Kitchen Tips and Hacks
Below, you will find nifty tips and tricks that you can use daily to make your life easier!
Tips, Tricks, and Hacks:
When baking chocolate recipes, dust the pan with cocoa powder instead of flour. The cocoa powder enhances the chocolate flavor and eliminates the white flour dust! Which then eliminates the mess all over your counter.
If you hate stems in strawberries and other fruits, then we have a simple trick for you. Take a plastic straw and start at the bottom of the strawberry. Push up and pull the strawberry down, causing the straw to go through the strawberry. It will make its way through, removing the stem. To remove the stem from the straw, just simply blow it out! Stemless strawberries! Less hassle to eat and fun to do!
Shucking corn is by far one of the most annoying tasks to do in the kitchen and lets be honest, shucking corn can get tiring quickly. Not to mention, it can be super time consuming. Use the magic of the microwave to eliminate both of these issues. Microwave your corn for 30 seconds to a minute on high heat. Voila! Corn shucks, be gone! With ease as well.
Here’s another kitchen hack that works like magic. And it involves marshmallows. Yup, marshmallows! Place a few marshmallows into a container of brown sugar and tightly seal it. This softens the sugar in a day, but you can keep the marshmallows in the container for up to a few weeks. It’s just one of the genius ways to brown sugar soft and usable!
If your grill’s got a little gunk on it and you can’t find the grill brush, crinkle up a big sheet of foil then rub it along the grates before lighting the grill. Watch it come right off, just like a grill brush would do.
Don't have a smoker for your meat? Me neither, BUT I have found this works great. For extra smoky flavor, try adding soaked wood chips right to the coals or in a foil pan above the flames. I personally do this all the time!
If you're reheating leftover pizza, this is the only method to try. Heat a dry pan over medium high heat. When the pan is hot, add your slices of leftover pizza and reheat in the dry pan for about two minutes. Add a teaspoon of water, quickly cover the pan, and steam covered for 30 seconds. Uncover the pan, boil off any remaining water, and continue cooking just until the bottom is firm and nicely crispy, about one minute. If done right, I swear this method gets you pizza that's exactly like fresh. It even puts a crispy crust on pizza that didn't have one to begin with.
Peeling and pressing garlic is a huge waste of time. Now days, we typically don't have enough time the way it is. To use a clove of garlic, set it on a cutting board and smash it with the flat side of a big knife (any chefs knife will do the trick). The papery skin will come right off, and you can mince it real quick right there in about 10 seconds. Done.
If you are trying to separate your egg whites from the yolk there are two easy ways you can do this. The first is by using a small funnel. Crack your egg and pour it into the funnel, the egg whites will slide through the funnel as the yolk will get stuck. If you don't have a funnel, just use an empty water bottle and suck the yolk up by squeezing water bottle and letting it go to crest a suction cup like tool.
When cooking with pots and pans on the stove top, always remember to keep the handles over the stove. You never know if your pet, child, or even yourself will accidentally hit the handle or grab it. This could then cause a mess all over your kitchen or may burn yourself or others.
When making soups or stews, make them a day early and let them sit in the refrigerator over night. Doing this allows all of the taste and seasonings really soak in, and your taste buds will be blown even more than if it was made and ate, day of.
If you need really thin sliced meat when making stir-fry recipes or other dishes, try partially freezing the meat before making your cuts. This will make the meat easier to slice very thin since it will hold firm while slicing, no more uneven cuts from the raw meat mushing underneath the knife blade.
If you ever want to dice up potatoes, cut up some meat, or mince or finely cut some herbs get that cutting board out. You start to cut or dice, and the board keeps sliding around on you. Annoying right? One simple trick fixes that issue. Take a paper towel and make it damp, place under the cutting board and say goodbye to it slipping around on you. The moisture helps keep it in place and gives it friction.
If you are cutting up an apple into slices for a snack, a charcuterie board, or a fruit platter; don't let the slices brown so fast. How do you do it? Simple, just add lemon or lime juice. Once the apple is cut up into slices, take your lemon or lime and squeeze the juice onto the slices and rub it in. This will help your apple slices look fresher, longer.
Here is a simple trick, you probably have not heard about before. When cooking pasta, rice or boiling water for your corn on the cob or a hot beverage, you have the chance of the water to boil over. To prevent it from ever happening, place a wooden spoon across the pot or pan. How does it work? A wooden spoon stops water from boiling over by physically bursting the rising foam bubbles and cooling them, causing steam to condense and collapse the foam, thanks to wood's porous, absorbent, and poor heat-conducting properties, which disrupt the surface tension and release steam before it spills over the pot's edge.
Do you love bananas and try to eat one after you workout or for a quick snack, but sometimes its hard to eat them all before they spoil and turn dark brown? It happens, sometimes you are too busy and they ripe faster than you can eat them. To help slow them down and stay fresh, there are two simple things to do. One, do not leave them all connected, make sure to separate them all. This helps slow down the ripening process. Secondly, wrap the stem part of the banana with saran wrap, this further slows down the ripening process, adding on a few more days for you to be able to eat the banana.
