We’re just going to cut right to the chase: we love cooking and we love cooking hacks. We’ve rounded up a few that we consider pure genius. Let’s not waste a second more!
If you’re making a delicious, fresh salad and find that you need to dice a lot of soft things like avocados or hard-boiled eggs and you don’t have the proper tool, you can simply place a metal cooling rack over a bowl, then find a flat metal spatula to push foods through the rack and dice perfectly uniformed pieces.
Always (always, always) add some mustard to your mac and cheese, any kind of mustard you prefer. You won’t taste the mustard, but it will add some tang and depth to your dish. You won’t regret it.
Rolling pie dough in the summer heat? Make sure you’ve had some vodka chilling in the freezer to use as a rolling pin. This will, of course, flatten your dough, but it will also keep it cool while you work with it.
Bakers, if you’re baking something that needs to have a flaky crust such as a pie, biscuits, croissants, or cookies, freeze your butter then grate it, freeze your flour, and even freeze your mixing bowl to ensure you get the best baked good results.
Spray your measuring cups and spoons with cooking oil before measuring sticky ingredients. This way whatever sticky substance you’re measuring will slide right off.
The next time you’re fixing something starchy like pasta, rice, or potatoes, try cooking it in stock versus water to add some extra flavor.
The next time you use up a stick of butter, don’t throw the paper away. Instead, hold onto it and the next time you need to grease a cookie sheet or loaf pan, just use what butter is still on the butter paper, and then throw it away.
You can’t have a good pie without a pie crust, and what makes for the best pie crust? Cookies. For any pie you may be whipping up, there is a delightful cookie crust that can be made. You can also use this as an opportunity to get super creative and incorporate some new flavors into your desserts.
If you plan on baking some cinnamon rolls this fall, and we hope you are, we’ve found that the easiest way to slice our rolls before placing them on the cooking sheet and being placed in the oven is to use unflavored dental floss. (This is also great for cheeses!)