Do you want to know the secret to making cooking simpler? Do you want to achieve perfection in the kitchen? These perfect food life hacks will help you do it!
If you think Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsey started out as the incarnation of pure perfection, you are wrong. They also had to spend countless hours studying, learning, testing, trying and failing in various aspects of the culinary arts. And they didn’t have a pool of endless cooking life hacks either – they had to work with their mentors and they had to make do with whatever they had at hand. Fortunately, you don’t have to become a celebrity chef and you don’t have to be perfect. However, our list of perfect cooking life hacks is here to help you improve your cooking skills and to make your life a lot simpler.
These perfect cooking life hacks are all about simplifying your time and efforts in the kitchen and about teaching you how to handle cooking the easy way. These perfect cooking hacks will help you maximize the time you spend trying to figure out how to hull your strawberries, how to preserve your egg mixture, how to peel your garlic faster, and so on. Now let’s take a look at our list of life hacks.
Keep Your Home Baked Cookies Fresh and Long-Lasting
Everybody hates hard, tasteless and bland cookies. If you want to preserve your home baked goodies for longer and make them taste the same amazing way as the day before, just place them in a container and put a slice of bread on top of them. The bread’s moisture will keep the cookies fresh and will preserve their perfect taste for a couple of days. Check out these cooking tips from Country Living for home baked chocolate and hazelnut cookies.
Use Bananas in Your Homemade Ice Cream
Are you a fan of home cooked ice cream? Here’s a cooking tip you should know – If you want to cook your own ice cream, just use frozen and mashed up banana slices. It’s healthy, it’s easy and it’s got the perfect creamy base for your home cooked dessert!
Use Dental Floss for Soft Foods
If you find it hard to cut soft foods like cakes, Swiss roles, cheese and so forth, you should definitely stop trying to get it right by using a kitchen knife. Here’s your perfect soft food cutter – a thread of dental floss! It will go straight through the soft texture without creating any messes. Just remember it next time you’re trying to cut through soft cheese and you’ll be able to serve perfectly cut slices to your guests.
Cook More on Sundays
We’ve all faced that nasty problem called “What to prepare for dinner on a weekday”. Here’s another one of our useful life hacks – cook more on Sundays. Just prepare several meals on Sunday and freeze them in your freezer. This way you’ll have a base for your weekday meals.
Use Frozen Herbs While Cooking
Instead of trying to throw fresh herbs into your meals each time, try out the frozen herbs trick. It’s super easy – just freeze some vegetable oil with herb leaves in your ice cube trays and use one cube each time you’re cooking! Neat and creative, isn’t it? It will not only save you time, but it will add that special taste and texture to your home cooked meals. Check out Serious Eats’ cooking hacks for frozen herbs.
Dry Your Herbs at Home
Speaking of herbs, you don’t need to wait days and days for them to dry out on their own. You can simply pop them in the microwave for around 30 seconds! Genius, right?
Use Lemon While Cooking Your Fish
Here’s your ultimate fish cooking life hack – in order to get that perfect taste use lemon slices for your fish. Don’t squeeze the lemon on top of the fish! Lay out several lemon slices under the fish and cook it this way. The lemon will add that perfect flavor and will keep the fish moist. And most of all – it will preserve it in one piece without the fear of breaking it apart. You can combine this cooking hack with All Recipes’ cooking tips for their lemon and rosemary salmon recipe.
How to Slice Tiny Cherry Tomatoes?
Have you ever had to go through the nuisance of cutting those tiny cherry tomatoes in half? Here’s your perfect tomato life hack – place the tomatoes in between two plates and cut them in half by pressing the second plate on top of them. Easy as pie!
Lemon-juicing Life Hack
Here’s one super easy cooking tip – juice your lemon the right way by rolling the lemon onto a flat surface before cutting it and squeezing its juice! This way you’ll be able to squeeze much more juice than before!
Garlic Peeling Cooking Tip
Peeling garlic can be a pain in your neck, especially if you’re running out of time and you have lots and lots of garlic cloves to peel. Instead of going through them particle by particle, just throw all of your garlic in a plastic container. Close the lid and shake the garlic. The cloves will break apart and most of them will peel off by themselves.
How to Cut Potatoes The Easy Way
If you’re trying to prepare the perfect potato recipe and you need to cut lots of potatoes at ones, just put the knife away. You can use an apple slicer – it will do the trick perfectly!
Genius Tip for Preserving Egg Whites
Some recipes require only egg yolks. In this case you probably throw the egg white away, because there’s no way to preserve in the fridge, right? Wrong! Here’s how to do it. Pour the egg whites in an ice cube tray and put them in the freezer. This way you’ll have preserved egg whites whenever you need them!
Cooking Hack for Brown Sugar
Brown sugar is bound to crumple and crystallize over time. In order to keep it fresh and fluffy store it in a plastic zip lock bag and put a few tiny marshmallows over it. They will do the trick for you.
Hulling Cherries and Pitting Strawberries
These two inevitable cooking preparations require lots of time, patience and will. They can also create an unbelievable mess. But here’s how to do it the easy way – use a straw to push through the cherries and the strawberries to remove the unwanted bits from the fruits. Neat, easy and perfect!
Now that you’ve learned all of these absolutely amazing and perfect cooking life hacks, it’s time to put them to practice. Check out these dessert recipes straight from Jamie Oliver’s cooking tips and tricks. Or try out some of your own favorite cooking recipes by using our cooking hacks.