Well, apart from the expertise, it’s the tricks and tips you need, to make the cooking experience quicker, simpler, and easier. If you don’t want to end up just microwaving all your meals for the rest of your life, you need to educate yourself with some easy hacks to leg up your cooking skills.
Cooking isn’t about converting your kitchen into a Masterchef battleground, it’s more about being able to whisk up something for your taste buds to savor on.
But, what’s the difference between a Masterchef and someone whose best cooked dish is Maggi?
From an easy way of sharpening knives, cutting cheese with floss to avoiding egg shells from getting into your food, here are some tips and tricks to make your life easy in the kitchen:
1. Go Ga Ga Over Garlic
Peeling garlic is one of the most hated things in the kitchen sphere. It leaves your hands smelling pungent, and it sometimes gets into your nails. Instead of carefully unwrapping each clove of garlic, just place a couple of unpeeled cloves together and crush them with a knife by using the heel of your hand. You will see how easy it is to unclothe these tiny fellows now.
2. Whisk Up A Perfect Egg
If you have always wanted to make a picture-perfect egg white omelet but you end up with the excess liquid that comes from the yolky part of the egg, use a strainer. Take a wire mesh strainer and strain the egg whites and the yolk separately. This makes life easy, doesn’t it?
3. Keep Your Fried Foods Crispy
What’s the first thing you do when you take out food from hot oil? Place it on a blotting paper to remove excess oil? That’s where you err. Place the hot, fried food on a cooling wire rack. This will prevent your deep-fried foods from becoming soggy.
4. Feeling A Little Gingery Today?
The flavor of ginger is something that leaves you feeling energized. But, it isn’t easy to prep this rhizome for cooking. Peeling it is difficult and it gets all the more scarier when you have a sharp knife trying to scrape it (and your fingers). Use a spoon instead. Peel off the ginger skin with a spoon to make your work easy and safe.
5. Move Away From Messy Marinating Methods
If you’re making chicken parmesan or veggie cutlets, or anything that needs to be doused with breadcrumbs, egg yolk, flour and other mixes of ingredients, this trick is for you. Keep the wet ingredients (egg yolk) and the dry ingredients (breadcrumbs and flour) in separate plates.
And delegate one hand for the dry mix and wet mix. This will keep your hands from dripping liquid and will save you the trouble of cleaning up later.
6. Fix A Salty Dish
We have all, at one point or the other, added more salt than required to our dishes. And then sat with our head in our hands because the dish was spoilt. But, guess what? We can correct a salty dish by just adding a raw, peeled potato to it.
It will absorb all the extra salt and save you from biting into a bowl full of salt. (This trick works for soupy or gravy dishes only)
7. Slippery Knives No More
If you have butter fingers and can’t keep the knife from slipping away, you definitely need to cover them with elastic bands. Take about two to three elastic bands and slide them on the handle of the knife. This will give you a better grip to hold on to the handle.
8. Use Mugs To Sharpen Knives
If your knife can’t slit open a watermelon, or if it cant cut an apple into 4 without you exerting pressure on it, use your mug. Confused? Turn your mug upside down and use the bottom to sharpen the sides of the knife. The ring of the mug is usually harder than the blade of the knife and it can help you file the knife.
9. Tackle Egg Shells With A Simple Crack
It’s a pain to pick out those tiny white bits of eggshell, right? There’s a way to keep the eggshells from getting in your omelet or scrambled eggs, or whatever you are making. Just crack the egg on a flat surface instead of cracking it against a bowl or any other surface.
10. Flatten The Food Before You Freeze It
When you freeze soups or sauces in a flat zip pouch, it becomes easy to thaw them. Also, if you have to store meat for a later use, seal it up in a freezer packet and flatten it out. You can prevent the cellular damage of the food, too.
These cooking hacks and tricks will not only make your life in the kitchen easy, it will also make you look really cool. So, the next time someone brags about their cooking skills, shoot them down with these kitchen tricks.
What are the kitchen hacks that you swear by? Let us know in the comments below.
