Cooking tips – 8 awesome hacks to save you time in the kitchen

Every chef’s life can be made easier with cooking tips.

Much as we’d like to waste hours every day over impossibly complicated cooking techniques, most of us just don’t have the time.

However much we may like being in the kitchen, most of the time it’s about getting in and out as quickly as possible.

This makes any sort of shortcut an absolute godsend.

There are plenty of handy steps you can take in the kitchen to cut down on time (Credit: Alamy/Westend61 GmbH)

Cooking tips

To help you get away from the kitchen and get on with the important job of chilling out, we’ve compiled a collection of awesome time-saving cooking tips.

READ MORE: How to cook pasta – Twisted chefs reveal 7 amazing tips for al dente pasta

You can thank us once you’re sat on the sofa with your feet up.

Dental floss is a useful tool in the kitchen (Credit: Alamy/luciopix)

1. Dental floss

Trying to be precise with something soft like pastry or a cake can be incredibly tricky with a large, unwieldy knife. A simple solution is to use dental floss to precisely slice through softer ingredients, without resorting to squashing your food.

Peeling garlic cloves can be fiddly (Credit: Pexels)

2. Peel your garlic

Easily one of the most fiddly jobs in the kitchen is unpeeling cloves of garlic. Rather than wasting precious minutes digging your fingers into flakey garlic skin, we suggest blasting an entire bulb in the microwave for about 20 seconds. When you take it out, you’ll find that the skin comes off with no fuss at all.

Freezing steak can make it easier to slice (Credit: Alamy/RubberBall)

3. Freezing steak

Trying to thinly slice slivers of steak for a stirfry or a sandwich can be a real headache. The meat has an annoying habit of slipping and sliding with even the slightest bit of pressure. An easy way around this problem is to put your steak in the freezer for an hour before you slice it. This will firm up the meat and allow you to slice in thin, precise lines.

Reading a recipe closely is crucial if you want to get your dish right (Credit: Alamy/Oleksiy Maksymenko Photography)

4. Reading your recipe

Though cookbooks can be a brilliant guide, it’s often annoying having to leave them open on a kitchen surface, taking up precious room for chopping and other mess. Save yourself a hassle and hang your recipe book from an adjustable coat hanger, clipped open on the page you are using.

Dried herbs are a great addition in the kitchen (Credit: Alamy/Nemjel)

5. Drying your herbs

All too often, fresh herbs end up slowly rotting in a fridge and inevitably going to waste. To help your herbs go the extra mile, a useful technique is to dry them out in the microwave before crushing them for storage in a small jar.

Storing apples can be difficult (Credit: Alamy/Deborah Vernon)

6. Save your apples

There’s nothing worse than tucking into a juicy apple, leaving the table for a few minutes and finding that the whole fruit has turned a horrible, mottled brown. A handy trick for preserving your apple slices is to brush the flesh in lemon juice, as this will provide a protective layer between the fruit and the air.

Using salad tongs is a great way to juice a lemon (Credit: Pexels)

7. Juice your lemons

Covering your hands in sticky lemon juice as you struggle to catch falling seeds and get everything you want into a bowl is no one’s idea of a good time. Make things easier on yourself by using salad tongs to squeeze the fruit and getting all the good stuff out in one fell swoop.

Keeping bananas fresh isn’t always easy (Credit: Pexels)

8. Banana preservation

Finding the perfect banana before it turns to overripe mush is a tricky business. However, there is an easy way out. Simply cover the stalk of a ripe banana with clingfilm to keep it ready for eating for far longer than normal.

READ MORE: 6 hacks that can take your chicken wings to the next level

Cooking is often a case of being as efficient as possible. While it’s nice to indulge every now and then, it’s always useful to know a few handy shortcuts here and there. Hopefully, this list will give you a few ideas for future time-saving.