In Chris DiMinno's fine dining days, plastic squeeze bottles were essential for the theatrical drizzles of sauces that garnished plates. Though he forgoes such flourishes at his more casual Trifecta Tavern in Portland, Oregon, he still relies on squeeze bottles.

These days DiMinno finds them invaluable for easier, cleaner, more precise handling of dry ingredients, such as salt. “The trouble with fingers is they’re inconsistent,” he says. He also uses squeeze bottles to add sesame seeds to salads and breadcrumbs to pastas, trimming the nozzles to create wider openings for these larger ingredients.

At Milk Street, we found that squeeze bottles also work well for sprinkling white sugar over desserts or dusting a pizza peel with semolina.

We don’t recommend the bottles for most powdery items, such as powdered sugar or cocoa, because they tend to clump easily and clog the nozzle. The exception is all-­purpose flour; the bottle makes quick and clean work of flouring the counter for rolling out dough.