By 'Kitchen Fan', I don't mean a person who enjoys and encourages kitchens, I mean a fan for moving air around, which you keep in your kitchen.
My kitchen fan is a 4" clip-on USB-powered fan (affiliate link). I usually plug it into the wall, but it runs on a separate USB battery pack, though the phone-specific ones don't seem to work well.
Anyway, why would you want a kitchen fan? Well for me, fans are so useful for cooking that I decided to have a dedicated fan in my kitchen. I used to move a box fan in periodically, but I find the little fan is good to have because it's easier to store, and it's very helpful to clip it right where it's getting used.
Here's what I use it for:
- Defrosting stuff - I hate defrosting meat in the microwave, because it always ends up cooking a bit in there. The fan is surprisingly effective for defrosting, I guess you can call it a convection defrosting tool. It's sorta like running cool water over it, but you're not wasting water. The convection isn't as strong as water.
- Defrosting milk - I know it's technically just a continuation, but I have a lot to say about defrosting with a fan. I started freezing milk when COVID-19 quarantine started, and it takes approximately eternity to thaw milk in the fridge. I put it in a hotel pan with the fan clipped on, and shake the milk jug like once an hour, and it's all thawed in like 3 hours.
- Dry the dishwasher out - my dishwasher doesn't have a heated dry mode, so I open the thing up and clip the fan on the counter, pointing in. Blow the fan in for an hour or two and it gets a lot of moisture out, so I don't have to dry dishes off (which I hate)
- Drying food out - I haven't done this, aside from blowing steam away when I was trying to reduce some apple butter down. I don't know if the forced air helps in this case, but I could see putting this fan in the refrigerator next to a sheet pan full of hand-cut french fries, and driving moisture off them. I'm gonna try this eventually. (note - I have and still do dry pasta with a big box fan)
- Cooling food down - I've got two young kids and a fan is way better than trying to get them to blow on their food, and way way better than me having to blow on it. That little fan is just about ideal for blowing on hot food. I use it on big bowls of soup that I don't want to let cool before I eat.
- Cooling yourself down - I get hot when I'm cooking. I can admit this. So I'll sometimes run my whole head under the sink, and then clip the fan on an upper cabinet door, pointed at me, and cooooool down.
I know that's a lot of writing about a little fan I keep in the kitchen.
I very strongly feel most people would benefit from having one of these fans in their kitchen. I can tell you from personal experience, too, it's very nice to have a USB fan and one of those lithium USB batteries when your power goes out in the middle of summer.