Kathleen Squires

Kathleen Squires brings exhaustive testing and a home cook’s point of view to coverage of food, kitchen gear, and everyday groceries for Wirecutter at The New York Times. She is a staff writer on Wirecutter’s kitchen team, a cookbook author, and an avid home cook, and her reporting centers on the choices people make about what to cook with and what to eat at home. Across her work, she combines rigorous, comparative product testing with clear, practical guidance that is grounded in real-world use.

Kitchen gear and appliances under real-world stress

Squires’ core Wirecutter beat is testing kitchen equipment and appliances in ways that replicate demanding home kitchens.

She has led reviews of food storage containers, running tests on 40 sets over years of reporting to recommend specific glass and plastic systems that perform best for everyday use. Her appliance coverage includes deep dives into refrigerators, such as a piece on a four-door, three-zone fridge framed as the best model many people have not heard of, emphasizing configuration and performance details that matter day to day.

In dishwasher testing, she and her team smeared hundreds of dishes with peanut butter, egg yolk, red sauce, and lipstick to measure cleaning performance in difficult, realistic scenarios.

She also co-writes and updates Wirecutter’s guide to gas grills, where testing has included grilling more than 140 pounds of meat to evaluate consistency, searing, and usability before naming a small group of top performers. Across these pieces, her reporting style is methodical and transparent: she documents how products are tested, how they fail, and why a few stand out, so that recommendations are rooted in observed performance rather than marketing claims.

Taste tests of everyday packaged foods

Squires extends the same structured approach to packaged foods, turning taste tests into detailed, comparative guides. In her review of sardines, she surveys the category to identify the five best options, balancing flavor, texture, and sourcing in a way that helps readers navigate a crowded shelf.

Her bacon guide similarly narrows the field to six standout brands, with testing focused on taste, texture, and cooking behavior so that the recommendations translate directly to breakfast plates and BLTs. She has written about hot dogs by organizing a large-scale tasting that involved 31 different varieties, from regional favorites to supermarket staples, to select a small set of winners. In yogurt coverage, she moves between service journalism and personal essay, describing herself as a “Yogurt Goldilocks” before spotlighting La Fermière, a brand Wirecutter had already named its top traditional yogurt, and then focusing on the floral flavors she favors.

The confirmed hot dog taste-test feature, framed as a “World Cup of wieners,” fits the same pattern: she uses playful formats and large, structured tasting panels to generate rankings, while still offering granular notes that matter to everyday grocery decisions.

Outdoor cooking and grilling

Outdoor cooking is a recurring sub-beat where Squires applies her testing-driven approach to grills and griddles. In her work on gas grills, she co-authors a guide that distills extensive grilling sessions into clear recommendations for different types of users, balancing heat distribution, durability, and ease of use. Her review of outdoor griddles describes cooking “lavish full breakfasts,” frying mounds of rice, and smashing burgers to evaluate how well each model handles varied tasks on a crowded surface.

She also writes service pieces on grill care and cleaning, addressing spots that home cooks often overlook and tying maintenance practices directly to food safety and performance. This body of work positions her as a go-to reporter for stories that combine outdoor entertaining, equipment choice, and practical cooking techniques.

Long-running food and travel writing beyond Wirecutter

Before joining The New York Times as a staff writer for Wirecutter, Squires built a long career as a freelance food and travel writer across newspapers, magazines, books, and digital outlets. She is described as a columnist at The Wall Street Journal and has written for major publications including the Los Angeles Times, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, Saveur, and others. Her client list has also included travel titles and book publishers, underscoring experience that spans restaurant coverage, destination stories, and culinary narratives beyond pure product reviews. That background shows up in her Wirecutter work when she layers sensory description, context, and personal experience into service pieces, as in her yogurt essay and hot dog taste tests, which read as both buying guides and food writing. The through-line from her broader career is a focus on how people eat and explore, which now anchors tightly on the practical side of choosing kitchen tools and packaged foods for everyday life.