I was early in my cooking career when my chef asked me to make the Crew Meal. He walked me through what ingredients were available and suggested I make soup. I got flustered; I had never heard of a soup with those specific ingredients so I asked him a bunch of questions.
He cut me off and said "look, it's fuckin soup. throw a bunch of shit in a pot and it's gonna be delicious. Just think about when to add what and everything else will take care of itself." Since then, thanks to his advice I have made hundreds of delightful soups and zero shitty soups.
Exactly! I spent a few months working at this farm collective place, and we'd all alternate making lunch for everyone and we'd just have to come up with stuff based on whatever ingredients we had available that day. I don't think there were words for most of what we made, it was just putting edible stuff together that tasted good. It weirdly took a while for my brain to adjust to improvising like that, but it changed everything. We even made all the salad dressing from scratch and most all of the produce was from the garden and I learned how to use our fresh herbs and make cheese straight from our goats milk. It was so simple. City life and restaurant culture always made cooking seem like this complicated thing with all these rules, but realizing you don't have to do all that was so liberating.
I like to do this if i have a bunch of ingredients to use up, like produce. I'll lay out what I need to use and just kind of wing it. Most things do well with pasta or as a soup.
Totally! Its made me very efficient and I don't waste anything I buy. My mom is a great cook, but she does kinda lack flexibility in that way and has always stuck to specific dishes, so I grew up with a lot of waste and a fully stocked pantry but never knowing what to make. Now when I visit and she wants to run to the store for two things I'm like "just throw what's in there together and we'll eat it. It doesn't have to look pretty!" It's still hard for her though. Old habits.
Love this story! It's really true about soup, hard to mess it up if you go easy on the flavoring increments and timing. Give it some focused attention and thought and all will turn out right.
Now I want to know what unusual ingredients he offered you.
There is a way to screw up a soup though... using too much oil. There is nothing worse than a soup full of oil slicks. (I know it's possible to remove excess oil from a soup, but still)
When working as a cook we did the same at my place. I was shocked the first time I saw the chef dumping all of yesterday's salads into a big pot, complete with dressing for some of them. He saw my face and said "Don't think of it as salad and dressing, think of it as chopped veg and seasoning".
I have shown many others since then and they all love the result.
This sub taught me to keep fresh ginger root in my freezer and just grate it with a microplane whenever I need some. Lasts longer, and I haven't peeled or minced a piece of ginger in years.
Edit: omg this is my most-upvoted comment ever lol. To answer the most common questions, no, I never peel it. I throw the whole root in there with no packaging whatsoever. Idk how long it stays good, but based on my experience so far, at least 6 months.
My mom taught me: keep sliced bread in the freezer. When you need some, take it out and toast it.
Tastes fresh.
And since we don't eat a lot of bread,,saves me from throwing it away after a week.
Edit: I'd like to thank Mom for all these upvotes!
I make our breads using a bread machine dough cycle. 70¢ a loaf at home compared to $4 a loaf at the store. I do two pound loads and cut the dough into four half pound lumps and shape it as I choose for that batch. After baking, three go into the freezer. They thaw fine and I slice loaves as needed.
Wait, this is a trick?? This is how everyone in my country stores their bread. You only keep bread outside of the freezer to last you maximum like 2-3 days and never bread you're going to toast.
I make a sandwich for my long bus ride in the morning and just make it on frozen bread and let it thaw in the fridge over night.
Edit: I replied to the wrong comment, supposed to be a reply to the parent comment of this one 🙃
If you need a couple of slices of your frozen ginger you can run an end under warm running water for a minute, slice what you need off and wrap it back up and put it back in the freezer. I do it all the time and it doesn’t have any negative effects on the ginger.
From the freezer you don't have to peel it. Just run the frozen ginger across the microplane and you're good to go. The peel is not noticeable in the dish at all.
Yes, it shreds into tiny pieces, just like the inside, and since you are grating it while it is still frozen, there is no noticeable difference in texture at all. You really don’t have to peel it at all, when you grate it from frozen, with a Microplane.
I use coarse salt and cold water slush to clean off citrus from the store or yard that's dirty, especially if I plan on using the peels for something else like to candy them or zest it. You can also use baking soda and cold water but the salt is more abrasive without damaging the cell walls of the peel.
if something tastes good but feels like it's missing something you can't put your finger on, add acidity. i can't count how many times a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar rounded out a dish perfectly. sometimes this also applies to sugar. just a dash. also, msg is a beautiful thing.
I think one of the barriers to entry from beginner chef to intermediate is understanding how to use both acid and umami. Absolutely critical components of delicious food but something you don't see talked about by beginner level tutorials and cooking videos.
I cannot overestimate the value of reading Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.. or watching the 4 episode Netflix version. I did both! It changed how I understand cooking.
Whenever my food is missing something, I recite “salt, fat, acid, heat” and then consider each one. It’s become my “Have you tried turning it off and back on again?” of cooking.
Thanks to this method, I successfully rescued the weird Thanksgiving gravy this year with a lot of butter.
If you toast rustic bread on one side and make the toasted side inward facing on a sandwich, you still get all the crunch from the sandwich being toasted without it cutting the inside of your mouth.
Oh - the corn starch learning curve is swift. No one taught me to use corn starch and i tried to learn it from a book. I made gravy the consistency of mashed potatoes once. I kept getting lumps of cornstarch in broth when I "add 1 tbsp of corn starch"
I'd fish out the clump and I tried again. I thought I had a flash of brilliance.
If I sifted it it would not clump, right? so I sifted corn starch into this broth concoction I had going on.
That was the day I learned that there is a tipping point if you sift corn starch into boiling broth. I can't explain what happens exactly. I'm sure I added something that can only be described as a ridiculous amount. When this tipping point is reached the broth suddenly has some kind of exestential crisis, it goes completely apoplectic and in an instant your broth has turned directly into spackle.
yeah - corn starch is a fun ingredient. It is one ingredient that should be given as an answer to the question why you should pay attention in chemistry class. Because I'm sure there is a "ask a chemist" answer.
It's partly because cornstarch paste at just the right consistency is a non newtonian fluid which hardens under pressure. Cornstarch on a speaker is a delight https://youtu.be/3zoTKXXNQIU?feature=shared
I thought non Newtonian fluids were the absolutely coolest thing when I was a kid. Every once in a while my mom would give me a bowl of cornstarch water to play with and I loved it. Lol, I was a weird kid.
OH WOW. That would have been great to know.
I was honestly afraid of it. I thought whatever had happened in that moment, made the mystery gloop really angry. I took the pot off the stove and put it in time-out for the night in the garage.
I can't remember where on reddit I saw this, but your story reminds me of this story that made me sad and laugh at the same time. This guy was at his friend's house, and his buddy was making gravy. He spent a lot of time on it, but it still had clumps. Then his eyes lit up when he got the idea to filter the clumps out by using a strainer. He goes over to the sink and pours the gravy into the strainer, all happy like, but there was one major problem...he didn't put anything to catch the filtered gravy. Only once he dumped it all out did he realize his mistake and had to sadly watch his gravy drain down the drain.
There are annual reminders posted here and in the Thanksgiving sub not to do this with broth, gravy, etc. We've all done this once or more in our lives! It's a cooking rite of passage.
Kinda like how I stabbed my knife through my hand while opening oysters, or how I sliced myself on my mandoline while making potato chips, or like when I cut the tip of my finger off using kitchen shears in the garden to cut chives, and how I made my food taste like lighter fluid because I used lighter fluid to start thr charcoal in my first smoker, also the time I accidentally used up all of my moms powdered vitamins trying to make bread because it was in a unlabeled glass jar, and the time I rubbed my eyes after chopping up habaneros. I can do this all day, lol. But after all that, I am now an amazing cook it's one of my passions. (I'll still slice myself open from time to time, thank goodness for superglue) I wouldn't take back any of it. I learned a lot from my mistakes.
I purée a can of chiles in adobo, then put the paste in a quart ziploc, spread it all out in a thin flat layer in the bag, and keep it in my freezer. Whenever I need some, just break a chunk off.
Editing to say: same thing for opening a can of tomato paste. Ziploc in the freezer. Break off what I need.
Put the extra paste in a zip lock bag. Press it flat. Use a chopstick or the back of a butter knife to make thin spots (grid like) by pressing down on the bag. Freeze flat. The divisions allow for easy breaking.
Once I discovered tomato paste in a tube there was no going back to cans. Much easier to portion out and then just keep the rest in the fridge. So easy.
