Kitchen Tips
Contents
Cooking thoroughly
If you have a dish you want to make sure is cooked thoroughly, perhaps because it includes eggs or meat, put a lid on for enough time for everything under the lid to reach 165°F, 75°C, the pasteurization temperature. Without a lid, the top is never nearly as hot as the bottom of cooking food unless it's very liquid.
Flavor with spices
Heat oil to medium in a pan, then add spices and toast them for half a minute before adding wet ingredients. This will infuse the oil with the flavor of the spices, which will help ensure every bite is flavorful since oil sits on the outside of the food. Great for cumin, caraway seeds, coriander, star anise, cardamom, etc.
Maintain knives
To keep knives sharp between sharpening, be sure to clean and dry them immediately after using. Never put them in an automatic dishwasher, never leave them soaking in water. Never cut on slate, granite, or glass, which are all harder than steel.
Use the back of the knife, not the sharp edge, to scrape food off a cutting board. This I learned by watching Jeff Smith on The Frugal Gourmet.
Store knives in a knife rack where the edge doesn't hit any other metal.
Slice, dice, or mince an onion
I slice both ends off a whole onion; halve longitudinally; remove skins, surgically slicing more of ends if necessary; put each half face down. Then...
- If slicing, cut latitudinally, always with a slicing motion, using knuckles of opposite hand as a guide, never raising blade more than millimeters above the onion so as not to slice knuckles.
- If dicing, cut a few slices longitudinally, holding onion-half together, then cut a few slices latitudinally, following safety guidelines above.
- If mincing, follow dicing directions but with more closely spaced slices, then continue mincing pieces until their as small as you desire.
