"Season, season, season. I am gobsmacked at how people will sometimes proudly proclaim to me that they cook with no salt. Aah, that’s why your food tastes like cardboard."
"Sometimes when a dish is missing something, it’s not more salt but something acidic like lemon juice. Vinegar can also add a lot"
"The thing I learned it, a good sharp kitchen knife makes cooking more fun and even if you think your knife is sharp enough it probably isn’t. Made all the difference for me."
"Cooking you can pretty much do with your heart, but baking recipes are architectural plans and every ingredient is a load bearing structure. You can make changes, but you better know what you are doing"
"Alton Brown said it best when it comes to scrambled eggs (and the same is 100% true for bacon); if it looks cooked in the pan, it will be over cooked on the plate. That was a huge one for me."
"Clean as you go. Nothing worse than cooking a lovely meal and having a giant sink of dishes w waiting for you. I make sure I have an empty dishwasher before I start cooking and then every dish I dirty while cooking goes straight into the dishwasher. Once we are done eating the only plates to clean are the ones we ate off and any pots that need a scrub. It takes so much pressure off to clean as you go."
"Wear an apron. So many cool t-shirts ruined."
"Just because you chopped all those onions (garlic, herbs, etc.), doesn’t mean they all have to go into the dish."
"READ THE COMMENTS of the recipe if you find it online. Of course you have to sift through the people who think half n half is spicy, buuuut there’s usually a lot of good feedback."
"A falling knife has no handle"
"Gather all your ingredients before you begin. Read all the directions before you begin."
"Smash the garlic. It makes peeling and cutting it way easier/faster. Plus you get to smash the garlic. 10/10"
"Don’t whisk eggs in a circle, whisk them in a back and forth motion. I can still hear chef saying “You’re chasing the eggs around the bowl!” when we did it wrong."
"If you’re going to be cutting butter into some kind of pastry (scones, pie crust, etc) **freeze the stick of butter and grate it**. It makes everything SO much easier. I’ll never ever go back to the older method of cubing the butter and then endlessly trying to cut it into smaller pieces etc. Plus doing that takes so long half the butter melts. Using the grated butter means I only have to spend about a minute mixing everything together so it’s much easier to avoid overworking the dough. Puffy scones, flaky crusts."
"I grew up in Southern California and have owned a catering business. My greatest failure in the kitchen was always that I simply could NOT make corn tortillas. They were awful no matter what I tried. Then I found an article online that mentioned the masa being the consistency of play-doh. 80’s kid lightbulb went off in my brain, and now I make tortillas better than my Mexican mother in law."
"Don’t crowd the pan."
"Use freshly grind pepper and not the powder. It’s true in general that freshly grind spices taste better (and/or smell better) but for pepper it is a difference between night and day."
"If you want the best fried mushrooms, fry them without any butter or oil. There is so much liquid in mushrooms, that the won’t burn for quite some time. Frying them like that, makes them sort of hyper concentrated. Once all the water has cooked of, add butter. They will suck up all that flavor."
"Let the stainless heat up before putting ANYTHING in it."
"Never cook something for the first time for an event. Try that new recipe out ahead of time."
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There is no such thing as grind pepper, grind is a verb, its what you do to pepper.
Once you have GROUND the pepper it becomes GROUND pepper
No. Salt is like fairy dust. It makes everything just... Magical.
I agree that not everything needs salt, because some ingredients are normally salty (cheese, processed meats), but salt is a taste enhancer, so it isn't used all by itself to make seawater. Plus, your body NEEDS salt, to survive. Historically, salt tablets were prescribed to any working class person for sweating, now we drink sport drinks.
#19 for some dishes, you need to slowly heat them in a pan and turn up the heat, putting them in already hot cookware is not always the best idea
I think they mean specifically with Stainless Steel. If you heat the Stainless pan up first food is less likely to stick to it. Hot pan + cold food = no stick. If you need to heat gradually go with non stick or ceramic coated.