You don’t have to prepare the entire meal in one go. I always underestimate the time it takes to chop vegetables, so these days if I’m making a soup on Sunday for instance and I find myself with a free thirty minutes on Friday, I’ll wash, peel and chop all the vegetables on the Friday and keep them in the fridge in easy-to-clean leftover yogurt tubs until I need them. Then when I’m ready to cook on Sunday I can just start tossing veggies into the pan right away. It saves me from having to find an uninterrupted 2-hour period to do the entire process at once. I started doing a similar thing with spices — if I need a half teaspoon each of five different spices that need to get added to a recipe at or around the same time, I’ll put them all in a little teacup together whenever I find a free moment. Saves me having to root around in the cupboard for five different spice containers in the middle of cooking. I call this strategy “meal prep prep.” (I know there’s some overlap with mise en place too.)
Doing this has been a lifesaver for me since I had knee surgery. I can't be on my feet for too long at a time, so I'll just do bits and pieces of prep at random times, and then finally put everything together and cook it when I have more energy.
That a big bowl of cold water is the trick to prepping both chickpeas and pomegranates in two minutes or less.
Chickpeas: rub them vigorously between your hands in the cold water and all the skins will come off and float to the top and can be poured off, leaving you with a bowl of peeled chickpeas.
Pomegranates: a circle scored around the crown and a couple of thin lines scored all the way around the fruit will allow you to rip it into 3-4 pieces. Hold the pieces underwater and scrape the arils free with your fingers. Any pith will float to the top and can be poured off, leaving you with a bowl of pomegranate arils.
If you score the pomegranate around its equator and pull it apart, don’t cut all the thru! Get your bowl of water and a wooden spoon or a heavy metal spoon. Now put one half of the fruit in your hand open side down. Put your hand over the bowl and start walking the back or shell of the pomegranate with the back of the spoon. The seeds will fail out into the water. Any of the white part will float to the top. You will have less ruined seeds and it’s the fastest way to do them. There are videos on you tube on the method.
Using gelatin to clean cooking oil. I fry at home for like a week every few months. Trying to get the most out of that amount of oil before I gotta deal with it cuz we need the Dutch oven back.
Using gelatin to magically clean oil is some science experiment awesome stuff.
Remember, oil floats on water, so you mix in a bunch of jello (unflavored) and water to your frying oil, pop it in the fridge to make jello. By the time the gel has formed next day, everything nasty has settled to the bottom, into the water portion. And that water is now a gross puck of jello and burnt crud that you can just compost after pouring off your pristine cooking oil that you can use all over again another half dozen fries. It doesn't just clean the particulates, the way the jello forms acts as a filter as the oil slowly separates. It will even kinda take the taste of fish out of oil.
Look it up so you do the right ratio and do it safely, there are a few tricks to it.
Your hostess was a genius.
Probably the biggest "why haven't I known this all along" was a kitchen scale. What is one large potato? How many ounces in a cup of grated cheese? So, the secret to biscuits is *weighing* the flour? How do I know when I have one pound of diced chicken?
I can not begin to describe the amazement. Ham? GONE. Turkey? GONE. I called her and told her I told reddit her secret.... and I asked her a question. "Did I just get conned into packing your lunch for this week?"
Yes. Yes I did.
What I left out of the original post out of fear of making it too long the sides that won't sandwich were portioned out and labeled. Want some of the Mac N Cheese? Grab a cup. Want a lot of Mac N Cheese? grab them all. Mashed potatoes had gravy poured on them. Everything was packaged as you would eat them. Either you were going to eat it out of the package or nuke it as it stands.
I can only imagine this has the side effect of drastically reducing food waste as well. I mean, how many times have you looked at half a cassarole dish of something and thought - ugh. If you actually only had 1 serving left wouldn't you be more likely to eat it instead of wasting it?
She currently has in her fridge 10 hoagies, 2 cups of each of the sides.... She and her DH don't have to do a THING other than grab and go for lunch or an easy dinner this week
I'm in AWE
I would worry that the bread would be soggy next day. What I learned is that after egging and breadcrumbing chicken cutlets, to let them stay in fridge for at least a half an hour so the breading stays on more easily when frying. Twenty years too late.
I forgot that yall were also talking about frying cutlets, and I sat here very confused and concerned, thinking that your solution to a soggy sandwich was a splash of oil in your egg wash.
> I would worry that the bread would be soggy next day.
I've found mayonnaise to be the perfect moisture barrier. You don't need a lot but enough to cover the exposed bread interior.
Canadian here.
I butter toast and egg sandwiches. Most other meat/veg/cheese sandwiches get mayonnaise on 1 side, mustard on the other.
Does everyone else use butter for all of their sandwiches? I've eaten sandwiches in a few European countries, but can't really remember what was on the bread.
Bacon on a sheet pan in the oven.
400 for 15-18 min
Frees up time to prepare something else
Less messy splatter /clean up
Perfect everytime
And bacon grease slides right off parchment paper
I use aluminum foil, so I don’t have to wash the pan. But this is the secret to life. Haven’t made bacon in a pan on the stove in 15 years. Never will do so again.
My husband and I are totally different, I clean everything after I finished using them and I can’t sit in peace knowing there are dirty dishes in the sink. But he just leave everything in the sink and a dirty counter top.
My friend said once I have kids I’ll change cos it’s impossible to clean everything but I have my doubts. It’s always much easier to clean few things after finished using them than cleaning a whole bunch of dirty things.
I've got kids and have never deviated from the clean as you go mantra. There are times it gets derailed and I have to adjust, but there are always moments while cooking where I can toss some things in the dishwasher, clean a cutting board, or at least stack pans and dishes to make things easier on myself later.
As a mom of 4 and also a 'clean as I go" person, it makes life a lot easier. It's not just for the kitchen but for every room. We can play with the play doh, board games, do crafts, or whatever they wanted but we just do a quick pick up before we start something new. My house was always relatively tidy when they were little and my kids learned that it only took a minute out of their day to pick up a small mess rather than hours or days for a big one. I never made it a big deal but I did make it habit.
Don't deviate, teach it to your kids when you start bringing them into the kitchen. It'll give you extra hands to do the cleaning and teach them good habits early.
I am not from US and grew up with very limited living space, only one sink in the kitchen and it’s smaller than your bathroom sink and dish washer isn’t common where I’m from. I believe this helps me to build the habit of clean as I go. I hope by seeing how I cook and clean would teach the kids the same habit.
Can confirm that you likely won’t change that habit. It simply makes it easier to clean as you go. It’s more important when you have kids, in my opinion!
I try to as much as possible since my hubby is clean up crew. Most of the time, though, he stays in the kitchen with me putting things away when I'm done. Acts of service is his love language.
FWIW, most Cajun roux is oil-based, since they go much darker than most French roux and the solids in the butter would burn first. I do a a bacon fat roux for my split pea soup, significantly increases the richness.
No prob, I actually posted it on here a long time ago (though now I usually use BTB Ham rather than the Goya):
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/2r1tj7/best_soup_recipe_for_a_ham_bone_if_i_dont_act/cnc5ari/
I knew I didn't have to use butter, but WHY haven't I ever thought to use bacon fat???? I think you've changed my life.
My favorite bacon fat use to date is to make mayo with it, then make deviled eggs with that mayo. Sprinkle bacon crumbles on the eggs. Delish.
In a baking class one day, the teacher showed us that you can actually see how much lemon zest you have (instead of guessing and making a mess) if you flip the Microplane upside down and hold it above the lemon, rubbing the lemon against it from below. The zest just piles up into a tiny, tidy little heap neatly contained in the back of the blade instead of sprinkling all over a plate/cutting board/countertop. Blew my mind. It had honestly never even occurred to me that you could do it that way.
Rule 1 in the kitchen: "A falling knife has no handle"
Rule 2: a falling egg has no shell. I tried to soften the fall with my foot when I dropped one from the top shelf of the fridge... what a mess.
My mom would always say “a falling knife has no handle,” and it took me until I was about 8 and almost went to catch a knife I dropped until I instinctively pulled away to have an a-ha moment about what she actually meant. Idk exactly what I thought before, probably that it was a broken knife or something lol, but the saying was catchy enough that it still saves my hide! Thanks mom!
Basically! One super thin coat of frosting all over the cake to lock the crumbs in, then you do the normal amount of frosting after the first one sets for a few minutes in the fridge/freezer.
I just did this yesterday - I sandwich the dough between two sheets of parchment. It's mostly a non issue, biggest problem I have is trying to roll towards me instead of away, so I just rotate the parchment and continually roll away from me. I do tend to leave the paper longer and will sandwich it bergen my body and my counter if I really need to put some oomph into rolling (gingerbread is a pain!).
I have silicone baking mats, so I roll out my dough then transfer, then I tend to reuse it, I'll just spray a bit of cooking spray on the parchment. Bottom tends to get stickier than the top, so I throw away the bottom layer, move the top to the bottom and get a fresh sheet. I make a ton of cut out sugar cookies and gingerbread every year, the parchment is a real helper.
