15 Useful Cooking Tips

We all appreciate cooking tips that make our lives in the kitchen easier. These tips can relate to food preparation, storage or even buying. Entire books exist based on cooking tips alone!

If you want to make things run smoother in the kitchen, why not try a few of the cooking tips given below?

Food Storage Tips

- Protect your fridge by laying newspaper on the shelves. This will catch any drips and is easy to remove, complete with crumbs and other debris.

- Wrap bunches of celery in tinfoil as soon as you get home from the market. The foil maintains the crispness of the celery and is reusable.

- Store tomatoes at room temperature to enhance the flavor. Chilling them will simply diminish that fresh taste that we all love.

- To ripen green fruit quickly, try putting it in a bag with already ripe fruit. The latter will cause the first to ripen faster than if it were on its own.

- Avoid storing potatoes and onions together as they cause a chemical reaction in each other that results in faster decomposition.

- Potatoes and other starchy roots should not be kept in the fridge as the starch will turn to sugar, ruining the taste of the vegetable.

Food Preparation Cooking Tips

- Keep your onions in the freezer. When you go to cut them, the fumes won't make your eyes tear up and sting. You could also try peeling and cutting fresh onions under running water as this also reduces the eye-irritating fumes.

- To quickly and easily peel boiled potatoes, transfer immediately from the hot water to a bowl of ice water. The peels will slip right off without any problems.

- Prevent garlic from sticking to the knife while mincing it by sprinkling a bit of salt over the cloves before starting to cut.

- Remove nasty odors like onions and garlic from your hands by simply rinsing under running water, with a stainless steel knife blade held between your hands. This sounds silly, but it works!

- Stop seeds from getting into your food. When squeezing the juice manually from a lime or a lemon, just hold your other hand under the cut fruit, catching the seeds and allowing the juice to run through.

Food Cooking Tips

- Heat oil in a frying pan before adding food. This allows the oil to heat evenly and will cook the food more evenly as well.

- To cook chicken in a hurry, try frying it for a couple of minutes in a frying pan to brown it, then finish off in the microwave. It cooks quickly, but with the flavor of pan-fried.

- Always pre-heat your oven before putting food in to bake. Skipping this step results in soggy, undercooked food.

These cooking tips are all useful, but they are just a few of the millions of cooking tips available. Do a search online and save the most useful ones. You can also make a little cooking tip booklet to give to friends and family as a gift item.