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cooking tips

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10 bad kitchen habits you need to break now

We all make mistakes in the kitchen — especially when we’re just starting out. But great cooks learn to be great by learning from their mistakes. Whether you’re a seasoned professional chef or a 20-something try-hard, if you’ve picked up any of these bad habits in the kitchen ditch them right now! Your cooking is suffering and you might not even know it. 1. Your knives are always dull When you’re using a dull knife, you actually increase your risk of getting injured. A sharp knife easily slices through anything, but a dull blade needs some force. This means it’s more likely to slip out of your hand and cut you — possibly seriously. If you don’t know how to properly sharpen a knife, no worries. You can get it done by a professional relatively cheaply. Once sharp, remember to store them with their blades protected in knife guards. Never…

Alton Brown shares genius tip for cooking steak

Alton Brown is known for his quirky personality and kooky — yet incredibly helpful — cooking tips. So when he posted a picture of a steak covered in mayonnaise to his Instagram account, fans knew it was worth looking into. (Remember when he told us to cook meatballs in an egg carton? Or how about juice a watermelon with an immersion blender?) Brown captioned the photo: “I didn’t have any oil or butter so..” https://www.instagram.com/p/Bn45Aa-HXwX/ It turns out that coating meat with mayo is actually nothing new to savvy chefs of the world. After all, mayonnaise is just eggs and oil, so the condiment can actually add more flavor to steaks and seafood than olive oil can do alone. This trick has also been used by grilled cheese masters to develop a crispier exterior. They mayo actually raises the smoking point, so the sandwich can be kept on the griddle longer, allowing…

“How to Taste” handbook is a game changer for home cooks

Perhaps the best handbooks are the ones we didn’t know we needed. If you’ve ever wondered why your dinner turned into a disaster, or you think salt is the savior of all your culinary problems, Here to Taste ($17.99, 240 pages) is here to help. Everyday, home cooks fiddle in the kitchen without really understanding why we do the things we do — some spices here, hotter temperatures there. But are these decisions really making our food the best it can be? There’s a lot that goes into the underlying principles of flavorful food, and certainly most of us wouldn’t have time to research it all (I mean, that sounds fun and all…). But you’ll be thankful that author Becky Selengut made this her mission as well as the focus of her latest book, How to Taste. Her approach to writing includes just the right about of geeky food science, laugh-out-loud humor, and aha moments on every page to keep your attention and make you…

Cooking tips and techniques from chef Gordon Ramsay

Want to up your cooking game? Even great cooks can miss a skill set or two if they haven’t had formal training. But we live in a time when celebrity chefs are just a click away, and they’re eager to share their wealth of knowledge with the world. Practice these pro tips from chef Gordon Ramsey and you’ll look like you’ve mastered your culinary moves over years of training. Most importantly, you’ll reduce your food waste thereby helping the environment and saving yourself money. https://youtu.be/ZJy1ajvMU1k How to finely chop and onion The root, or the base of the onion is “absolutely crucial. Leave that on there. Cut that off, and the onion will start to bleed, and you’ll start crying rapidly,” he says. Ramsey tells us to slice the onion going forward and let the weight of the knife do the work. Then your three middle fingers — one in front and two behind — let the…