What are the best cooking hacks you've learned over the years?

Ok I might get downvoted to oblivion but I use MSG. It enhances the flavors so much that I have stopped going to restaurants.

Edit- I did my research and found no credible source that says MSG is harmful.

Edit2- If you go to a restaurant or order KFC chances are they use MSG as well

1. Nothing goes on a plate without being tasted
2. If it's too sour, add sugar
3. if it's sweet and you haven't added acid, add a splash of vinegar.
4. if it's too hot, add fat
5. if you burn it, throw it out.
6. IF you taste it early, it should taste weak. If it's fantastic when when it starts to simmer, it'll be too harsh once it's reduced.
7. Taste it and it tastes empty or boring? Smell it. Smell all your herbs/spices on hand, which ever one it smells the closest to, add a healthy pinch and salt if it doesn't taste salty already.
8. know your oils and use the right ones. Olive oil can handle some heat and is great for savory, grapeseed is almost flavorless. Canola has a distinct flavor that doesn't go with everything.
9. season your meat before you cook it.

By far my favorite is to have a squirt bottle of water next to my stove. It's great to have throughout the cooking process, especially if you've moved on from Teflon bullshit and are using a pan you pre-heat. To start, you put the pan on the heat and squirt a little water in it. When the water evaporates, the pan is usually in the 350F-400F range. Then when the pan is dry and heated a little more, you can squirt a few more drops in to see if the Leidenfrost effect has taken, uhhh, effect. The way you tell is that the water just dances around on the pan instead of behaving like water normally does, and it's how you know your food won't stick, it is at this point that you add the oil.

Moving on to the actual cooking, let's say you've thrown some chicken thighs in the pan and you've built up a lot of fond (the brown bits that form in the bottom of the pan) and the chicken is almost done, but you're not planning on making a sauce. Deglaze the pan with little squirts of water targeted directly at the fond and rub the chicken thighs over the area where the water is deglazing and suddenly that fond is sticking to your chicken thighs, resulting in a better crust and a cleaner pan.

Speaking of cleaner pan, once you're done cooking and plating and you have a hot dirty pan, squirt enough water in to cover the bottom of the pan and then go eat. When you come back to the kitchen to clean up, the water will have broken down the shit on the bottom of the pan and will steam the sides of the pan, so the pan will wipe clean as easy if all you did was fry an egg.

Finally, I stopped putting milk (of any variety) in my coffee, but I wanna be able to drink my coffee right away and it's too hot when it's made fresh, but I've got a bottle full of room temperature water (all the filtered water in my house comes out ice cold) sitting right there so I can cool it down that way (I brew my coffee pretty strong so watering it down isn't a big deal).

When I have to use parchment paper, I crumple the paper ip into a little ball first, then press it out flat into the cooking vessel (sheet pan or loaf pan or whatnot) and it lays flatter/conforms to the pan better without rolling up all over the place rather than trying to just use a pristine sheet of parchment. It really works great.

Use a meat thermometer! All your meat will come out perfect, without being under or over cooked.

deglazing. it's when you use an acid to pull all the glaze off the bottom of a pan. it flavors the dish and makes cleaning your pan easier.

rice vinegar and red or white wines are favorites

Reverse taring - instead of placing the bowl on the scale and taring before weighing, place your ingredients on the scale and tare, and you can then scoop out and see the negative weight of how much you have used. This is especially helpful if you are trying to weigh an ingredient into a hot pan you can’t just set on the scale

Biggest hack? Realizing that humans have been cooking for millennia, and that it's in the best interest of big business to convince you that it's difficult/expensive/extremely complicated.

You don't NEED the fancy equipment every company out there is trying to sell you.

Not everything needs to be gorgeous on the plate, or a whole production to make.

The poorest people in the world cook delicious food every day.

For instance, you don't need NEED a +$150 Japanese chef knife to cook at home. What you need is something that can hold an edge through general maintenance, a whet stone, a kitchen towel to dry off your blade immediately after you hand wash it, and a little bit of patience.

IKEA sells some surprisingly great single construction (steel blade, steel handle) knives, and their single body chef knife is like $25. Just get an honing rod for use before you start slicing, and a whet stone for periodic sharpening (there's TONS of YouTube videos of all the different ways of sharpening your knife), and remember to wash and hand-dry after you're finished. My chef knife cost me barely anything, and I've used it for years and years, and it still slices through a tomato without a problem. Also, I only cook for myself, so I can absolutely 100% guarantee my whet stone will "outlive" me.

