thing about the manual chopper, she said, is the control you have.

"Whereas if you use a mini food processor then what you have is just minced ... with the food chopper, because it's manual, I can get a coarse chop all the way down to a minced," she said.

At Gainesville restaurant Café N' Crepes, it's not chopping that is important - it's crepe making.

Chef and co-owner Gus Gonzalez said he relies on his crepe griddle every day.

"Here, you know, we have our crepe griddle, to make our crepes," Gonzalez said of the circular griddle. "The favorite tool that I use in the kitchen at home ... different cooking pans and chef's knives."

Knives also are the favorite kitchen tool for Tracy Bennett, a Gainesville caterer and owner of The Meating Place in Cartersville.

He said he loves his German steel knives he uses at home and in his restaurant.

"We like German steel over Japanese or Chinese (steel). ... It stays sharp longer," he said.

But Robers did mention one specialty item home cooks could easily fall in love with - a mandoline. This tool will let you custom slice anything and is great for making homemade potato chips or thinly slicing peppers.

"Mandolines are sold at a lot of specialty kitchen stores, but what makes ours different is it is safe," she said. "It has a food guard where your fingers don't get near the blade."

A new item that is set to come to The Pampered Chef in the spring is a pineapple wedger.

"You can save money on the already cut pineapple that you don't even know how long it's been cut," Robers said. "You can buy the less-expensive fresh, whole pineapple and then you cut off the top and the bottom and this cores and peels fresh pineapple."