Kitchen Tips

  • Garnish with flavors that are already in the dish
  • Use a really good Teflon pan to make crepes. You don’t need a crêpe maker!
  • Get an indoor cast iron stove-top grill pan. They leave great grill marks and produce juicy and tasty meats
  • Heat a little milk in a mug for ~15secs and froth with an electric frother until stiff. Use for a macchiato or add a dollop to espresso.
  • For bright green veggies, blanch a bunch of parsley in boiling water before cooking boiling or use a teaspoon of citric acid preservative
  • To prevent burning meats when sautéing, use an olive oil and butter combo
  • When making pasta dough, mix flour and egg in a bowl instead of on counter top to prevent losing your eggs
  • Run an ice cream scoop under hot water to cut through ice cream with ease or microwave ice cream carton in 10sec intervals
  • When cooking with butter, wait until the foam subsides and then add your food
  • Pop a fast pour spout on an empty and cleaned white wine bottle and fill with EV olive oil
  • Thoroughly dry your poultry skin before cooking to get that perfect crisp
  • Meat doneness finger test: If it feels like your: Cheek=rare; Chin=medium-rare; Forehead=well done
  • When working with ground meat to make patties, wet or lightly oil your hands and the meat won’t stick
  • To quick ripen fruit, throw in a paper bag with an apple
  • To roast peppers put under a broiler until blackened. Then put into a covered Pyrex bowl. They’ll peel easily.
  • Wash your wooden cutting board with hot water & white vinegar. Vinegar smell will dissipate
  • Peel garlic: place clove on a board and smash with heel of your chef’s knife. Skin will peel right off
  • Make croutons or bread crumbs in a food processor with leftover bread
  • Use panko crumbs when breading pork or chicken to get a great crispy crust
  • After cooking steak to your desired temp, let it sit out under foil to redistribute the juices
  • To prevent avocado from browning, keep avocado pit in a halved avocado and place the unused half in covered container on bed of sliced red onion
  • To maximize juice from a lemon, throw it in the microwave in 30sec intervals
  • To cook potatoes quickly, wrap in Saran wrap and microwave on high 1 min per potato
  • Saute meats in lard, particularly duck lard,  for great flavor
  • Store pine nuts in freezer
  • Flash freeze fresh pesto in silicone mini muffin tray
  • If you don’t have a lemon juicer, cut lemon in half and stick a fork in center of flesh and twist while squeezing
  • Always score the top of dough with a bread knife before baking
  • Dip a bread knife in flour to prevent it from sticking when scoring dough
  • Use a dough scraper to scoop up cut veggies to be cooked
  • Pour 1 cup of tap water into a preheated pan at the bottom of an oven. The resulting steam will enhance the quality of the crumb
  • Cut a vanilla bean in thirds and stick into your container of sugar to have vanilla infused sugar
  • Consider joining a food co-op in your area. Farm fresh food, in large quantities, for relatively cheap
  • Egg freshness test-if it floats in water it’s bad
  • Keep kitchen twine and cheesecloth in your pantry, you never know when you’re going to need it
  • Don’t throw away extra dough. Just wrap and freeze. When you need it, defrost in fridge overnight. Then leave out on counter for an hour before using
  • Use a steel to keep your knife sharp…you know, that cool gadget all the TV chefs use…
  • Substitute shallots for onions – they’re less harsh than onions and add great flavor to any dish, fresh or cooked
  • Invest in a good porcelain coated cast iron pot (think Le Creuset), they are versatile and retain heat well

One Response to Kitchen Tips

  1. Mhe-Lhanee Benito | January 22, 2010 at 1:52 AM | Reply

    very helpful…. thanks for the tips… U

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s