Are you a home chef? Do you look forward to the time you spend in the kitchen, whipping up your newest concoction? Whether youre a veteran or a novice, whether youre the next at-home Rachel Ray or you cant tell a teaspoon from a tablespoon, everyone can use some handy tricks to make cooking easier.
Have you ever wondered why a recipe that says it takes an hour to make online ends up taking you an hour and a half in your own kitchen? Oftentimes its because the person who wrote that recipe knew some handy tips and tricks that you didnt. If you are ready to take your cooking skills to the next level, read on. We will teach you 45 amazingly simple and genius kitchen hacks that will transform the way you cook forever!
Bake bacon in the oven.
Ever wonder why the bacon you get at a restaurant is always evenly and consistently cooked with no annoying raw ends? Ever wonder why the middles dont get all crumbly or hard and overcooked? The difference is all in the cooking. Whereas most home chefs fry up bacon on the frying pan, most restaurant workers bake it in the oven. Try it out at 400 to 420 degrees Fahrenheit and be amazed!
Slice a lot of cherry tomatoes simultaneously.
Cherry tomatoes add a delicious splash of flavor and color to any dishbut slicing them in half is really difficult if you have to do it one at a time. But you dont! Not with this handy little kitchen hack. Have two plastic lids that are the same size? Good. Put a bunch of cherry tomatoes on one of the lids (have it so the inner part of the lid is facing up). Now, put the other lid on top to sandwich them inside. Hold the lid down, grab a knife, and cut through all of them at once. Pull off the lid, and all your cherry tomatoes will be sliced neatly and cleanly.
Make an orange candle.
Want to knock someones socks off at a dinner party or a date? This kitchen hack is for place settings, not for food preparation, but it still involves food. Instead of grabbing a candle and putting it on the dinner table, why not grab an orange instead?
Yes, oranges can be made into candles, and quite simply too. Start by slicing your orange in half. Do not slice through the part where the stem wasthat part will become your wick inside the orange, so you want to slice perpendicularly to that part. Next, remove the flesh from inside the orange, but be careful not to remove the part that sticks out inside where the stem used to connect. This becomes the orange wick. Now, pour a little oil into the orange half. Olive oil works great. Then use a lighter and light the wick. You will have an orange half acting as a candle, burning the oil.
You can get fancy with this by cutting the orange half with patterns edges. Or you can take the other half and remove the flesh from it as well, and then use it to cover the bottom half. Cut a hole on top so that the flame is uncovered. Make the whole fancy if you want. The orange candle looks beautiful, luminous and clever, and will impress anybody who eats with you.
Pancake patterning trick.
Drizzling pancake batter into whimsical patterns using an icing dispenser isnt the only pancake hack in our kitchen cabinet. Another easy one is cookie cutters, the same ones you use to make sugar cookies over the holidays. Simply place them on your frying pan, pour the batter inside the outlines, and watch as your pancakes rise in amazing shapes. Of course, they will largely be shaped like Christmas trees, snowmen, and gingerbread men, but this makes them the perfect holiday breakfast treat!
Oh yeah, and before we forget, you can totally do this with eggs too when youre cooking sunny-side up. Just pour them into the cookie cutters and watch as they shape perfectly (and whats arguably even better, cook evenly).
Save your guacamole from going brown.
Guacamole is delicious, but it can be a bit tricky to preserve. It goes brown and also changes flavor when it is exposed to oxygen. If you want to prevent this, you can put your leftover guacamole in a container, and then add a thin layer of water to the top. The water acts as a protective barrier, and prevents the guacamole from reacting with the oxygen in the air. Pour the water out of the container when you are ready to eat it. The guacamole will stay green and delicious.
While were at it, microwaving guacamole ruins it really fast. Whenever you have leftover Mexican food, try and store the guacamole separately so that you wont have any of it heating up and getting ruined in the microwave. If it is already with the rest of your food, scoop as much of it out as you can, heat up your food, and then put the guacamole back on top of it after you take it out of the microwave. This will keep it fresh, green and delicious.
Soften butter in minutes.
Youre getting ready for a dinner party, and youre finally getting everything out on the table. You realize then you forgot to pull the butter out of the fridge. You take it out, and of course its hard as a rock. But dinner is in two minutes! What do you do? Nobody likes cold butter that is impossible to cut. It turns out there is a perfect solution which allows you to soften your butter without melting it, and it only takes a couple of minutes. This is an easy way to make your dinner guests happy.
Just get a small glass and warm it up, then put it over top of the butter. You can heat up the glass by running warm water over it or by putting it in the microwave for a few seconds. The butter under the glass will quickly soften and will be just the right consistency to easily cut and spread. Voila!
Video Tutorial
Peel an orange with ease.
Laziness is no longer an excuse for not eating your fruit! Oranges are delicious, but lets face it, peeling them is a pain. But does it have to be? Not if you use this orange-peeling hack from Jewelpie.com. Put your orange down on a cutting board. Use a knife to slice off a thin bit from the end, and then do the same thing with the end opposite. Next, cut a perpendicular line. You want to go almost clean through the orange, but not all the way. Then you can pull both ends away from each other and stretch out the orange in a long strip. Then you can just grab each slice off the strip and enjoy!
Get those pesky eggshells out of your bowl.
This is practically a daily experience for anyone who does a look of cooking, especially baking. You crack your eggs into the bowl, cringing the whole time, because you just know they arent going to break evenly. Sure enough, a little piece of egg shell falls into the bowl and gets stuck in the egg white. You poke around for a full minute trying to get the pesky thing out of there.
There is an easier way! And it is incredibly simple. All you have to do is make your fingers wet, and try again. You will be amazed how well this works. The little egg shell bit should adhere right to your fingers and come out. While were at it, do you hate when bits of egg white run down the side of your bowl and drip all over the counter? Try putting the bowl at the edge of the counter and a trash can under it. Any whites that drip down will go into the trash bin and you will not have to clean it up.
Get corn off the cob easily and neatly.
Corn on the cob is delicious, but its not fun for everybody to eat. If you have braces, jaw issues, or you just dont enjoy getting all those corn-bits between your teeth, you might prefer to cut your corn off the cob. Of course, this is royal pain. In fact, odds are at some point in your life, you have avoided corn on the cob because you cant be bothered to cut it off, scrape it off your cutting board and into your bowl, and then pick up all the corn you missed that fell onto the counter, the sink or the floor.
Enter the Bundt cake pan! This is an easy way to catch all the corn you are cutting off the cob. Just put the cob in the center, standing it up on the protrusion, and cut downwards. The corn will all fall down into the pan. No corn on the counter, sink or floor. And you can just spoon it right out of the cake pan and into your bowl.
Peel a head of garlic in seconds.
It turns out there is a hack for peeling garlic that is every bit as simple as the hack for shucking corn. All you need is two bowls that are the same size. Put your head of garlic in one of the bowls, and then put the other bowl on top of it to create a closed container. Then simply shake the bowls really hard. In a minute or less, you can open the container back up and look inside. Assuming you shook it hard enough and long enough, you should see all the skins separated from the garlic cloves. Awesome!
DIY Instructions and Project Credit Diyncrafts
Keep your cookies moist with an apple wedge.
Nothings tastier than deliciously moist cookies right out of the oven. And nothings more distressing than those same cookies not being half as moist or delicious a few days later. If you bake cookies in large batches, you dont want to have to eat through them all in a few days, though. You want to make them last. Instead of putting them in the cookie jar, try storing them in Tupperware along with an apple wedge. The cookies will draw in moisture from the apple wedge and will keep a lot longer this way. If you are storing them for a while, you can always replace the apple wedge with a new one.
