The subreddit r/foodhacks is full of tips and tricks that can make your time in the kitchen much more efficient. Most importantly, the unorthodox techniques teach you creative thinking and problem-solving, two skills that help turn even the simplest meals into something extraordinary. For example, before recycling jars of pesto, mayonnaise, tomato paste, mustard, and such, you can add oil and give it a vigorous shake. This creates the base for a “delicious dressing while ensuring you’ve got the last bits out”, says Samantha Harvey, the head chef at the Laundry in Brixton, London. Equally effectively, you can put any old rinds or hardened cheese ends in milk for a day before using them to create an intensively cheesy béchamel sauce. These are your options, he says: you’ll either end up not needing to grate so much cheese into a mornay sauce for fish or on macaroni cheese, or “you’ll end up with a more luxurious mac’n’cheese”. Toft’s “biggie” is compound stock butter: three or four chicken stock cubes – “beef is too intense” – whisked into a block of softened butter, then rolled, refrigerated, sliced into coins, and frozen to create instantly deployable nuggets of fat and flavor: “Stir them into a sauce, bang into a tray with roast potatoes, over steamed veg, whatever.” Leafier vegetable dishes aren’t very good candidates for reheating. “With some, you end up with mush,” says Mayur Patel, the co-founder of Bundobust. But meat- or pulse-based soups, stews, curries, ragus, and even some hardier salads retain their texture and often develop far punchier, more cohesive flavors after a period in the freezer or 24 hours in the fridge. The science of this unexpected bonus – how flavor molecules slowly disperse, or how calcium receptors are activated on your tongue – is complex, but the phenomenon is so self-evident that the Japanese word kokumi is used to describe the greater complexity many cooked foods exhibit when reheated next day. Another good steer, from Ben Mulock, the executive chef at Balans in London, is to puree any veg you stuffed under your roasting joint as aromatics (onion, carrots, celery), and blend that puree into your gravy “to give it body and flavor”. This, according to him, should largely remove the need to use thickening flour, the common cause of lumpy gravy. There are several ways you can start incorporating it. James Simpson, the co-founder and chef at Owt in Leeds, likes to enhance pasta, “especially with tomato-based sauces”, ratatouille, braised pork, or roast chicken with a few strokes of very finely grated lemon zest. It gives dishes a subtle brightness. “Salt to sweet baking is like bay leaves in cooking,” says Lungi Mhlanga, the owner of a doughnut cafe, Treats Club London. “You’re not supposed to know it’s there, but when it’s not, you notice.” Increasingly, baking recipes include salt to foreground flavors of chocolate or vanilla, and Mhlanga considers it essential for French toast, to prevent it from becoming cloyingly sweet. It may seem counterintuitive, says King, but a sprinkle of sea salt on many desserts creates “little explosions” of heightened flavor. Anything with chocolate, caramel, meringue, nuts, and even some fruits can become a valid target! For more game-changing tips, fire up our older publication on r/foodhacks. Follow Bored Panda on Google News! Follow us on Flipboard.com/@boredpanda! Please use high-res photos without watermarks Ooops! Your image is too large, maximum file size is 8 MB.