Don't be afraid of spices. Use more than you think is necessary. Onion and garlic can make a meal 100x better.

Save a cut of pasta water to thicken up sauces.

Unless baking or doing a watery/clear soup, never add just water. Anything with flavor that matches the style of cooking will be better.. could be just stock/boujong, wine, beer, cola or acids like vinegar or fruit juices, clam juice, etc. Anything liquid is an opportunity to add flavors.

Grilled cheese hack: assemble the sandwich open-faced on a baking sheet and place under the broiler for a few minutes until the cheese is melted and bubbling and slightly browned, then close it up and cook it like normal in a covered skillet on medium heat with butter. The cheese will be completely melted and (more importantly) it will stay melted while you're actually eating the sandwich, and the browning on the cheese adds a big flavor component.

I used to make them the normal way just in a skillet, and even if the cheese was just barely melted it would cool off and re-solidify before I started eating it. And often I would burn the crust just trying to get the cheese melted.

@PoodleDoodle

• when dicing onions cut radially first, then slice across, it saves you that weird half slice that's traditionally used for dicing onions.

• I use cast iron for nearly everything, it survives a hundred years because it's bulletproof not because it's gingerly handled every time it's removed from it's velvet case. People dragged them around on Chuck wagons, you will not kill it with soap. Worst case it gets a little sticky and now you need to cook some bacon in it.

• A splash of acid in your soup or stew at the end really wakes it up.

• Never cook rice without at least a couple bay leaves. Ideally you'll cook it in chicken stock as well, add flavour where you can.

• The best chicken stock in a jar is Better Than Bullion. Hands down. No contest.

• With a splash of oil you can cook eggs even in a sticky cast iron pan.

• Always use hand protection of some kind with a mandolin. I've never seen a non-pro chef go without and not fuck up their hand. Even pros lose the tips of their fingers sometimes too.

• If you want to recreate movie theater popcorn at home you need the following things:
  A whirlypop or other stovetop cooker
  Coconut oil, refined
  Popcorn kernels, quality varies, find a good brand
  Fine salt
  "Popcorn oil" - this is butter flavored oil sold next to the kernels

Here's what you do, set up a bowl to dump your popcorn in, throw some salt in the whirlypop with a spoon of coconut oil, and just a tiny glug of the popcorn oil, not much just a tad. Add your kernels, crank the heat to high and start cranking. Do. Not. Stop. The popcorn will begin to pop after an interminable wait. Keep cranking until it either gets hard to crank or the popping slows down significantly. Then quickly dump your popcorn into the waiting bowl. Do not add salt, you already did this, the fine salt will be well distributed this way. Add a bit of popcorn oil. Shake the bowl a bit to distribute, add more if desired etc. Then enjoy your movie theater popcorn.

It took me years to work out how to do it without the Naks oil, which I bought from a local popcorn shop for awhile.

chicken (or vegetable) broth in lieu of water to cook rice.

Let your protein equalize to room temperature before you cook it. This is a great time to season it as well. Pat dry, then cook.

Rest any grilled or pan fried meat on a non-heated surface for at least 5 minutes after cooking.

“Carry Over Cooking” is a thing that usually results in overcooked food if you don’t account for it.

Learn to make a pan sauce. Easy, quick, and worth it.

That trick of reserving a cup of “pasta water” that you never do? Yeah…

Almost without exception dried herbs/spices go in at the beginning of the cooking process, and fresh go in at the end.

If you work with a group of people start having an “Autumn Potluck” at work. It’s perfect for trying out holiday recipes, before the holiday, and get back constructive feedback and/or nice compliments.

Often recipes are really inefficient and sequenced wrong... Read the whole thing and find the "long pole" , and do that first.. could be starting the oven preheat early, starting the rice cooker right away vs at step 6 or run things in parallel.

Bake bacon on cookie sheets at 375 for about 20 minutes. You can make a ton of bacon very quickly, with almost no mess, and all the bacon is perfectly flat. We have a double oven and we can make about 4 pounds of bacon in about 30 minutes this way. :)

Boil spaghetti in a small amount of water in a frying pan. You won't need to push the pasta down and you'll have lovely starchy water to finish off your sauce — perfect for something like a carbonara!

Instead of using a pastry cutter to incorporate butter, freeze the butter then grate it with a box grater then mix it in. It stays much colder. Perfect for pastry or biscuits.

This one is a little bit of a hot take, but bottled lemon or lime juice is good for consistency. While fresh will most certainly be better, you may inadvertently juice a bad lemon/lime and potentially ruin a dish. Bottled juices can last a bit longer in the fridge.

