Grocery Shopping Tips from Professional Chefs

Making a grocery list? First, ask a few professional chefs for advice. Oh, wait: we’ve already done that. List, bag, cart token: LET’S GO!

Grocery Shopping Tips from Professional Chefs

Because chefs know better than anyone how to approach your kitchen. Whether it’s about buying the best salmon, tips to make you better in the kitchen or secret kitchen weapons: chefs to the rescue!

Buy frozen vegetables

Frozen vegetables are perfectly fine. No, you shouldn’t take those little carrots and peas, but for everything else: perfectly fine. Frozen peas can go into pretty much anything. Plus: handy if you have an injury or a bruise.

Meat is a luxury

Eating meat every day is still normal for many people. But of course it isn’t: meat is a luxury, when you look at the eating habits of your parents and grandparents. So buy less meat, try fish for once or – shocking – cook a vegetarian meal.

Superfoods? Forget it

Does the supermarket sell superfoods? Just leave them in the shop. Not because they’re bad for you, but because they’re ridiculously expensive.

Legumes

Handy to have in the pantry: dried legumes. Chickpeas, lentils, black beans—they last practically forever and are incredibly versatile. Soak them overnight, so you can cook them quickly the next day. Extremely nutritious and extremely cheap: a great deal.

Tomatoes: fresh and canned

Buy fresh tomatoes in the right season, but if you want to make tomato soup or tomato sauce and it happens not to be autumn, choose canned tomatoes. Make sure you buy cans with no added sugar or salt, just one hundred percent tomatoes.

Buy forgotten vegetables

Not those trendy vegetables that appear on every menu, but in every country certain vegetables are overlooked. Think: cabbage, turnips, cauliflower, carrots. Cheap, incredibly nutritious and also: long-lasting. Find some good vegetarian recipes to turn them into something delicious, and you’ll eat like a king on a beggar’s budget.

Roasting chicken, a great buy

With one chicken, if you’re reasonably handy, you can get two or three meals. Use the bones to make stock for delicious chicken soup, and the fat from the roasted chicken is great for frying. For example, make butter-baked chicken. Bonus: the pan juices baste the fluffy potatoes and make an amazing gravy.

Onions

We can keep this short: they’re cheap, they keep for a long time (if you store them somewhere cool and dry) and they make almost every meal tastier. Advice: buy a bag of onions.

Make your own coffee

Do you like Starbucks coffee? Your own coffee is much better. Buy good coffee and make a cup at home before you have to catch the train. Put it in a thermos, then laugh at everyone who buys a paper cup of coffee on the go for far too much money. Did you know that coffee from any coffee shop is two thousand percent (!) more expensive than what you make at home?

Skip the chips and cookies

We spend too much money on food that isn’t healthy. So the chef’s advice: simply skip those aisles with chips and cookies. Don’t drive your cart past them, and you won’t be tempted to buy them either.

Preferably buy unprocessed meat

If you buy meat, buy unprocessed meat. Steak, chicken breast, all perfectly fine. But slavinken and sausages are processed, cut, seasoned and contain all kinds of additives. Learning to make your own sausages is a very good investment!

Always have flour at home

You should always have a bag of flour in the cupboard. No baking mix or anything like that, just flour. Because with it, you can make anything you want. Add some baking powder and you have self-rising flour. Pancake mix? Flour! Cookie mix? Flour! Thickening sauce? You guessed it. Tip: do watch out for flour moths in your flour (I speak from experience..)

Two pieces of fruit

Eating more fruit works best when you have a full fruit bowl in a central spot in the house. Buy seasonal fruit and see if you can buy it as locally as possible. Strawberries from South Africa aren’t sustainable, but apples from the Betuwe are.

Potatoes

Buy a large bag of potatoes, store them somewhere cool and dry, and simply leave the soil and dust on them. That way, they’ll keep for a long time.

Baking soda

And last but not least: always make sure you have baking soda at home. The miracle product in the kitchen for cleaning, baking extra crispy potatoes, making the chewiest chocolate chip cookies and making your meat wonderfully tender.

Read also:

• It’s scientifically proven: you buy healthier groceries with a shopping cart
• Caught! Woman ‘forgets’ to scan more than 300 euros’ worth of groceries
• How to keep your groceries fresh 10 times longer