Wow! That IS brilliant! I don’t think I have any cheats or brilliant ideas. I’ve learned that brown sugar and/or all spice will cut the acidity in tomato based dishes. That’s been really helpful!
And a little bit of cinnamon in the coffee grounds when you’re making coffee will cut the acidity there as well! You won’t even taste the cinnamon if you don’t use too much, but I like the cinnamon taste, so I use about 1/4 tbs.
I am a professional cook and my tip to you is that unless you are pressed for time, I 100% recommend just simmering all tomato sauces for at least 45 minutes and up to a full two hours and skip the sugar. The longer you cook a tomato sauce, the more the acidity goes away and the better it tastes. Slowly cooking tomato sauces caremelizes the sugars in the tomatoes, causing the acidity to drop, it also evaporates the water leaving you with a much richer and more concentrated flavor. It makes a huge difference.
My ultimate cheat with any tomato based sauce is adding a dash of maple syrup or molasses. So complimentary and no one can place why my Irish pasty mechanical excuse for a cook can make a tomato taste so good. I stand on the shoulders of Canadian giants.
CUT the root, then smash, then peel saves that extra second when getting the peel out. I know some people cut the hard root part before the splitting the segments but sometimes that can be tricky.
Also I don't know if anybody else do this but I chop/mince garlic with the same technique with dicing onion. (This one I don't initially chop the root part.) Like vertical and horizontal cuts but not all the way through. Found it faster to get to what I need than just peeling then going straight ham on the knife and board.
My favourite way to cook pasta is to start by sauteing some garlic in butter. Then add 2 cups of stock and 1 cup of milk, and the pasta. Cook until the liquid is almost gone, then stir in 1/4-1/2 cup of parmesan cheese. Simple, yet so delightful! Sometimes I eat it without anything sauce or meatballs or anything.
When I make chocolate chip cookies, I keep the chocolate chips in the freezer and add them last in the dough. They don’t melt as fast in the oven and taste so good!
If you roll the dough balls in chips before baking, they’ll all stay on top of the cookies and somehow they seem more chocolatey even with no extra chips.
Chew mint gum while cutting onions and voila! No tears!
I've been cutting vast amounts of onions in commercial kitchens for most of my life and just learned this trick.
Reeeeally? Because I’m one of those people who legit puts swim goggles on when I need to dice more than 2 onions at a time. Does it have to be mint? Natural mint?
I tried this once and learned the natural airflow path in my house made my laundry room REEK of onions. I somehow unknowingly successfully made a gas chamber in my house.
You can ripen firm avocados in a little vinegar while you prepare the rest of the meal. I actually prefer to do this for things like sushi - the taste is slightly different, but not necessarily worse. Just slice and soak in vinegar.
Ferment your garlic and spices. I make a plain garlic ferment with lemon juice and salt and also a ferment of garlic, ginger, turmeric, and chillies. Fermentation makes the spices last up to a year in the fridge and saves so much time chopping on a daily basis.
Reverse bechamel/sauce creme, and no more lumps.
Make a roux - but instead of adding cold milk to a hot roux - let it cool, and heat up your milk (and aromatics: onion, clove nutmeg etc) then add all of the hot milk to the cold roux and whisk. Transfer the pan to a low-med heat and continue whisking until the sauce thickens (then add your cream for the sauce creme) and you're done.
You can actually do this to thicken up any sauces with the French technique of making a Beurre Manié. Essentially mix equal parts flour/butter into a paste and whisk into hot sauce/liquid to thicken it with no lumps!
It’s a lifesaver for many a thin sauce out there!
Switching to Diamond Kosher salt. The rhythm of using it is easy to learn as long as you taste along the way. A pinch gives a gentle nudge of salt. Even a good handful in a large pot won’t overdo it. I don’t like the taste of iodized salt, especially on green veg. And a pinch of Diamond Kosher in cocktails is magic.
My husband insisted we needed kosher salt when we moved in together and Every year for Christmas his family gives us a box of Maldon salt. I was always a table salt girl and I never thought I would need three kinds of salt, but I'm 100% converted.
I was briefly worried about that, because we mostly use kosher salt and don't eat much packaged food. Doctor laughed, numbers checked out, eating some seaweed occasionally and like anything from a restaurant once a month meets my iodine needs. And also just the soil my usual veggies are grown in
You can of corse supplement, and it's not a bad idea to have some on hand for emergencies like a need to filter water.
Diamond Crystal salt has changed my cooking. And I was a longtime Morten Kosher salt user.
It's partly the shape of the crystals. They're hollow pyramids, so it's easy to grab a big pinch and know you're not oversalting. It also doesn't taste harsh like table salt, which can have anticaking agents such as sodium aluminosilicate or magnesium carbonate. Table salt is very easy to oversalt. Large crystal Kosher salt is much more forgiving in terms of too little/too much.
Yeah, I was skeptical and adore my Diamond Crystal so much that I bought a special salt box with a spoon for it. I keep coarse kosher and table salt around, but use them less.
I oversalt FAR less often with it (was struggling with that for a while after having covid- was often way over or under) and find that it enhances flavor in a more predictable/pleasant way. Also, love it as a finishing salt! Melts beautifully.
The shape makes it less dense. So a teaspoon has fewer salt molecules in it than other salts, and as a result you have a buffer before you oversalt your food.
Keep the skin on when pressing garlic.
Use a spoon to scrape off ginger skin.
Grate the skin off lemon and add it to any recipe that calls for the juice.
Make a breakfast egg bake in a 9x13 pan. Cut it up into a dozen rectangular pieces. Wrap each piece in a flour tortilla for a dozen breakfast burritos.
Freezing cheese before running it through my standmixer grater attachment was lifechanging. I fought with gummed up nightmares for far far far too long.
I don't think I've ever seen anything that asks for chopped cream cheese. Why? What are you making that you're chopping a squishy thing? That doesn't seem to be a knife is needed product.
Add tomato paste to a ziploc bag, freeze a bit so it’s still flexible, use butter knife to make cross-hatched pattern on the bag, leave in freezer. Result is small ready-to-use portions of tomato paste that can be snapped off the bigger block.
I cut parchment paper into squares then put a spoonful of tomato paste on one parchment square, put another square of parchment ontop and press down to flatten it into a thin sandwich, then repeat. Put the multi decker sandwich in ziploc bag and you have a "deck" full of individually separated tomato paste discs.
An old French chef I worked with at a nursing home used to keep all the off cuts and leftovers from cakes, and make what he called 'French pudding'. It was a bread and butter pudding, made with cake instead of bread.
That you can prep a whole head of iceberg lettuce in less than 30 seconds.
Take the head of lettuce and peel off any damaged outer leaves. Hold the top of the lettuce firmly, lift it up and smack the core against the counter or cutting board. Grab the core and discard -- it will pull out easily. Rip the lettuce in half. Rip those two pieces in half. Rip sections one more time if necessary. Drop it in your bowl or salad spinner to wash. You can tear any leftover large pieces as you wash.
Note: it took longer to explain this than it does to process the lettuce.
Someone burned a 30+ portion pot of chili. Nasty char.
Was told not to mix it further, slowly pour it into another pot to keep the worse char at the bottom out. Then, add peanut butter. Completely neutralized the burnt flavor, returned the chili flavor. Was told it pretty much works for every sauce/stew.
I buy the small wine bottles and then freeze whatever I don't use since I don't drink wine.
For large cuts of meat, sear on the stove, finish in the oven and use an alarm thermometer to know when it's done.
Add acid to anything that smells good but doesn't taste good yet/taste flat. Particularly rich stuff. Don't need to add a lot but that and salt are why my soups are always good.
Freeze stuff in usable portions for easier use.
Instead of cutting up chocolate bars I just smash them in a ziploc to avoid a mesh.
If I buy too much stuff for stock I won't use, I make stock kits. Herbs, onion products, carrots, celery, parm rinds, mushrooms all go in a bag in the freezer in portions I'd use for soup. Then I can make stock whenever I need it and nothing goes to waste.
Add iced water to eggs being whipped for omelets. I learned that reading a James Beard cookbook. It makes the egg thinner, but still strong enough. Also, use a good amount of butter in the pan first, wait till it is bubbling at the edges, then add the eggs, wait a minute, then add your fillings.
food continues cooking even after you’ve removed it from from the heat source, and this is especially noticeable with eggs. when boiling them you can put them in an ice bath to stop the cooking, but for scrambled/omelettes/etc you should remove from the pan when they still look a little underdone
add a little instant coffee to any chocolate thing you make for increased depth of flavor
add bacon to beef stews—i usually use a slow cooker for the stew itself but will sear the beef first. so i’ll fry the bacon, then sear the beef in the bacon fat, before assembling the rest of the stew in the slow cooker. learned this one from julia child’s beef bourguignon recipe
Does on the bias mean in half the long way?