You don't need to slave over a stove for 3 hours to get caramelized onion. Here's what you do. After slicing the onion, get the pan up to a medium heat with a splash of oil. Toss in the onions and add a bit of salt to make them sweat. Once they start to dry out, go golden at the edges, and even stick to the pan a bit, add a splash of water. You do have to stir continuously for this method as well, but it takes much less time. Do this process a few times where you add water, cook it until its dry, another splash of water, cook it until it dries out again, etc. Sometimes I'll even alternate in a splash of white wine for fun. You should have beautiful caramelized onions in 30 min with this method.

Mine is to salt or season from up high.

Stop mincing garlic and just get a fucking microplane. Thank you Rachel Ray.

Buy and air fryer and a rice cooker. They're a life saver combo. Whenever you have no time to cook, you can still assemble a wide range of meals just by using those two devices.

Ah, the alchemy of the kitchen! A dash of efficiency, a sprinkle of passion, and a dollop of savviness. First off, mise en place - French for 'put in place.' Prepare your ingredients ahead of time, it can help remove a loot of stress.

Secondly, invest in a sharp knife - it's the Excalibur of the culinary world, turning the toughest veggies into paper.

Lastly, experiment! Like any good inventor, a chef isn't afraid of a few mishaps; it happens to the best of us! You'll surprise yourself with some of things you may come up with 😉

Probably known, but stainless steel cookware is the best you just need to make sure it's hot enough first before you start to cook. Drop a pinch of water in the pan, if it dances around you're good too go.

To get a good sear on a steak in a pan, the pan doesn't have to be super hot, you just have to make sure the contact surfaces are as dry as possible.

If your stew tastes like it's missing something, it's bay leaf.

Don't buy hyperspecialized tools for cooking if you can use more generalized tool for the task with the same amount of effort. You can do a lot with a good chef's knife.

Cut through greasiness with a bit of acid.

Adding a little bit of sugar, but not so much you can taste the sweetness, to otherwise salty dishes will mellow out and enhance the flavor of the dish.

Replace everything plastic with glass.

Always salt your pasta water to the equivalent of sea water salty. It'll make your pasta taste much better.

More ways to measure are always better. It can give you more data as to what works, what doesn't, and how to reproduce it.

Simply adding a kitchen scale and a digital temperature kettle has upped my coffee game. A meat thermometer has removed the guesswork from my fish/steaks/roasts/chicken, and they're perfectly cooked every time. Out of the three, the kettle is the only one that was more than $30 (because I decided to go boojee and get a gooseneck for pourover coffee).

Also:

• its a lot easier to add salt/sugar/spice than it is to take it out.
• Never add directly from the container. Always go container>palm>food. This saves you from accidentally having a runaway seasoning avalanche (see previous point).

You can make a delicious, calorie dense chicken noodle soup on an extreme budget with canned chicken, chicken broth, and ramen noodle packages. That meal kept me from going hungry on multiple occasions during college.

Mandolines are not you friend. They thirst for blood.

Seriously if you get one get a safety mandoline like the once for all brand.

It’s not really a hack I think, but having a good instant probe thermometer really gives you the ability to be consistent no matter what, especially if you’re cooking proteins or have something that’s temperature dependent.

I had started with a cheaper one and eventually graduated to a Thermapen when I realized how critical it was to the things I was making.

Always keep canned tomatoes in the pantry. Particularly tomato paste. It's a great ingredient that can add a depth of flavor to a variety of dishes.

Whole spices really do make a big difference and it's worth knowing how to use them even if you don't make them part of your everyday cooking. When its time to make a special dish, using whole spicessl that you grind fresh will be worth it.

Use acid in your cooking. Citrus, viniger, wine, yogurt, etc will often upgrade a dish.

Parchment paper/aluminum foil is your friend. Minimize your time scrubbing dishes by minimizing the mess you make when baking food.

Add salt as you cook, not all at the end.

Knife skills.

Buy a very good chef's knife. There are expensive options, there are some more affordable options. Carbon steel is best, but there are some very good stainless alloys too. Do some research. Don't cheap out, this is a tool you'll buy for life if properly maintained. Pro range Wüsthof, Zwilling or Kai are great options.

Learn how to properly and safely use it.

Learn how to maintain it and keep it razor sharp (not exaggerating, you should be able to shave your arm after sharpening it). I use a dual sided Japanese wet stone (1000/3000 grit), it's great.

Not only proper knife skills with a good, balanced, sharp knife are much safer and save a lot of time, they also make cutting a joy instead of a chore.

