8 kitchen hacks borrowed from top chefs
Always handy: when professionals share their tips, so you can be better prepared. With these eight tips, you can fire up your cooking every day. Make the most of them!
Cooking at home is really different from cooking in a restaurant. You only have to satisfy one, two or three guests, while a professional chef has one order after another coming in. And while you only have to make one dish for your menu, a chef has to know the entire menu by heart. With the insider tips from these professional cooks, you can take your everyday meals to restaurant level—and who wouldn’t want that?
Develop your knife skills
Want to cut quickly and neatly? Use the claw grip. Hold your hand so that your fingertips are hidden behind your palm, and use it to hold the vegetable you want to cut. Your knife moves against your knuckles, but won’t chop off any joints or fingernails. Practice, practice, practice!
No crying
If you put your onions in ice water for ten minutes before cutting them, your eyes won’t water.
Speed
Want to cut vegetables faster? Use a mandoline, an extremely sharp slicer that you can run cucumber, beetroot and carrot over to cut them into thin slices. Please use the protective guard that comes with the mandoline, otherwise it may cost you your fingertips.
Don’t be stingy with salt and pepper
Season the meat with salt and pepper just before you start frying it. That way, the meat stays juicy. If you season it with salt and pepper hours in advance, it will actually become dry.
Try something different
Try using ingredients in a different way. If you’ve never put a sweet potato through your juicer, you have no idea that the juice is sweet and creamy. Absolutely delicious in a dessert, and also packed with vitamins A and B, as well as carotene.
Garnish your dishes
Impress your guests by decorating dishes, for example by sprinkling some green leaves over the dish. These could be microgreens, such as pea shoots, but you can also use ingredients from the dish itself, such as fresh herbs or spices, to decorate your plate.
Blend like a pro
Put the liquid ingredients in the blender first—water, juice or stock—and then add the rest, namely the vegetables and fruit. This means the blender motor doesn’t have to work as hard, and everything gets puréed more evenly. If you do it this way, your blender will last longer and you’ll get beautiful smoothies and soups.
Turn up the heat!
Don’t be afraid of heat! If you want to sear a steak, you need to turn up the heat on your stove. If you don’t cook that steak or chicken in a searing-hot pan, you’ll never get that Maillard reaction. Also make sure you don’t overcrowd a frying pan while cooking, because that cools the pan down too much and won’t produce a good result either.’
Also read:
- Recipe: white chocolate and speculoos cheesecake
- 17 idiotic orders—seriously, it can get even crazier
- 8 things you’re doing wrong in the kitchen, according to real chefs