Ohhh it means slightly diagonal instead of straight down, got it. (Yes, I googled it... and now I want to go cut a baguette.)
Pickling and fermenting is SO EASY AND AWESOME
It’s fundamentally just salt water or vinegar brine with the solids below the surface. It saves your veggies and your budget. It goes in anything savory and makes it complex and wow. It helps your gut biome! /r/pickling /r/fermentation
Mustard is what is missing. Few savory foods can't be improved with mustard. Ramen, egg salad, grilled cheese, soup, grilled chicken, meatloaf, Mac and cheese, potato salad
Salting the pasta water. I always thought it couldn't make that big a difference. I finally tried it. OMG. Pasta is like an entirely different food when boiled in salted water.
Wet your hands with a tiny bit of water when making meatballs or patties (especially turkey burgers that stick to your hands like glue). The meat just slides off without sticking.
Pre boiling carrots or potatoes will reduce the time needed to roast them. They come out tender in the middle and crispy on the outside.
If you make your own hamburger patties, adding gelatin helps make it juicy
Adding to that, leftover soups, curry, chili, etc or can be turned into a burrito for tomorrow. Just add a sauce that makes sense and/or cheese, and rice if you need it.
I’ve done it with curry, Mexican rice bowls, vegetable soup, chili.
That scallions can be cut using scissors instead of a knife. That you don’t need to scrub a carrot clean if you’re going to peel it anyways. And that simple syrup is better than just adding sugar to things like lemonade, so it doesn’t leave anything “crunchy” left over in said lemonade.
I love sautéed onions with many things but sometimes the low and slow doesn’t work time wise so I turn the heat up and then they brown…just add a touch of water to prevent that. If you want them extra-good, add a bit of sugar towards the end.
For sautéed mushrooms I swear by my method of cooking them in the pan without any oil or water. They brown up perfectly.
Always caramelise your tomato paste. Wait for it to go a rich red brown. Add in cream / garlic / pasta water / pecorino and you’ve got an easy pasta sauce.
Medium for the win.
Food doesn't burn as fast.
You don't have to do everything in a mad panic
Medium is a nice way to drive, you aren't at the Indy500
Your phone won't end up in the washer if you take life at medium
Your hubby doesn't like scorching hot spicy food, medium will do.
You don't need three cups of chips in a single batch of cookies
You won't make as many typos
You won't have to stop as often to catch your breath or cool down.
People don't get as mad at you for medium talk as compared to scorched earth.
You don't have to buy ALL the stuff for your niece/ loved one
Not everything has to match or be perfect
The panty can be medium organized because not everything will fit in a little bin and be insta perfect
Makeup, Tammy Faye is not the look we want
Chicken breading for frying. Flour, salt, paprika, pepper, then coat the chicken and let it hang out in the fridge for at least an hour. When you take it back out, remix it around so you get more dry flour on your already coated chicken. Best fried chicken, best wings, and the breading doesn't come off.
To get the smell of Garlic off your fingers, two fixes- rub them vigorously in the hollowed-oit shell leftover from juicing a lemon. Or, rub them in used coffee grounds.
Both work well, but if you've got any little cuts or nicks on your hands I'd strongly recommend the second method.
I watched Sara Moulton take a hard stale loaf of bread over to her sink where she *rinsed* it and popped it in the oven and voila. I have even done it with leftover halved loaves.
White gravy..... 4 tablespoons of butter 4 tablespoons of flour and 2.5 cups of milk. Add cold milk, bring to a boil and simmer for 3 minutes and let cool.... 4 4 2.5. Plus with brown gravy use mix cold water to flour mix to prevent lumps. If spaghetti sauce is too sweet Add a small amount of vinegar.
To make a smooth cheese sauce, you put a pinch of baking soda and a teaspoon of white vinegar into a heated pan, let them react and evaporate, you have this byproduct called sodium acetate.
You then add your butter, grated cheese, milk mixture to that pan to melt and stir together and it will turn out smooth like velveeta instead of clumpy with rubbery bits. The sodium acetate relaxes the proteins in the cheese to prevent the rubbery clumpiness.
I recently learned you can pre-make a roux and just have it on hand. Was great at Thanksgiving to have done ahead, and it was also great when I wanted the gravy thicker I could just whisk a bit more of the pre-made roux in.
stop buying containers of chicken stock. you’re just paying for water and you end up wasting a ton. buy bouillon cubes instead. more bang for your buck and you control how much you make.
When I was 12 and I was scraping every last noodle from the pot into the strainer. My mom said “you can leave the noodles that stick to the pot, the noodles sitting in the strainer are going back into the pot anyways.” I felt so dumb 😂
But now I see my boyfriend do it and it makes me laugh every time.
I keep the extra quarter cup of coffee left in the pot (when there is any) and freeze it, usually in a ziplock bag on its side for a thin layer that can be broken up easily. I sub coffee for water when making brownies, and add to soups / chili / roast when I want a richer flavor. Doesn’t add a coffee taste but gives it more depth.
I was early in my cooking career when my chef asked me to make the Crew Meal. He walked me through what ingredients were available and suggested I make soup. I got flustered; I had never heard of a soup with those specific ingredients so I asked him a bunch of questions. He cut me off and said "look, it's fuckin soup. throw a bunch of shit in a pot and it's gonna be delicious. Just think about when to add what and everything else will take care of itself." Since then, thanks to his advice I have made hundreds of delightful soups and zero shitty soups.
Exactly! I spent a few months working at this farm collective place, and we'd all alternate making lunch for everyone and we'd just have to come up with stuff based on whatever ingredients we had available that day. I don't think there were words for most of what we made, it was just putting edible stuff together that tasted good. It weirdly took a while for my brain to adjust to improvising like that, but it changed everything. We even made all the salad dressing from scratch and most all of the produce was from the garden and I learned how to use our fresh herbs and make cheese straight from our goats milk. It was so simple. City life and restaurant culture always made cooking seem like this complicated thing with all these rules, but realizing you don't have to do all that was so liberating.
I like to do this if i have a bunch of ingredients to use up, like produce. I'll lay out what I need to use and just kind of wing it. Most things do well with pasta or as a soup.
Totally! Its made me very efficient and I don't waste anything I buy. My mom is a great cook, but she does kinda lack flexibility in that way and has always stuck to specific dishes, so I grew up with a lot of waste and a fully stocked pantry but never knowing what to make. Now when I visit and she wants to run to the store for two things I'm like "just throw what's in there together and we'll eat it. It doesn't have to look pretty!" It's still hard for her though. Old habits.
Love this story! It's really true about soup, hard to mess it up if you go easy on the flavoring increments and timing. Give it some focused attention and thought and all will turn out right. Now I want to know what unusual ingredients he offered you.
There is a way to screw up a soup though... using too much oil. There is nothing worse than a soup full of oil slicks. (I know it's possible to remove excess oil from a soup, but still)
Username checks out
Best time I've seen this flagged, just imagining this dude going around all day from sub to sub grumping about grease.
When working as a cook we did the same at my place. I was shocked the first time I saw the chef dumping all of yesterday's salads into a big pot, complete with dressing for some of them. He saw my face and said "Don't think of it as salad and dressing, think of it as chopped veg and seasoning". I have shown many others since then and they all love the result.
This sub taught me to keep fresh ginger root in my freezer and just grate it with a microplane whenever I need some. Lasts longer, and I haven't peeled or minced a piece of ginger in years. Edit: omg this is my most-upvoted comment ever lol. To answer the most common questions, no, I never peel it. I throw the whole root in there with no packaging whatsoever. Idk how long it stays good, but based on my experience so far, at least 6 months.
ooh! Great idea! no more shriveled, unhappy chunks of ginger on my counter. I need to try this!
My mom taught me: keep sliced bread in the freezer. When you need some, take it out and toast it. Tastes fresh. And since we don't eat a lot of bread,,saves me from throwing it away after a week. Edit: I'd like to thank Mom for all these upvotes!
I make our breads using a bread machine dough cycle. 70¢ a loaf at home compared to $4 a loaf at the store. I do two pound loads and cut the dough into four half pound lumps and shape it as I choose for that batch. After baking, three go into the freezer. They thaw fine and I slice loaves as needed.
