Cooking

Clean as you go, don't just leave it all for the end. Onions are sauteing and you're done chopping everything? Good, wash your cutting board and knife and clean up any messes before the next step. Sausage is done browning and you're dumping it in with the onions for a minute with the garlic and some herbs? Great, wash that pan and spoon and set it down to dry and wipe up all the oil splashes.

Just makes clean up so much easier after you've eaten and you're much more efficiently using your time.

Adding Knorr brand Caldo de Tomate to your rice cooker turns your plain old rice into Spanish rice. Blew my mind when I tried it.

Butter makes everything better

Mine is to salt or season from up high.

@PoodleDoodle

• when dicing onions cut radially first, then slice across, it saves you that weird half slice that's traditionally used for dicing onions.

• I use cast iron for nearly everything, it survives a hundred years because it's bulletproof not because it's gingerly handled every time it's removed from it's velvet case. People dragged them around on Chuck wagons, you will not kill it with soap. Worst case it gets a little sticky and now you need to cook some bacon in it.

• A splash of acid in your soup or stew at the end really wakes it up.

• Never cook rice without at least a couple bay leaves. Ideally you'll cook it in chicken stock as well, add flavour where you can.

• The best chicken stock in a jar is Better Than Bullion. Hands down. No contest.

• With a splash of oil you can cook eggs even in a sticky cast iron pan.

• Always use hand protection of some kind with a mandolin. I've never seen a non-pro chef go without and not fuck up their hand. Even pros lose the tips of their fingers sometimes too.

• If you want to recreate movie theater popcorn at home you need the following things:
  A whirlypop or other stovetop cooker
  Coconut oil, refined
  Popcorn kernels, quality varies, find a good brand
  Fine salt
  "Popcorn oil" - this is butter flavored oil sold next to the kernels

Here's what you do, set up a bowl to dump your popcorn in, throw some salt in the whirlypop with a spoon of coconut oil, and just a tiny glug of the popcorn oil, not much just a tad. Add your kernels, crank the heat to high and start cranking. Do. Not. Stop. The popcorn will begin to pop after an interminable wait. Keep cranking until it either gets hard to crank or the popping slows down significantly. Then quickly dump your popcorn into the waiting bowl. Do not add salt, you already did this, the fine salt will be well distributed this way. Add a bit of popcorn oil. Shake the bowl a bit to distribute, add more if desired etc. Then enjoy your movie theater popcorn.

It took me years to work out how to do it without the Naks oil, which I bought from a local popcorn shop for awhile.

When slow cooking a roast lay it on a bed of potatoes or whatever other sides you want, fill the water to the top of the veggies (or taters) then soak the roast in your sauce of choice. Gravity and heat will help the sauce work into the veggies giving them a nice flavor. The roast pretty much always comes out perfectly moist and you get amazing veggies out of the deal.

This one is a little bit of a hot take, but bottled lemon or lime juice is good for consistency. While fresh will most certainly be better, you may inadvertently juice a bad lemon/lime and potentially ruin a dish. Bottled juices can last a bit longer in the fridge.

deglazing. it's when you use an acid to pull all the glaze off the bottom of a pan. it flavors the dish and makes cleaning your pan easier.

rice vinegar and red or white wines are favorites

Use a piping bag to fill muffin tins/cupcakes. Saves so much mess and crumpled paper.

Grilled cheese hack: assemble the sandwich open-faced on a baking sheet and place under the broiler for a few minutes until the cheese is melted and bubbling and slightly browned, then close it up and cook it like normal in a covered skillet on medium heat with butter. The cheese will be completely melted and (more importantly) it will stay melted while you're actually eating the sandwich, and the browning on the cheese adds a big flavor component.

I used to make them the normal way just in a skillet, and even if the cheese was just barely melted it would cool off and re-solidify before I started eating it. And often I would burn the crust just trying to get the cheese melted.

Get a mandolin for cutting veggies. OMG, it's so quick and easy!

Always salt your pasta water to the equivalent of sea water salty. It'll make your pasta taste much better.

Not really a hack but just something important, always remember to account for how much salt you need if you don't have the recipes specific type of salt because different salt types have different shapes and sizes

I'm a big fan of frozen herbs, frozen cubes of garlic save a ton of time breaking open cloves, frozen basil still has that fresh taste and smell relative to dried.

If you make pizza in a home oven, baking steel is a game changer. It gets nice and hot and makes your crust crispy. Like a pizza stone but better.

If you have a blender, try making your own almond milk for a fraction of the cost. It's easy.

Stop mincing garlic and just get a fucking microplane. Thank you Rachel Ray.