| Heat Up The Kitchen With These Useful Tips By Double Door Refrigerators January 30 ,2012 Have you always wanted to become a better cook? There are lots of tips and ideas on how to improve your technique in cooking. Learning how to cook better and to enjoy it more can improve the quality of life for you and your family. Read this article for some neat suggestions that cooks of all experience levels can use. A great cooking tip is to consider staying away from store bought seasonings. This is especially important because not only can they be extremely expensive but they might also contain large amounts of sodium which is never good for your health. Consider making your own spices or adding different foods to give your food a great taste. Cook biscuits on a stick! You can use the dough from canned biscuits or homemade to make improvised bread over a campfire. Just stretch the dough out in to a thick string and wrap it around the end of a stick. Bake it slowly over the coals of a campfire just like you were roasting a marshmallow! When you open up a can of fruit cocktail and drain the juice off do not pour it down the sink! Save that juice in a cup and freeze for when you are baking. It is great to use in a recipe instead of water for some extra flavor in your goods. If it's all you can do on a weeknight is to pick up the phone and order a pizza, try preparing a week's worth of meals on the weekend. It is worth spending a little time on the weekend to make weeknight meals a breeze. To make it even easier, find any number of new cookbooks, shows, or blogs that have pre-prepared shopping lists and menus for a week of make-ahead meals. Do not feel as though you must follow every recipe to the letter. While cook times and techniques are less flexible, you can often leave out ingredients that you don't like, especially spices or other non-essential ingredients. You can also add ingredients that you think will be more pleasing to your or your family's palates. When roasting a chicken or turkey, maximize the flavor and juiciness by stuffing the cavity with halved or quartered lemons, onions, shallots, garlic cloves or oranges. These foods will add a great, subtle flavor to the meat while providing extra moisture as they roast in the oven. Simply remove the items from the cavity prior to carving the bird. Recipes are made to be guidelines for creating dishes you will enjoy. You do not have to specifically follow them if there is an ingredient that you would like to add or take away. You should feel free to be creative and experiment with the recipes you select. When browning or sautéing foods, make sure that you do not overcrowd the pan. Rather than creating a luscious, browned crust on your foods, overcrowding results in steaming. Try cooking the food in smaller batches or using two pans instead of cramming too much into a single pan or skillet. If you are a horrible cook, try a crock pot. Getting used to crock pot cooking is easy, hard to mess up and there are tons of books and articles on how to use a crock pot. Crock pot cooking is almost fool proof and is very helpful for a busy family. To keep your burgers flat, indent the middle of the burger with your thumb, nearly leaving a hole, before frying or grilling the patties. As the meat draws up and shrinks while cooking, the indentation will close itself, leaving you with flat burgers instead of small patties with extra thick middles. If you're cooking with cast-iron pots and pans - never clean with soap, unless you want to lose its non-stick properties! Instead, use a paste of salt and water to scour the pan, if needed, or boil some water in the pot or pan to loosen stuck-on foods. Remove the remaining residue with a paper towel, and rub on a thin layer of oil before storing. A quick way to stop your fruits and vegetables from browning before using. When the air hits a freshly peeled apple or potato, the fruit or vegetable will begin to turn brown. Placing the freshly peeled fruit or vegetable in a bath of cold lightly salted water will help the fruit or vegetable retain its color. It is a good idea to cook your green vegetables in boiling hot water. If you place the veggies in cold water and wait for it to come to a boil you will lose a lot of the green color because the chlorophyll in them will leech into the water. Cooking made easier! Make soup stock in large quantities and put them in freezer safe containers to freeze for next time you need stock. This takes a lot of the work out of making homemade soup! Some people even think broth and sauce tastes better, after it is frozen. Make sure that you understand the conversions for substituting dried herbs for fresh in a recipe, and vice-versa. While some herbs, including basil, lose a bit of flavor during the drying process, the flavors of herbs like oregano actually intensify. If you are unsure how much of an herb to use, start with small amounts and gradually add more. When you open a can of tomato paste for just a spoonful and are wondering what to do with the rest, place dollops on a parchment-lined cookie sheet, and stick the sheet in the freezer. When the blobs of paste are frozen solid, transfer them to a freezer bag. You can then pull out just enough tomato paste for your next few recipes, without wasting partial cans. as you can see, learning to be a better cook is not that difficult. You do not need to be a chef at a 4-star restaurant in order to cook like one. Try some of these ideas in this article, and you will be impressed by how much you can improve your cooking technique. Your family will look forward to each meal that you make! |