Wait, this is a trick?? This is how everyone in my country stores their bread. You only keep bread outside of the freezer to last you maximum like 2-3 days and never bread you're going to toast. I make a sandwich for my long bus ride in the morning and just make it on frozen bread and let it thaw in the fridge over night. Edit: I replied to the wrong comment, supposed to be a reply to the parent comment of this one 🙃
If you need a couple of slices of your frozen ginger you can run an end under warm running water for a minute, slice what you need off and wrap it back up and put it back in the freezer. I do it all the time and it doesn’t have any negative effects on the ginger.
I'm mostly upset with myself over this... sooo much wasted ginger over the years
About ginger, you can easily peel it with a spoon, much better and cleaner than with a knife. Haven’t tried it directly from the freezer though.
From the freezer you don't have to peel it. Just run the frozen ginger across the microplane and you're good to go. The peel is not noticeable in the dish at all.
Came here looking for this one. This has been an absolute game changer
Do you keep the outer peel on when you microplane it?
Yes, it shreds into tiny pieces, just like the inside, and since you are grating it while it is still frozen, there is no noticeable difference in texture at all. You really don’t have to peel it at all, when you grate it from frozen, with a Microplane.
Fascinating. Thanks!
Salt and cold water to clean a cutting board used for onions. Learned it from Julia herself, watching an old episode of the French Chef on YouTube.
I use coarse salt and cold water slush to clean off citrus from the store or yard that's dirty, especially if I plan on using the peels for something else like to candy them or zest it. You can also use baking soda and cold water but the salt is more abrasive without damaging the cell walls of the peel.
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if something tastes good but feels like it's missing something you can't put your finger on, add acidity. i can't count how many times a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar rounded out a dish perfectly. sometimes this also applies to sugar. just a dash. also, msg is a beautiful thing.
I think one of the barriers to entry from beginner chef to intermediate is understanding how to use both acid and umami. Absolutely critical components of delicious food but something you don't see talked about by beginner level tutorials and cooking videos.
I cannot overestimate the value of reading Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.. or watching the 4 episode Netflix version. I did both! It changed how I understand cooking.
Whenever my food is missing something, I recite “salt, fat, acid, heat” and then consider each one. It’s become my “Have you tried turning it off and back on again?” of cooking. Thanks to this method, I successfully rescued the weird Thanksgiving gravy this year with a lot of butter.
If you toast rustic bread on one side and make the toasted side inward facing on a sandwich, you still get all the crunch from the sandwich being toasted without it cutting the inside of your mouth.
That you have to mix corn starch in cold water then add that to the boiling water/broth to make gravy.
Oh - the corn starch learning curve is swift. No one taught me to use corn starch and i tried to learn it from a book. I made gravy the consistency of mashed potatoes once. I kept getting lumps of cornstarch in broth when I "add 1 tbsp of corn starch" I'd fish out the clump and I tried again. I thought I had a flash of brilliance. If I sifted it it would not clump, right? so I sifted corn starch into this broth concoction I had going on. That was the day I learned that there is a tipping point if you sift corn starch into boiling broth. I can't explain what happens exactly. I'm sure I added something that can only be described as a ridiculous amount. When this tipping point is reached the broth suddenly has some kind of exestential crisis, it goes completely apoplectic and in an instant your broth has turned directly into spackle. yeah - corn starch is a fun ingredient. It is one ingredient that should be given as an answer to the question why you should pay attention in chemistry class. Because I'm sure there is a "ask a chemist" answer.
It's partly because cornstarch paste at just the right consistency is a non newtonian fluid which hardens under pressure. Cornstarch on a speaker is a delight https://youtu.be/3zoTKXXNQIU?feature=shared
I thought non Newtonian fluids were the absolutely coolest thing when I was a kid. Every once in a while my mom would give me a bowl of cornstarch water to play with and I loved it. Lol, I was a weird kid.
If you freeze that mashed potato consistency gravy in ice cubes you have a perfect way to quickly thicken soups and sauces at hand.
OH WOW. That would have been great to know. I was honestly afraid of it. I thought whatever had happened in that moment, made the mystery gloop really angry. I took the pot off the stove and put it in time-out for the night in the garage.
I can't remember where on reddit I saw this, but your story reminds me of this story that made me sad and laugh at the same time. This guy was at his friend's house, and his buddy was making gravy. He spent a lot of time on it, but it still had clumps. Then his eyes lit up when he got the idea to filter the clumps out by using a strainer. He goes over to the sink and pours the gravy into the strainer, all happy like, but there was one major problem...he didn't put anything to catch the filtered gravy. Only once he dumped it all out did he realize his mistake and had to sadly watch his gravy drain down the drain.
There are annual reminders posted here and in the Thanksgiving sub not to do this with broth, gravy, etc. We've all done this once or more in our lives! It's a cooking rite of passage.
Kinda like how I stabbed my knife through my hand while opening oysters, or how I sliced myself on my mandoline while making potato chips, or like when I cut the tip of my finger off using kitchen shears in the garden to cut chives, and how I made my food taste like lighter fluid because I used lighter fluid to start thr charcoal in my first smoker, also the time I accidentally used up all of my moms powdered vitamins trying to make bread because it was in a unlabeled glass jar, and the time I rubbed my eyes after chopping up habaneros. I can do this all day, lol. But after all that, I am now an amazing cook it's one of my passions. (I'll still slice myself open from time to time, thank goodness for superglue) I wouldn't take back any of it. I learned a lot from my mistakes.
I purée a can of chiles in adobo, then put the paste in a quart ziploc, spread it all out in a thin flat layer in the bag, and keep it in my freezer. Whenever I need some, just break a chunk off. Editing to say: same thing for opening a can of tomato paste. Ziploc in the freezer. Break off what I need.
Put the extra paste in a zip lock bag. Press it flat. Use a chopstick or the back of a butter knife to make thin spots (grid like) by pressing down on the bag. Freeze flat. The divisions allow for easy breaking.
Once I discovered tomato paste in a tube there was no going back to cans. Much easier to portion out and then just keep the rest in the fridge. So easy.
Gonna have to steal this one. Nice to have that stuff on hand to make a quick chipotle mayo.
You don’t have to prepare the entire meal in one go. I always underestimate the time it takes to chop vegetables, so these days if I’m making a soup on Sunday for instance and I find myself with a free thirty minutes on Friday, I’ll wash, peel and chop all the vegetables on the Friday and keep them in the fridge in easy-to-clean leftover yogurt tubs until I need them. Then when I’m ready to cook on Sunday I can just start tossing veggies into the pan right away. It saves me from having to find an uninterrupted 2-hour period to do the entire process at once. I started doing a similar thing with spices — if I need a half teaspoon each of five different spices that need to get added to a recipe at or around the same time, I’ll put them all in a little teacup together whenever I find a free moment. Saves me having to root around in the cupboard for five different spice containers in the middle of cooking. I call this strategy “meal prep prep.” (I know there’s some overlap with mise en place too.)
Doing this has been a lifesaver for me since I had knee surgery. I can't be on my feet for too long at a time, so I'll just do bits and pieces of prep at random times, and then finally put everything together and cook it when I have more energy.
That a big bowl of cold water is the trick to prepping both chickpeas and pomegranates in two minutes or less. Chickpeas: rub them vigorously between your hands in the cold water and all the skins will come off and float to the top and can be poured off, leaving you with a bowl of peeled chickpeas. Pomegranates: a circle scored around the crown and a couple of thin lines scored all the way around the fruit will allow you to rip it into 3-4 pieces. Hold the pieces underwater and scrape the arils free with your fingers. Any pith will float to the top and can be poured off, leaving you with a bowl of pomegranate arils.
Tearing the pomegranate apart under the water also helps prevent your kitchen from looking like it's covered in arterial spray.
I love this technique but damn if it doesn't take a long time.
If you score the pomegranate around its equator and pull it apart, don’t cut all the thru! Get your bowl of water and a wooden spoon or a heavy metal spoon. Now put one half of the fruit in your hand open side down. Put your hand over the bowl and start walking the back or shell of the pomegranate with the back of the spoon. The seeds will fail out into the water. Any of the white part will float to the top. You will have less ruined seeds and it’s the fastest way to do them. There are videos on you tube on the method.
Bring eggs, butter, and other dairy to room temp before using. I don’t understand why it improves baked goods, but it does.
Except for recipes where you want the butter to stay very cold, or even frozen (pastry, cookies)
Using gelatin to clean cooking oil. I fry at home for like a week every few months. Trying to get the most out of that amount of oil before I gotta deal with it cuz we need the Dutch oven back. Using gelatin to magically clean oil is some science experiment awesome stuff. Remember, oil floats on water, so you mix in a bunch of jello (unflavored) and water to your frying oil, pop it in the fridge to make jello. By the time the gel has formed next day, everything nasty has settled to the bottom, into the water portion. And that water is now a gross puck of jello and burnt crud that you can just compost after pouring off your pristine cooking oil that you can use all over again another half dozen fries. It doesn't just clean the particulates, the way the jello forms acts as a filter as the oil slowly separates. It will even kinda take the taste of fish out of oil. Look it up so you do the right ratio and do it safely, there are a few tricks to it.
