When you first start cooking, you’ll probably focus more on the basic skills that will serve as your foundation across all sorts of recipes. Once you establish these, though, you may want to learn some small actions to enhance how you handle food and make the process easier. These are some useful kitchen tricks you should know that can improve your cooking experiences.
Use Salt When Cooking Pasta
To get stiff pasta from a box into a softer form, you need to place it in boiling water for a short amount of time. Although this step doesn’t involve adding any sauce yet, you should season the boiling water with some salt. Prior to putting the pasta in the pot, dissolve about one or two tablespoons of salt in the water. Wait until it’s fully mixed in, and then pour in the pasta. This subtle but useful kitchen trick will enhance the flavor of the pasta, making your final dish taste better overall.
Utilize a Thermometer for Meat
Whether your recipe calls for grilling or roasting, it can often be hard to tell when meat is finished cooking. The outside may appear well-browned, but once you cut into it, you may find that it is more raw or cold than you would like. Luckily, you can take the guesswork out of cooking meat by utilizing an oven thermometer. You can simply stick this in your meat as it goes into the oven. When you want to check on its progress, you can look at the thermometer’s reading and instantly know the temperature at the center of your meat.
Test Your Knife’s Sharpness
A sharp knife is the core of your kitchen tool arsenal. If it becomes blunt, you can’t cut your ingredients into your desired pieces safely. However, it’s hard to tell if your knife is sharp just by looking at it. To save time and prevent accidents, you can test your knife’s sharpness every so often before you begin preparing food. There are a couple of ways to do this. You can either try slicing through a smooth, round ingredient, such as a tomato, or attempt to cut a piece of paper while you hold it in the air. When a knife can glide effortlessly through these, you know it’s in good shape. If it can’t cut them, you’ll want to spend some time sharpening.