Have you ever been cracking eggs to place the yolk in a bowl and the shell breaks off and goes into the bowl? Of course you have, everyone has. It is always a pain in the rear trying to get those tiny 1 or 2 pieces of shell out, but not anymore. This simple hack will make it much easier and all you have to use is the actual egg shell. Use the whole egg shell that you have in your hand and scoop the little pieces out, egg shell acts like a magnet with each other. You will be able easily get the fragments out without having to dig your fingers into the yolk.
Fruit (Other than berries) should not go in your refrigerator. Refrigerators dull the taste of most produce, harm their texture, and can harm their ripening process. So, if you bought something that doesn’t need to go in there leave it out. Most fruits including apples, oranges, pears and bananas don’t belong in the refrigerator unless you’re not planning on eating them soon. I don’t refrigerate tomatoes, avocados or peppers either. Very hot climates are an exception, however.
If you have hard water where you live, then you might be aware that your kitchen sink faucet or even shower head may start to get clogged up over time. You may clean it but then shortly after, its clogged again. Try this method out: white vinegar. Get a plastic bag and fill it up with white vinegar. Place the faucet head into the whit vinegar and tape or rubber band the bag in place, soaking the faucet for 15 minutes or so. Once time is up, remove the bag and let the hot water run, clearing out the mineral build up and giving you much more time in between cleanings.
I will be honest, one of my biggest dislikes when it comes to cleaning is cleaning out my fridge. I hate wiping out the compartments, you go through all the work and in the end it doesn't seem to been cleaned to well, leaves a residue and an odor which I am not a fan of. Simple and easy hack to make sure all you shelves and drawers are clean: dishwasher. Yes, you heard that right, take them out and run them through the dishwasher. Not only will it clean it much better than you will, but it is half the effort. This is a must try the next time you clean out your fridge.
Have you ever had something in your fridge that went bad or just really took over the aroma and now your fridge smells bad or just like that dish? One simple trick will take care of that for you. Use coffee grounds to deodorize your fridge. Yes its that simple. Once you make your morning coffee, take the used grounds and place them in a bowl. Leave it open and store in your fridge. Coffee has Nitrogen in it, which is a natural deodorizer. So let the grounds do the work for you and take that smell away.
We all get to the point to where our oven gets dirty. From splatters or spills, it happens. How do you clean it up? A bunch of elbow grease and chemicals, breathing all that in, not getting anywhere. Yea me too, until I learned about this simple trick that I second guessed every second until I actually tried it. Shaving Cream. Yes, you read that right. Spread shaving cream on your oven door or when trying to spot clean stains, grease, or residue build up in your oven. Let it sit for about 7-10 minutes, come backs, scrub with a sponge and wipe up. It picks up most of the gunk and leaves a a nice clean look after!
Tired of cooking meat and then when eating, it leaves a mess of juices on the plate when they should be in your mouth? Here is why, always let meat “rest” once cooked. Cutting it while it’s hot will let all the juices drain out and result in a drier texture. Letting it "rest" or cool down, will hold the juices inside the meat and let the flavors explode in your mouth and not on your plate.
One common problem I always seemed to come across is buying leafy greens to use throughout the week for our meals and after a few days, they look to be well less than appetizing. Until now, recently I learned to wrap all my leafy greens in a paper towel which then I would place in a reusable plastic bag. This helps keep the moisture in the paper towel and not turn your greens into slime. Give it a try and let us know what you think!
Don't you hate when cookies, brownies, or any other delicious desert gets hard overtime while in a bowl or container? Not anymore! Place a piece of bread or two into the bowl/container. This will help keep your delicious baked treats fresher longer.
Unless you are a professional chef, odds are you dislike chopping fresh herbs. Knife is too close to fingers, not sure if you are getting it small enough, etc. Here is a simple tip that not too many think about. When trying to dice herbs, drop the knife and pick up the pizza cutter. Yes, you heard that right. Slices right through and you can get it as fine as you would like. Not to mention you cut the time it takes in half.
What do you do when cooking bacon? Do you pour the grease down the drain? DONT! That can lead to plumbing issues. INSTEAD, grab your aluminum foil, lay over your sink drain and carefully push down until you create a bowl with the foil. Once you have your bowl, pour your bacon grease into the foil bowl and let it sit until it cools off and hardens. Then, fold it up at the top and throw away!
Does your microwave have food splattered all over it on the inside? Have you not cleaned it in months? If you said yes to both questions, you're not alone. Here is a simple solution, grab a microwave safe bowl and place 2 cups of water into it. Place into microwave and turn on for 4-5 minutes. The steam from the water will work its way to all the gunk in the microwave making it much easier to clean.
Coffee too bitter to drink plain? Check this out: When making coffee (with grounds and a filter), add some salt to the grounds before you brew it. This helps make the coffee taste less bitter.
Salt not only helps remove the bitterness of coffee, it also helps take out the stale taste of the water in the tank.
If you like to make homemade lemonade but wish it was more naturally sweet, all you have to do is roast your lemons for 5-7 minutes before juicing them.
Roasting them brings out their natural sugars and tones down the tartness. You may not even need to add any sugar depending on your taste buds.