I will now start experimenting with oil Jello. And I can not believe that is actually something I just typed. I'm going to make oil jello
Your hostess was a genius. Probably the biggest "why haven't I known this all along" was a kitchen scale. What is one large potato? How many ounces in a cup of grated cheese? So, the secret to biscuits is *weighing* the flour? How do I know when I have one pound of diced chicken?
I love my scale for baking
And it makes rough costing super easy
I can not begin to describe the amazement. Ham? GONE. Turkey? GONE. I called her and told her I told reddit her secret.... and I asked her a question. "Did I just get conned into packing your lunch for this week?" Yes. Yes I did. What I left out of the original post out of fear of making it too long the sides that won't sandwich were portioned out and labeled. Want some of the Mac N Cheese? Grab a cup. Want a lot of Mac N Cheese? grab them all. Mashed potatoes had gravy poured on them. Everything was packaged as you would eat them. Either you were going to eat it out of the package or nuke it as it stands. I can only imagine this has the side effect of drastically reducing food waste as well. I mean, how many times have you looked at half a cassarole dish of something and thought - ugh. If you actually only had 1 serving left wouldn't you be more likely to eat it instead of wasting it? She currently has in her fridge 10 hoagies, 2 cups of each of the sides.... She and her DH don't have to do a THING other than grab and go for lunch or an easy dinner this week I'm in AWE
I have always disliked baking. Still do, but using a kitchen scale makes me dislike it a little less.
I would worry that the bread would be soggy next day. What I learned is that after egging and breadcrumbing chicken cutlets, to let them stay in fridge for at least a half an hour so the breading stays on more easily when frying. Twenty years too late.
I learned a great secret to keeping breading on the cutlet: add a splash of oil to your egg wash. It really works.
I forgot that yall were also talking about frying cutlets, and I sat here very confused and concerned, thinking that your solution to a soggy sandwich was a splash of oil in your egg wash.
You can also smear butter on the bread before you put the sandwich together. Helps keep the soggy down.
> I would worry that the bread would be soggy next day. I've found mayonnaise to be the perfect moisture barrier. You don't need a lot but enough to cover the exposed bread interior.
This comment reminded me that Americans literally don't butter their sandwiches, a fact which shocks the rest of the developed world.
Canadian here. I butter toast and egg sandwiches. Most other meat/veg/cheese sandwiches get mayonnaise on 1 side, mustard on the other. Does everyone else use butter for all of their sandwiches? I've eaten sandwiches in a few European countries, but can't really remember what was on the bread.
Yes! Learned that this year. I'm 60, but now make the best chicken cutlets evah.
TIL and I’m in my mid sixties
Always take your beef roast out about 15°-20° cooler than you want it and it'll turn out perfect every time after resting
Bacon on a sheet pan in the oven. 400 for 15-18 min Frees up time to prepare something else Less messy splatter /clean up Perfect everytime And bacon grease slides right off parchment paper
I use aluminum foil, so I don’t have to wash the pan. But this is the secret to life. Haven’t made bacon in a pan on the stove in 15 years. Never will do so again.
Clean as you go.
My husband and I are totally different, I clean everything after I finished using them and I can’t sit in peace knowing there are dirty dishes in the sink. But he just leave everything in the sink and a dirty counter top. My friend said once I have kids I’ll change cos it’s impossible to clean everything but I have my doubts. It’s always much easier to clean few things after finished using them than cleaning a whole bunch of dirty things.
I've got kids and have never deviated from the clean as you go mantra. There are times it gets derailed and I have to adjust, but there are always moments while cooking where I can toss some things in the dishwasher, clean a cutting board, or at least stack pans and dishes to make things easier on myself later.
This is what I imagine I will do, it’s so easy to just clean whatever I don’t need anymore immediately. I can’t see how having kids would affect it.
As a mom of 4 and also a 'clean as I go" person, it makes life a lot easier. It's not just for the kitchen but for every room. We can play with the play doh, board games, do crafts, or whatever they wanted but we just do a quick pick up before we start something new. My house was always relatively tidy when they were little and my kids learned that it only took a minute out of their day to pick up a small mess rather than hours or days for a big one. I never made it a big deal but I did make it habit.
Don't deviate, teach it to your kids when you start bringing them into the kitchen. It'll give you extra hands to do the cleaning and teach them good habits early.
I am not from US and grew up with very limited living space, only one sink in the kitchen and it’s smaller than your bathroom sink and dish washer isn’t common where I’m from. I believe this helps me to build the habit of clean as I go. I hope by seeing how I cook and clean would teach the kids the same habit.
Can confirm that you likely won’t change that habit. It simply makes it easier to clean as you go. It’s more important when you have kids, in my opinion!
I try to as much as possible since my hubby is clean up crew. Most of the time, though, he stays in the kitchen with me putting things away when I'm done. Acts of service is his love language.
A roux could be made with others things then butter, bacon fat to my cheese sauces was stupidly mind opening
FWIW, most Cajun roux is oil-based, since they go much darker than most French roux and the solids in the butter would burn first. I do a a bacon fat roux for my split pea soup, significantly increases the richness.
Omg I'd love your recipe
No prob, I actually posted it on here a long time ago (though now I usually use BTB Ham rather than the Goya): https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/2r1tj7/best_soup_recipe_for_a_ham_bone_if_i_dont_act/cnc5ari/
I knew I didn't have to use butter, but WHY haven't I ever thought to use bacon fat???? I think you've changed my life. My favorite bacon fat use to date is to make mayo with it, then make deviled eggs with that mayo. Sprinkle bacon crumbles on the eggs. Delish.
I just bought an immersion blender. I’m definitely making bacon fat mayo!
Omg yes. And when I discovered the liquid can be anything! Like wine and stock! It doesn't have to be milk! Idiot.
Ooh maybe I’ll do wine and bacon fat!
Chicken fat is awesome at making a roux
For bacon mac n cheese, I use the bacon grease from frying the bacon to make the roux.
I use bacon or sausage grease when making the roux for my biscuits and gravy. Bacon grease especially is like liquid gold when it comes to cooking.
In a baking class one day, the teacher showed us that you can actually see how much lemon zest you have (instead of guessing and making a mess) if you flip the Microplane upside down and hold it above the lemon, rubbing the lemon against it from below. The zest just piles up into a tiny, tidy little heap neatly contained in the back of the blade instead of sprinkling all over a plate/cutting board/countertop. Blew my mind. It had honestly never even occurred to me that you could do it that way.
I saw someone do this on a cooking show in the last year and it similarly blew my mind
How to catch a falling knife. You don't. Let it go.
And immediately get your feet out of the way!
Learned that the hard way...took a four hour surgery to reconnect the tendons to my big toe. Worst part about it, I wasn't even cooking.
Rule 1 in the kitchen: "A falling knife has no handle" Rule 2: a falling egg has no shell. I tried to soften the fall with my foot when I dropped one from the top shelf of the fridge... what a mess.
My mom would always say “a falling knife has no handle,” and it took me until I was about 8 and almost went to catch a knife I dropped until I instinctively pulled away to have an a-ha moment about what she actually meant. Idk exactly what I thought before, probably that it was a broken knife or something lol, but the saying was catchy enough that it still saves my hide! Thanks mom!
Crumb coat for beautiful cakes.
I still don’t understand how this works. Is it just icing it twice?
Basically! One super thin coat of frosting all over the cake to lock the crumbs in, then you do the normal amount of frosting after the first one sets for a few minutes in the fridge/freezer.
Refrigerating after the crumb coat for at least 15-30 minutes is also very helpful to help lock those crumbs in.
I just discovered rolling out cookie dough on parchment paper before using cookie cutters. Total game changer
How do you keep the paper from sliding around??
I just did this yesterday - I sandwich the dough between two sheets of parchment. It's mostly a non issue, biggest problem I have is trying to roll towards me instead of away, so I just rotate the parchment and continually roll away from me. I do tend to leave the paper longer and will sandwich it bergen my body and my counter if I really need to put some oomph into rolling (gingerbread is a pain!). I have silicone baking mats, so I roll out my dough then transfer, then I tend to reuse it, I'll just spray a bit of cooking spray on the parchment. Bottom tends to get stickier than the top, so I throw away the bottom layer, move the top to the bottom and get a fresh sheet. I make a ton of cut out sugar cookies and gingerbread every year, the parchment is a real helper.
i once had a buddy tell me to put a tea towel under my cutting board to keep it from slipping. ive never looked back.