If you cook by using a cooking recipe you can be creative (within reason). If you BAKE by following a baking recipe stick to the letter!

When cooking minced meat for taco filling or anything similar, cook half of it regularly, and then really cook the crap out of half of it until it's almost crispy, it really makes the texture more enjoyable.

Not really a cooking hack but freezing grapes works really well and they're a yummy and easy snack especially in summer. If you think your grapes might go off before you can use then or you got a batch that isn't as crisp as you'd like just freeze em.

Buy an air fryer and a pressure cooker. Save time and money.

Brine chicken breast. I save brines from things like pickles and feta for this and choose whichever one best matches what I'm making. Feta + chipotle makes awesome burritos.

I always see recipes say to heat a pan until the oil shimmers but I've never been able to see the difference. Instead, I drop a couple pieces of diced onion into the pan and wait to hear a sizzle. This is extra helpful for someone with adhd like me who would absolutely start a fire if I didn't have a noise to remind me that I'm cooking

Not really cooking, just preparation, but I used to eat pomegranates from our tree as a kid. Pomegranates have little seeds that stain and which are really hard to avoid puncturing. My dad used to have us eat on a picnic table out back rather than indoors, because we'd invariably be squirting the stuff all over.

Years later, I ran across someone pointing out that you can just take a bowl of water, and break open the pomegranates under the surface of the water. The (edible) seeds and (inedible) rind mostly separate, and there's no mess. It worked wonderfully.

I wish that we'd known about that back then. Would have made eating them way easier.

When slow cooking a roast lay it on a bed of potatoes or whatever other sides you want, fill the water to the top of the veggies (or taters) then soak the roast in your sauce of choice. Gravity and heat will help the sauce work into the veggies giving them a nice flavor. The roast pretty much always comes out perfectly moist and you get amazing veggies out of the deal.

Mine is, don’t eat anything solid, hold your poop for 3-days. When the redditors arrive why won’t understand, but whatever food you eat will be the best you ever tasted, they also will remain confused about why there is so much karma on your foodporn posts!

Use an instant pot for beans. Saves water and a ton of time. You can also use it to cook rice or pasta.

Exact measurements and specific spices aren't that important if you're just making a meal at home. The point is just to make it tasty and probably healthy.

There are still people who don't user probe thermometers. This is the single best cooking tip I can give:

• Get a probe thermometer (preferably a fast reading one).
• Use it.
• Know your temps.

Taste as you go and taste everything! Understanding how the components of your meal taste is a great way to make yummy things. It also helps you learn how ingredients manifest in the end result and will help you expand your cooking versatility

Patience. Good food doesn’t have to take a long time, but you need to give each step the respect it deserves, sometimes it will take a little longer. Mise en place is an important step, and so is reading the entire recipe thru before beginning. Also read recipes, even if you never intend to cook them, because you’ll discover new techniques and combinations that might elevate an old favourite.

Just from a practical perspective: use your microwave as rarely as possible! Leftovers can be really amazing - sometimes as good or better than the original dish - but only when heated properly!

Instant pot wasn't just a craze. You can take a 6 hour chili and get it done in 90 minutes.

That said, while they're not one trick ponies, they're not as good at most of their other tricks as regular cookware. That said, you need to sear meat and cook a stew in one it, it's completely reasonable.

Sousvide is amazing, as long as you like rare-medium meat and corn. If you're going to cook it to medium well, sousvide is a waste of your time.

To caramelize onions quickly, sprinkle them with a small amount of baking soda.

Not really a hack but just something important, always remember to account for how much salt you need if you don't have the recipes specific type of salt because different salt types have different shapes and sizes

Mise en place! Clean as you go.

• MSG. My favorite use for it is in soups. It only takes a small amount and it makes a significant difference.
• Slow cookers are awesome for preparing dry beans, infused oil, and roasting beets in aluminum foil.
• Know your emulsifiers and keep them handy. I always have a nice mustard as well as soy lecithin on hand, and if I’m ever worried about an emulsion breaking or I want a nice even sauce or dressing, I have at least one neutral and one savory option. Soymilk also works if it works for your recipe.

Clean as you go, don't just leave it all for the end. Onions are sauteing and you're done chopping everything? Good, wash your cutting board and knife and clean up any messes before the next step. Sausage is done browning and you're dumping it in with the onions for a minute with the garlic and some herbs? Great, wash that pan and spoon and set it down to dry and wipe up all the oil splashes.

Just makes clean up so much easier after you've eaten and you're much more efficiently using your time.