10 Essential Cooking Tips
Everyone loves a good insider tip, right?
I’ve picked up a few things over the years while experimenting in the kitchen so I thought I’d share a few tips.
Let me know what you think in the comments!
Let’s get into it.
10 Essential Cooking/Kitchen Tips
To soften butter to room temperature, unwrap it, put it in your mixing bowl or another container that’s not plastic, and put it on top of or near your oven as it preheats. Keep an eye out to make sure it’s not melting.
Sautee vegetables in broth instead of oil! It saves calories, adds great flavor, and you avoid cooking with fat.
Buy marked-down bread from the store, put slices in Ziplock bags, and freeze it. It thaws quickly!
When boiling pasta or potatoes, save some of the water. Adding a little of the water to pasta helps your sauce stick to the noodles better, and adding some of the water to mashed potatoes allows you to thin them out without sacrificing the potato flavor.
Mise en place! Prepare your ingredients before cooking, thoroughly read the recipe, and clean up your mess as you go. Basically, just keep yourself organized in the kitchen.
When baking a pie, place a cookie sheet in your oven as it preheats. Bake the pie on top of the cookie sheet. This allows your bottom crust to get a little crispier due to the heat from the cookie sheet underneath the pan. And it makes it easier to get the pie out of the oven when it’s done (no losing crust from touching the pie pan!).
Use a meat thermometer instead of eyeballing it and guessing when your food is done.
Don’t overcrowd your pan! It will actually take longer to cook your food if your pan is too full. This is especially true with bacon!
Taste as you go! Don’t be afraid to taste your food as you cook and adjust seasonings along the way.
Finally, let your meat rest. Let it rest at room temperature before cooking it, and after it’s done, let it rest before you cut it. The one exception is bacon; adding cold bacon to a cold pan is better than letting it sit at room temp while the pan preheats (the slices don’t shrivel up as much if you let them gradually heat up along with the pan).