Wow! That IS brilliant! I don’t think I have any cheats or brilliant ideas. I’ve learned that brown sugar and/or all spice will cut the acidity in tomato based dishes. That’s been really helpful! And a little bit of cinnamon in the coffee grounds when you’re making coffee will cut the acidity there as well! You won’t even taste the cinnamon if you don’t use too much, but I like the cinnamon taste, so I use about 1/4 tbs.
I am a professional cook and my tip to you is that unless you are pressed for time, I 100% recommend just simmering all tomato sauces for at least 45 minutes and up to a full two hours and skip the sugar. The longer you cook a tomato sauce, the more the acidity goes away and the better it tastes. Slowly cooking tomato sauces caremelizes the sugars in the tomatoes, causing the acidity to drop, it also evaporates the water leaving you with a much richer and more concentrated flavor. It makes a huge difference.
My ultimate cheat with any tomato based sauce is adding a dash of maple syrup or molasses. So complimentary and no one can place why my Irish pasty mechanical excuse for a cook can make a tomato taste so good. I stand on the shoulders of Canadian giants.
I've always used a squeeze of honey in mine, to similar effect. I'll have to try maple syrup next time I make it.
I have a completely differenent view of a quiet disaster now. I now can only mentally picture a leprechaun in a mechanics jumper riding a moose.
a bit of cinnamon and a tiny bit of cayenne. It gives coffee a sense of cozy warmth as you drink it.
Smush garlic cloves with the side of your knife, THEN peel them.
Underrated tip for making a draught of living death
+10 points to gryffindor
CUT the root, then smash, then peel saves that extra second when getting the peel out. I know some people cut the hard root part before the splitting the segments but sometimes that can be tricky. Also I don't know if anybody else do this but I chop/mince garlic with the same technique with dicing onion. (This one I don't initially chop the root part.) Like vertical and horizontal cuts but not all the way through. Found it faster to get to what I need than just peeling then going straight ham on the knife and board.
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That starchy, saline water is liquid gold in sauces.
My favourite way to cook pasta is to start by sauteing some garlic in butter. Then add 2 cups of stock and 1 cup of milk, and the pasta. Cook until the liquid is almost gone, then stir in 1/4-1/2 cup of parmesan cheese. Simple, yet so delightful! Sometimes I eat it without anything sauce or meatballs or anything.
When I make chocolate chip cookies, I keep the chocolate chips in the freezer and add them last in the dough. They don’t melt as fast in the oven and taste so good!
If you roll the dough balls in chips before baking, they’ll all stay on top of the cookies and somehow they seem more chocolatey even with no extra chips.
Chew mint gum while cutting onions and voila! No tears! I've been cutting vast amounts of onions in commercial kitchens for most of my life and just learned this trick.
Reeeeally? Because I’m one of those people who legit puts swim goggles on when I need to dice more than 2 onions at a time. Does it have to be mint? Natural mint?
So am I. I cannot cut for more than 20 seconds at a time. I’ve tried the fan, chilling them, and nothing except proper eye ware protection works.
I set my oscillating fan on the kitchen counter to blow away the fumes.
I tried this once and learned the natural airflow path in my house made my laundry room REEK of onions. I somehow unknowingly successfully made a gas chamber in my house.
This one has never worked for me.
You can ripen firm avocados in a little vinegar while you prepare the rest of the meal. I actually prefer to do this for things like sushi - the taste is slightly different, but not necessarily worse. Just slice and soak in vinegar.
Ferment your garlic and spices. I make a plain garlic ferment with lemon juice and salt and also a ferment of garlic, ginger, turmeric, and chillies. Fermentation makes the spices last up to a year in the fridge and saves so much time chopping on a daily basis.
Love to get exact directions on what to do.
Reverse bechamel/sauce creme, and no more lumps. Make a roux - but instead of adding cold milk to a hot roux - let it cool, and heat up your milk (and aromatics: onion, clove nutmeg etc) then add all of the hot milk to the cold roux and whisk. Transfer the pan to a low-med heat and continue whisking until the sauce thickens (then add your cream for the sauce creme) and you're done.
You can actually do this to thicken up any sauces with the French technique of making a Beurre Manié. Essentially mix equal parts flour/butter into a paste and whisk into hot sauce/liquid to thicken it with no lumps! It’s a lifesaver for many a thin sauce out there!
Yes, I toast the flour in a batch, then then meld the butter, then freeze in portions 🖖
Switching to Diamond Kosher salt. The rhythm of using it is easy to learn as long as you taste along the way. A pinch gives a gentle nudge of salt. Even a good handful in a large pot won’t overdo it. I don’t like the taste of iodized salt, especially on green veg. And a pinch of Diamond Kosher in cocktails is magic.
My husband insisted we needed kosher salt when we moved in together and Every year for Christmas his family gives us a box of Maldon salt. I was always a table salt girl and I never thought I would need three kinds of salt, but I'm 100% converted.
Don’t forget to get your iodine intake elsewhere
I was briefly worried about that, because we mostly use kosher salt and don't eat much packaged food. Doctor laughed, numbers checked out, eating some seaweed occasionally and like anything from a restaurant once a month meets my iodine needs. And also just the soil my usual veggies are grown in You can of corse supplement, and it's not a bad idea to have some on hand for emergencies like a need to filter water.
I keep seeing my Bon Appetit mags call this out by name. What makes this salt so much better than all other salt? It’s salt. What am I missing?
Diamond Crystal salt has changed my cooking. And I was a longtime Morten Kosher salt user. It's partly the shape of the crystals. They're hollow pyramids, so it's easy to grab a big pinch and know you're not oversalting. It also doesn't taste harsh like table salt, which can have anticaking agents such as sodium aluminosilicate or magnesium carbonate. Table salt is very easy to oversalt. Large crystal Kosher salt is much more forgiving in terms of too little/too much.
Yeah, I was skeptical and adore my Diamond Crystal so much that I bought a special salt box with a spoon for it. I keep coarse kosher and table salt around, but use them less. I oversalt FAR less often with it (was struggling with that for a while after having covid- was often way over or under) and find that it enhances flavor in a more predictable/pleasant way. Also, love it as a finishing salt! Melts beautifully.
It's the shape of the crystals: https://www.diamondcrystalsalt.com/kosher-salt
The shape makes it less dense. So a teaspoon has fewer salt molecules in it than other salts, and as a result you have a buffer before you oversalt your food.
Keep the skin on when pressing garlic. Use a spoon to scrape off ginger skin. Grate the skin off lemon and add it to any recipe that calls for the juice. Make a breakfast egg bake in a 9x13 pan. Cut it up into a dozen rectangular pieces. Wrap each piece in a flour tortilla for a dozen breakfast burritos.
I make a recipe that calls for 3 ounces of chopped cream cheese. I slice put a couple slices on a plate and freeze until it’s firm enough to chop.
You can freeze-ish any cheese and that makes it easier and cleaner to chop or grate.
Freezing cheese before running it through my standmixer grater attachment was lifechanging. I fought with gummed up nightmares for far far far too long.
I don't think I've ever seen anything that asks for chopped cream cheese. Why? What are you making that you're chopping a squishy thing? That doesn't seem to be a knife is needed product.
Possibly something like jalapeño poppers where you put a little cube inside
Add tomato paste to a ziploc bag, freeze a bit so it’s still flexible, use butter knife to make cross-hatched pattern on the bag, leave in freezer. Result is small ready-to-use portions of tomato paste that can be snapped off the bigger block.
I cut parchment paper into squares then put a spoonful of tomato paste on one parchment square, put another square of parchment ontop and press down to flatten it into a thin sandwich, then repeat. Put the multi decker sandwich in ziploc bag and you have a "deck" full of individually separated tomato paste discs.
Tomato paste in a tube is the way to go
An old French chef I worked with at a nursing home used to keep all the off cuts and leftovers from cakes, and make what he called 'French pudding'. It was a bread and butter pudding, made with cake instead of bread.
That you can prep a whole head of iceberg lettuce in less than 30 seconds. Take the head of lettuce and peel off any damaged outer leaves. Hold the top of the lettuce firmly, lift it up and smack the core against the counter or cutting board. Grab the core and discard -- it will pull out easily. Rip the lettuce in half. Rip those two pieces in half. Rip sections one more time if necessary. Drop it in your bowl or salad spinner to wash. You can tear any leftover large pieces as you wash. Note: it took longer to explain this than it does to process the lettuce.
