Not really a hack but just something important, always remember to account for how much salt you need if you don’t have the recipes specific type of salt because different salt types have different shapes and sizes
Also (and I know this is obvious to many) aim to undersalt your dish. You can always add more salt but it’s hard to fix oversalting. If it needs more flavors, use herbs and spices. If you’ve already added a good bit of salt and you’re nervous about oversalting, add some acid. Wine, vinegar, lemon juice, lime juice, etc. That might reveal flavors that the salt was trying to bring out!
That sounds like it involves a lot more mess with the addition of a piping bag that can’t even handle the chunks in many of my recipes. How does spooning crumple paper?
Clearly you have a better technique than me. When i spoon batter into paper cups, the spoon inevitable touches the paper, sticks to it, and causes it to fold and stick to the batter in the rest of the cup. At least a third of my cups end up messy and misshapen. Piping works great for me, but I dont do a lot of things with “chunks.”
Grilled cheese hack: assemble the sandwich open-faced on a baking sheet and place under the broiler for a few minutes until the cheese is melted and bubbling and slightly browned, then close it up and cook it like normal in a covered skillet on medium heat with butter. The cheese will be completely melted and (more importantly) it will stay melted while you’re actually eating the sandwich, and the browning on the cheese adds a big flavor component.
I used to make them the normal way just in a skillet, and even if the cheese was just barely melted it would cool off and re-solidify before I started eating it. And often I would burn the crust just trying to get the cheese melted.
Boil spaghetti in a small amount of water in a frying pan. You won’t need to push the pasta down and you’ll have lovely starchy water to finish off your sauce — perfect for something like a carbonara!
Ah, the alchemy of the kitchen! A dash of efficiency, a sprinkle of passion, and a dollop of savviness. First off, mise en place - French for ‘put in place.’ Prepare your ingredients ahead of time, it can help remove a loot of stress.
Secondly, invest in a sharp knife - it’s the Excalibur of the culinary world, turning the toughest veggies into paper.
Lastly, experiment! Like any good inventor, a chef isn’t afraid of a few mishaps; it happens to the best of us! You’ll surprise yourself with some of things you may come up with 😉
First off, mise en place - French for ‘put in place.’ Prepare your ingredients ahead of time, it can help remove a loot of stress.
Corollary: as you empty a dirty dish, put it directly into the dishwasher or give it a quick wash and dry while the ingredients sweat/simmer/cook. Nothing is quite as nice as having the kitchen nearly cleaned up as you plate your meals. (my wife taught me this - it only took me 25 years to learn!)
Besides mise en place, also clean as you go. Basically you only have to clean the pot(s) you cook in, everything else has already been cleaned. And invest in a knife sharpener. They go dull very quickly. And a big box of bandaids :-)
When I have to use parchment paper, I crumple the paper ip into a little ball first, then press it out flat into the cooking vessel (sheet pan or loaf pan or whatnot) and it lays flatter/conforms to the pan better without rolling up all over the place rather than trying to just use a pristine sheet of parchment. It really works great.
LPT - go buy a box of half-size sheets from a restaurant supply store. Webstaurant was my go to until they sent their shipping prices into the stratosphere. I buy 1000 sheets at a time and store it with the sheet pans (the box is only a couple inches tall) and it lasts forever. Costs about $50-60 a box iirc which is way cheaper than buying in rolls.
By far my favorite is to have a squirt bottle of water next to my stove. It’s great to have throughout the cooking process, especially if you’ve moved on from Teflon bullshit and are using a pan you pre-heat. To start, you put the pan on the heat and squirt a little water in it. When the water evaporates, the pan is usually in the 350F-400F range. Then when the pan is dry and heated a little more, you can squirt a few more drops in to see if the Leidenfrost effect has taken, uhhh, effect. The way you tell is that the water just dances around on the pan instead of behaving like water normally does, and it’s how you know your food won’t stick, it is at this point that you add the oil.
Moving on to the actual cooking, let’s say you’ve thrown some chicken thighs in the pan and you’ve built up a lot of fond (the brown bits that form in the bottom of the pan) and the chicken is almost done, but you’re not planning on making a sauce. Deglaze the pan with little squirts of water targeted directly at the fond and rub the chicken thighs over the area where the water is deglazing and suddenly that fond is sticking to your chicken thighs, resulting in a better crust and a cleaner pan.
Speaking of cleaner pan, once you’re done cooking and plating and you have a hot dirty pan, squirt enough water in to cover the bottom of the pan and then go eat. When you come back to the kitchen to clean up, the water will have broken down the shit on the bottom of the pan and will steam the sides of the pan, so the pan will wipe clean as easy if all you did was fry an egg.
Finally, I stopped putting milk (of any variety) in my coffee, but I wanna be able to drink my coffee right away and it’s too hot when it’s made fresh, but I’ve got a bottle full of room temperature water (all the filtered water in my house comes out ice cold) sitting right there so I can cool it down that way (I brew my coffee pretty strong so watering it down isn’t a big deal).
For pan temperature: Just get an IR thermometer. Squirt a bit of oil in and you have enough that you can get a good reading. And then you don’t have to worry about making sure the oil heats up before you put the meat/whatever in. For something like a (cantonese street vendor style) stir fry you may want to superheat the pan to the point that the oil would smoke, but (regardless of what the people who hate electricity say) that is not the norm. And is generally very difficult to do indoors anyway.
Deglazing: In almost every situation, I would rather use a splash of a more flavorful liquid. Even a glug of chicken stock goes a long way. And I have definitely been known to do the “one for me, one for you” approach to booze while cooking.
Leaving an empty heated pan on the hob: Don’t do this if you at all care about your pots and pans. Or if you have pets or (stupid) kids. You are right in that “deglazing” the pan after you cook is a great idea. But I just use a glass of water to dump maybe a few tablespoons-ish in there, scrape it up with a wooden spatula, and then wash the pan. Pretty much every dish benefits from resting for a minute or two (at least) and that is really all you need to clean up.
The problem with squirting the oil into the pan as it heats is that the metal of the pan heats up a lot slower than the oil so you will burn the oil before your pan is up to temp. Also, pre heating pans will not harm them in any way at all. It sounds like you’re applying my comment to Teflon coated pans, which I excluded at the beginning of my comment.
on the pan test, I just run a bit of water onto my hand and flick droplets off my fingers. My reason is that I absolutely LOATHE having anything plastic near the stove. I’ve had far more mishaps involving errant plastic containers than any other.
Besides, If my hand bacteria can make it into the water and survive a 300+ degree pan, it deserves to outlive all of us.
I’ll echo the other comment about deglazing with other flavorful juices to make a better pan sauce (even if it’s not going to be a sauce), since I just prefer it that way. BUT, a splash of water into a pan sauce that’s simmered for too long WILL restore its glossiness and re-thin it.
The common saying is “as salty as the sea” but that’s actually a lot more salt than you would think. 2-3 teaspoons of salt for a large pot of water is plenty. If your water was actually as salty as the sea, your pasta would taste awful
seriously i think it boils down to just keep practicing. for me i learned seasoning by using kosher salt - after a while i think you build muscle memory on how much you use. only advice i can offer in addition to ask the great ideas here is to keep cooking 😊
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