For mashed potates, boil the spuds in their skins until tender keeps the starched together . Then peel while warm.Smash. Add warm milk then butter, season to taste.
For seasoning after cooking I’ll agree with you. When your cooking you need salt.
Unless you are cooking beans from dry [not canned] Those damned dry beans will no rehydrate and get tender unless you boil the bejesus out of them overnight. Cook the dried beans in unsalted water until mostly done then add the flavorings like smoked ham hocks or bacon, or sausage…
Commerically packaged chicken breasts are almost always too damn thick, with too much variation from the sides to the middle, to saute without overcooking much of it or leaving the innermost part unsafely underdone. A meat mallet is your friend – pound those suckers out to a uniform thickness (or thinness), and a brief acquaintance with a hot saute pan is all that’s required to have them nicely browned on the outside and cooked through without turning into something Goodyear would be proud of.
My family generally likes orzo, but just boiling it makes it a bit bland. Toasting the uncooked pasta in a dry skillet to brown it before boiling adds a nutty, toasted flavor that improves it significantly, in my opinion.
Always keep dried spaghetti, a couple cans of diced tomatoes, anchovies, capers, and Kalamata olives around. You never know when you might need Puttanesca.
I think salt is overused in cooking - it does sometimes just make things taste salty. I’ve used less than a kilo of added salt in cooking in total the last twenty years - of course a lot of the things I cook already contain either natural salt (for example fish) or have had it added in the manufacturing process (for example bacon), and it’s present in some of the ingredients I sometimes use (Bovril, soy sauce), but I still think it’s used too liberally in popular cooking.
But then, I throw away the little blue salt packet in my Salt-n-Shake crisps and eat them completely unsalted; they taste of… potato!
A guy I used to work with told me that his mother started the kids on salad by dressing it with condensed milk. I thought it sounded terrible until one day he made up some shredded lettuce, carrot and cabbage with condensed milk and it was pretty good. Apparently his mother gradually added other flavours and reduced the condensed milk until everyone was a salad fan.
Salt haters: try sea salt. I buy something called Celtic Sea Salt; it’s gray and moist and is very flavorful–almost on its own. The best use for it is to add it to foods after cooking, but I also throw it in things while I’m cooking. I use about twice as much as I ever did the regular iodized salt (which I loathe) and EVERYTHING tastes better.
Chop walnuts and add them to waffles right after you pour the batter in the waffle iron (especially Belgian waffles). They enhance the taste of the waffles, and because they’re on top, they get all toasty and delicious.
You can make oat flour, which also makes a wonderful coating for chicken (which I oven-fry). Just whirr up regular rolled oats in the food processor or blender until it looks like flour. Better for you than bleached white wheat flour. I make my Belgian waffles with oat flour (and nuts; see above) and they are FABULOUS.
I thought I was the only person who felt like this. For no reason that I can recall I stopped putting salt on meals when I was a teenager. I never salt anything I cook (although I do use soy sauce, fish sauce, shrimp paste, anchovies etc).
I find that some brands of bread (usually white) taste like salt licks to me. I pick up the taste in the oddest things but when I check the ingredients I am right.
Dissolve your cornstarch to water before you add it to your gravy. Otherwise you get some nasty lumps.
To tell if a steak is done to your liking, press on your steak, and see if it feels like these parts of your hand:
[ul]
[li]The part of your hand in the middle where the lines come together = well done[/li][li]The bulge in your hand at the base of the thumb = rare[/li][/ul]
Use tongs instead of forks/knives to turn meat on the grill or when you’re sauteing. Poking holes in meat tends to let out a lot of moisture when it’s cooking.
Cook vegetables in broth- it gives them a fair amount of flavor without adding much fat at all.
Fun! I learned it by the feel of various parts of my face, though:
- Rare: center of your cheek
- Medium: the very end of your nose
- Well done: the center of your brow ridge (between your eyebrows)
Put a pinch of sugar in tomato sauces to reduce acidity.
I don’t get this one. First, why would you use corn starch? Second, flour is added to the drippings, not to the liquid. After the roux is ready, water/stock is added, and it can be whisked smooth easily.
Well, not necessarily - it’s excellent to thicken stews. It also makes a clearer sauce than using flour.
Add instant hot chocolate mix to your waffles for easy Choco-waffles!
About half a package of instant mix per portion of batter going in to the wafflemaker does the trick.
Not all gravy is of the Thanksgiving variety. You can have asian style gravy over stir fry, tomato based gravy over pasta etc.
Always keep chicken stock and lemons around. When something calls for water, automatically at least consider using stock, it adds teriffic flavour. When something seems dull, consider brightening it up with some fresh lemon.
Learn about the 5 mother sauces. With this basic knowledge, you can whip up almost any sauce you might need with whatever is in your pantry to go with your food.
I’m sure I’ll think of more later… this thead is fun!
Also, sometimes you simply screw up and add too much liquid to your roux. One quick fix is to make a slurry (as the water-starch/flour concoction is known) and whisk that into the sauce.
I use slurries often enough in my cooking (especially in stews, as Missy2U indicates), and it is a tip well worth repeating.
Also, riffing on the “cook vegetables in broth” suggestion, cooking rice in broth works awesomely well, too.
A good thickener for soups/stews is garlic-flavored instant mashed potatoes.
Use butter. Not margarine, not cooking spray, not lard. Butter. Use it often.
When the bell goes off, give it three more minutes.
Generally agreed, but lard has many important uses that butter just won’t do for (fluffy biscuits for one, and as a flavor base for many ethnic dishes).