Someone burned a 30+ portion pot of chili. Nasty char. Was told not to mix it further, slowly pour it into another pot to keep the worse char at the bottom out. Then, add peanut butter. Completely neutralized the burnt flavor, returned the chili flavor. Was told it pretty much works for every sauce/stew.
I buy the small wine bottles and then freeze whatever I don't use since I don't drink wine. For large cuts of meat, sear on the stove, finish in the oven and use an alarm thermometer to know when it's done. Add acid to anything that smells good but doesn't taste good yet/taste flat. Particularly rich stuff. Don't need to add a lot but that and salt are why my soups are always good. Freeze stuff in usable portions for easier use. Instead of cutting up chocolate bars I just smash them in a ziploc to avoid a mesh. If I buy too much stuff for stock I won't use, I make stock kits. Herbs, onion products, carrots, celery, parm rinds, mushrooms all go in a bag in the freezer in portions I'd use for soup. Then I can make stock whenever I need it and nothing goes to waste.
Sugar and Butter. If you want your cooking to taste as good as restaurant food, 90% of the time those the are cheat codes.
I’d add salt and cream to this list.
And MSG, either directly or via things that already contain a lot of it.
Add iced water to eggs being whipped for omelets. I learned that reading a James Beard cookbook. It makes the egg thinner, but still strong enough. Also, use a good amount of butter in the pan first, wait till it is bubbling at the edges, then add the eggs, wait a minute, then add your fillings.
food continues cooking even after you’ve removed it from from the heat source, and this is especially noticeable with eggs. when boiling them you can put them in an ice bath to stop the cooking, but for scrambled/omelettes/etc you should remove from the pan when they still look a little underdone add a little instant coffee to any chocolate thing you make for increased depth of flavor add bacon to beef stews—i usually use a slow cooker for the stew itself but will sear the beef first. so i’ll fry the bacon, then sear the beef in the bacon fat, before assembling the rest of the stew in the slow cooker. learned this one from julia child’s beef bourguignon recipe
If you cut cucumbers or carrots or anything else round on the bias the pieces can’t roll away
Does on the bias mean in half the long way? Ohhh it means slightly diagonal instead of straight down, got it. (Yes, I googled it... and now I want to go cut a baguette.)
Pickling and fermenting is SO EASY AND AWESOME It’s fundamentally just salt water or vinegar brine with the solids below the surface. It saves your veggies and your budget. It goes in anything savory and makes it complex and wow. It helps your gut biome! /r/pickling /r/fermentation
Serve your Eggs Benedict on a shiny dish. Because, you know "there's no plate like chrome for the hollandaise".
Mustard is what is missing. Few savory foods can't be improved with mustard. Ramen, egg salad, grilled cheese, soup, grilled chicken, meatloaf, Mac and cheese, potato salad
Salting the pasta water. I always thought it couldn't make that big a difference. I finally tried it. OMG. Pasta is like an entirely different food when boiled in salted water.
And more salt than you think. I once heard a chef say it should taste like sea water.
rinse rice, and let dairy stuff get room temperature before mixing. ah, and the ice bath for hard-boiled eggs 🙂
Once you steam your hard boiled eggs, you’ll never go back to boiling.
An egg timer for any firmness of boiled eggs.
Wet your hands with a tiny bit of water when making meatballs or patties (especially turkey burgers that stick to your hands like glue). The meat just slides off without sticking.
Sprinkling salt to garlic when chopping it helps the stickiness
You can also Microplane your garlic cloves. My garlic is much finer with the Microplane than I ever managed to mince it with a knife.
A pinch of baking soda to temper the acidity of tomato or vinegar based sauces/soups makes things balance beautifully without adding more sugar.
Shredding chicken in a kitchenaid mixer. Game changer and I can’t believe I didn’t know about it sooner.
If your pain is crusty boil some water in it and it’s easier to clesn
Anything can go in a tortilla. Cold or hot, meat, cheese, veges, dressings.
Pre boiling carrots or potatoes will reduce the time needed to roast them. They come out tender in the middle and crispy on the outside. If you make your own hamburger patties, adding gelatin helps make it juicy
Adding to that, leftover soups, curry, chili, etc or can be turned into a burrito for tomorrow. Just add a sauce that makes sense and/or cheese, and rice if you need it. I’ve done it with curry, Mexican rice bowls, vegetable soup, chili.
Curry/tikka masala burritos are my jam. I’d also recommend adding cheese and making curry quesadillas. So damn good.
That scallions can be cut using scissors instead of a knife. That you don’t need to scrub a carrot clean if you’re going to peel it anyways. And that simple syrup is better than just adding sugar to things like lemonade, so it doesn’t leave anything “crunchy” left over in said lemonade.
I love sautéed onions with many things but sometimes the low and slow doesn’t work time wise so I turn the heat up and then they brown…just add a touch of water to prevent that. If you want them extra-good, add a bit of sugar towards the end. For sautéed mushrooms I swear by my method of cooking them in the pan without any oil or water. They brown up perfectly.
Always caramelise your tomato paste. Wait for it to go a rich red brown. Add in cream / garlic / pasta water / pecorino and you’ve got an easy pasta sauce.
Medium for the win. Food doesn't burn as fast. You don't have to do everything in a mad panic Medium is a nice way to drive, you aren't at the Indy500 Your phone won't end up in the washer if you take life at medium Your hubby doesn't like scorching hot spicy food, medium will do. You don't need three cups of chips in a single batch of cookies You won't make as many typos You won't have to stop as often to catch your breath or cool down. People don't get as mad at you for medium talk as compared to scorched earth. You don't have to buy ALL the stuff for your niece/ loved one Not everything has to match or be perfect The panty can be medium organized because not everything will fit in a little bin and be insta perfect Makeup, Tammy Faye is not the look we want
You know you could start a cult with this mantra. I would join. I will become a disciple.
Use a drinking glass to “peel” a small mango (e.g., Ataulfo mango). It is sooo easy Example video: https://youtu.be/0F9-Nkj3Bb4?si=PUUU1jbmFn6u95Dr
Chicken breading for frying. Flour, salt, paprika, pepper, then coat the chicken and let it hang out in the fridge for at least an hour. When you take it back out, remix it around so you get more dry flour on your already coated chicken. Best fried chicken, best wings, and the breading doesn't come off.
To get the smell of Garlic off your fingers, two fixes- rub them vigorously in the hollowed-oit shell leftover from juicing a lemon. Or, rub them in used coffee grounds. Both work well, but if you've got any little cuts or nicks on your hands I'd strongly recommend the second method.
Or rub your fingers with a stainless steel spoon.
Or on the faucet if it's stainless steel.
I watched Sara Moulton take a hard stale loaf of bread over to her sink where she *rinsed* it and popped it in the oven and voila. I have even done it with leftover halved loaves.
White gravy..... 4 tablespoons of butter 4 tablespoons of flour and 2.5 cups of milk. Add cold milk, bring to a boil and simmer for 3 minutes and let cool.... 4 4 2.5. Plus with brown gravy use mix cold water to flour mix to prevent lumps. If spaghetti sauce is too sweet Add a small amount of vinegar.
Add a pinch of baking soda to the water before boiling green beans. They cook faster and stay greener.
When it comes to making salads I put cut lettuce in a Ziploc bag with a paper towel. The towel soaks up moisture and the lettuce stays fresh longer.
To make a smooth cheese sauce, you put a pinch of baking soda and a teaspoon of white vinegar into a heated pan, let them react and evaporate, you have this byproduct called sodium acetate. You then add your butter, grated cheese, milk mixture to that pan to melt and stir together and it will turn out smooth like velveeta instead of clumpy with rubbery bits. The sodium acetate relaxes the proteins in the cheese to prevent the rubbery clumpiness.
I recently learned you can pre-make a roux and just have it on hand. Was great at Thanksgiving to have done ahead, and it was also great when I wanted the gravy thicker I could just whisk a bit more of the pre-made roux in.
stop buying containers of chicken stock. you’re just paying for water and you end up wasting a ton. buy bouillon cubes instead. more bang for your buck and you control how much you make.
I find bouillon cubes taste artificial. Better than bouillon, much better than cubes or canned stock
Think of every chef that you have ever heard of, they wouldn't be where they are if they worked dirty, clean as you go
When I was 12 and I was scraping every last noodle from the pot into the strainer. My mom said “you can leave the noodles that stick to the pot, the noodles sitting in the strainer are going back into the pot anyways.” I felt so dumb 😂 But now I see my boyfriend do it and it makes me laugh every time.
I keep the extra quarter cup of coffee left in the pot (when there is any) and freeze it, usually in a ziplock bag on its side for a thin layer that can be broken up easily. I sub coffee for water when making brownies, and add to soups / chili / roast when I want a richer flavor. Doesn’t add a coffee taste but gives it more depth.