These are the most important lessons I learned while working in professional kitchens

It doesn’t matter whether you’ve worked in a Michelin-starred kitchen or fried chips at high speed in a beach bar: working in a professional kitchen will always teach you a few useful things that you can also apply at home. Top-level kitchen hacks, here they come.

Always clean the deep fryer immediately

If you arrived late, made the whipped-cream dispenser explode or accidentally poured away the stock, then cleaning the deep fryer was your job. And that’s an awful job. Trust the experience of someone who regularly saw whipped cream splatter against the extractor hood: do it as quickly as possible. When the frying oil is still lukewarm, it’s easier to drain the pan (the colder it gets, the more viscous the oil becomes) and wipe everything clean with a large piece of kitchen paper. Scrub with soda, dry with an old tea towel and you’re done! (And one more tip: when you clean the whipped-cream dispenser, check whether there’s still a cartridge in it.)

Hone your knives every time

Every once in a while, the knife sharpener would come to the restaurant, and then the first-aid kit also had to be topped up to the brim: razor-sharp knives. But in between those days of reckoning, you maintain your kitchen knife by honing it briefly before every use. That’s what the strange magic wand in your knife set is for, in case you were wondering. Honing prevents burrs and keeps the knife more or less sharp. (And you know: never put it in the dishwasher!)

A piece of non-slip kitchen paper

A smooth countertop, a smooth cutting board, a razor-sharp chef’s knife: a disaster waiting to happen. Prevent everything from sliding around by placing a damp piece of kitchen paper underneath your cutting board. If the countertop is a mess, throw away that soggy cloth and start again. Clean work surface, damp kitchen paper, clean cutting board on top (mind the color), and you can get back to the whole crate of cucumbers that need slicing, or the bucket of onions that need chopping.

Prepare, prepare, prepare

If you’re making AVG for four people, you generally don’t first peel, chop and lay everything out, and only then start cooking. No, it all happens somewhat simultaneously and in a bit of a muddle. But when you’re cooking for a large group, the preparations are crucial. Everything you can prepare in advance, you do beforehand. Including partially cooking the risotto, cooking the steaks sous vide and assembling the sauces. It turns out to be pretty useful to do that at home too when you want to impress with your cooking skills – that way you’re not frantically baking, frying, kneading and decorating everything at once while trying to chat with your guests in a relaxed manner.

Keep it simple, stupid

This is officially abbreviated to: KISS. It boils down to this: don’t make something when you don’t know exactly how to do it. No improvising and “we’ll see how it goes”; instead, adapt your menu to what you can do and what you know. That’s useful when a buffet for two hundred people has to be set up (will that even be allowed soon?), but also when you’re cooking for guests at home. No complicated molecular antics, please, but just a delicious risotto. Result: a relaxed cook who has everything under control. (The reality was different, by the way, because a kitchen team always tries to do something even better, more beautifully or faster, so those stress spots on the neck would have been there anyway.)

Also read:

• 15 tips & tricks from culinary school that you can use right away
• Come into the oven with us: culinary school in seven lessons
• Lotje learns to cook