Cooking Tips
Chef’s Secrets to make life easier in the kitchen
- To grind nuts quickly, crush them with a rolling pin or wooden mallet in a Ziploc bag.
- To freeze foods for easy separation such as berries, spread on cookie sheets until frozen and pack in containers.
- When cooking with herbs, use twice as much fresh as the dry counterpart.
- Brush soy sauce on meat before broiling for a rich brown color.
- To keep boiled potatoes white, add a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar to water.
- Put lemon on fish after cooking, never before, to keep from getting mushy.
- If soups or stews are too salty, add a few slices of potato. Boil a few minutes and remove.
- Before peeling oranges, cover with boiling water and let stand 5 minutes. The bitter white membrane can be removed more easily.
- Nuts keep up to one year in the freezer.
- Keep popcorn in your freezer for betting popping.
- Coat raisins with flour to keep them from sinking to the bottom of muffin and cake batter.
- For soup with rich flavor and color, brown bones, onions, celery and carrots in oven first.
- Forming meatballs is easier if hands are first chilled with an ice cube.
- Raw mushrooms, kiwi and strawberries can be sliced evenly and quickly with a egg slicer.
- To cut fresh bread, heat the serrated knife.
- Shave chocolate with a potato peeler for a quick dessert garnish.
- Make a cardboard ring to keep the rim of plate clean when spraying salad dressing or dusting desserts with powdered sugar.
- Marinate hard cooked eggs in beet juice before making them into deviled eggs.
- Roast peppers quickly with a blow torch.
- Peel garlic easily by chopping off the ends and hitting the clove with the back of a knife on a cutting board.