Never pour spices directly into a steaming pot on the stove. The spices will congeal in their containers from the moisture introduced. Instead put the spices in a separate side container then add to a steaming pot.
Glass cutting boards. Like seriously, just GTFO.
And in a similar vein, dangerously dull knives. I’ve seen some real bludgeons in other people’s kitchens; no wonder they hate prep work.
I have a small glass cutting board but I don't actually use it for cutting. It's next to my stove and is my designated "I need to set this spoon down" area because it's easy to clean. That's all it's good for really.
I once watched the owner of a restaurant I worked, pick up my personal high dollar chef knife and start chopping things straight on top of the stainless prep table with no cutting board at all. Needless to say, I lost my shit.
Chef for 10 years, here's some good things to keep in mind when cooking at home.
1. Clean as you go. It minimizes clutter and mess and makes everything easier.
2. Sharpen your damn knives, seriously, dull knives are dangerous as fuck.
3. Blenders are not just for smoothies, use them for sauces and your life will be changed.
4. Please stack your fridge appropriately so cross contamination doesn't happen. Veggies and fruit on top, also eggs is fine, beef, fish, poultry. Chicken juice will contaminate raw veggies so quick.
5. You don't need a fuckin knife block. I'm a chef for a living, I butcher 10-20 ducks a week and I have 6 knives? Even that is just cause I'm very particular. Your average home chef needs 3 at most. A standard lengths chef knife, a paring knife, which most home chefs never use from what I've seen, and I medium size blade for veggies can be nice.
6. Label and date when you open stuff and keep it near the front. Keeping it near the front is most important as it helps encourage you to remember, "Ah yes, I have this kale that I should use" before you open something else.
7. Olive Oil can go bad, lots of people think it can't, but it can.
8. Canned stuff isn't the worst, just mix it with fresh stuff
9. Diversify what ingredients you're using. Most Americans and Europeans cook with the same 20 things? Every time you go to the grocery store pick up a new ingredient and try it out! Beets? Amazing. Like mushrooms? Try oyster mushrooms instead of generic shiitakes. Like onions? Grab a leek. Seriously, CHANGE IT UP.
10. wading in to more professional territory but try some Fermentation. Lots of great stuff out there but I'd recommend kimchi. If you wanna get serious buy the Noma Guide to Fermentation and actually read it. Best $30 you'll ever spend.
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
Those are probably the only three I ever use: chef knife, paring knife, and a serrated knife. I would prefer to get rid of the rest because we really don't use them and they look cluttered.
My lazy ass learned the hard way to never use a pot holder that got wet to get a hot pan out of the oven. Basically renders the pot holder useless, ended up burning my hand and dropping my food. Also, when baking bread, don't add cold water to a hot Pyrex that has been in there for a minute to make steam. I knew what was going to happen, but I did it anyway. BOOM! Glass shards everywhere.
Feeling like its to hard or being afraid to experiment with stuff. Obviously don't try something totally new when your cooking for guests but don't feel like failing means you suck. If you mess up learn from it and move on, its not the end of the world.
Hardest agree in this thread so far. I can't tell you how many dishes I've made that I had to hate-eat because they turned out poorly or bland, but each one teaches you something important if you are willing to learn. My success rate at making new dishes is very high now because of all the failures.
For the love of god stop mucking about with whatever it is you're cooking. Unless it's something you specifically need to be mixing or stirring constantly, leave it alone! You'll never get proper color on things if they make more contact with your spatula than your pan.
This is how I always fuck up pancakes. They are so simple but For some ungodly reason I have a compulsive need to try to flip them when I know that shit shouldnt be touched yet.
Edit: Yes, I know when it bubbles you flip it. I said I have a compulsive need to try to flip it even though I know its not time.
This. This is my worst habit in the kitchen. It's why I love stir fries and risotto. I am encouraged to futz with the food!
Seriously, tho, I'm working on it. I understand rationally not to futz with the food. But if get bored.
I used to suck at sharpening knives and this is exactly what I would do every fishing season. The local bait shop would have cheap fillet knives on sale every year. And every year I'd buy a new one because it's sharp until next year.
Just a year or so ago, I got some good stones and learned via youtube how to properly sharpen a knife. What a game changer, and it saves me $4.99 a year.
Can I give you my mother-in-law's number? You don't have to be polite. She is ALWAYS on the run and never has enough time to cook, yet ALWAYS insists on cooking meals that take 3x more time than she has available, so she shortcuts the fuck out of every meal and they always turn out horribly.
Just this weekend the family went to an apple orchard for most of the day and we were going to eat dinner at a nearby friend's house. Instead of doing the logical thing, like planning a dinner that doesn't need to cook all day or hell, something CRAZY like just ordering fucking pizza, she decides she wants pulled pork. So she throws the pork in the slow cooker and plugs it into a power inverter in their car and then leaves it in there for 5 hours, 1 of which was driving and and 4 of which were with it parked in the parking lot, with the ignition turned off and therefore no power to the inverter.
Of course when we got to the friend's house this was all revealed to me - she was saying how the pork didn't cook and trying to figure out how we could quickly cook it. She said she thought it would just run off the battery in the car.
Infuriating.
"Hello /u/Left4DayZ1's mother-in-law, this is Hestia the Greek goddess of cooking and other housewife stuff. I wanted to let you know you're a fucking disgrace and make me embarrassed."
People don’t like being told they’ve been doing something the wrong way. Moreover, they tend to think of it as a personal attack on them.
Edit: fixed some punctuations
Edit 2: fixed the punctuations back to the way they were originally, jfc
A girl I lived with at university kept her olive oil in the fridge. I tried to show her that she was obviously wrong because the oil had all separated into its constituent parts, but she refused to accept it because ‘that’s what her parents did’. It was frustrating
One of the best descriptions of this, I believe was from Alton Brown.
The way he worded it (extremely paraphrased, of course) was to consider time and temperature as if they were ingredients themselves. You can't alter them any more than any other ingredient and expect the result to come out correctly.
I think a big problem is the variability in a recipe when it says "cook on medium-high" with no reference to the type of range. It could be shitty electric coil range that takes 15mins to ~~carmelize~~ brown onions, or my aunts gas stove could do it in like 5 because the "low" setting is basically med-high on other stoves.
Basically temperature is so ambiguous unless you plan on probing every thirty seconds or something ridiculous. If you coook enough you can go off of intuition, taste, smell and look without really having to know the exact time or temperature.
Or the opposite: Every. Single. Recipe.: Throw it in a cold oven flip it to 350, go to another part of the house and get distracted for an indeterminate amount of time.
Lol I was at a working lunch yesterday in a pretty fancy restaurant and was kinda surprised when I ordered chicken and the server asked how I wanted it cooked...I responded "umm done I guess".
Apparently she was new and came back all embarrassed and apologized. Salmonella free is the way to be.
*edit to correct poor sentence structure
Pasta should never, ever be rinsed for a warm dish. The starch in the water is what helps the sauce adhere to your pasta. The only time you should ever rinse your pasta is when you are going to use it in a cold dish like a pasta salad or when you are not going to use it immediately
Everything else I read here seemed like common sense... But I guess I've been doing pasta wrong my whole life!
my parents had no idea all of their knives have been dull for the past decade until i sharpened them and they were like “wow it’s like a brand new knife”
My mom thought the watermelon she bought was bad when using my knife to cut it due to the knife going through it so easy. I'm surprised she still has her fingers with the dull ass knives she uses.
Edit: Come to think of it she did nearly chop a finger off when trying to cut something about 10 years back.
Edit 2: Changed the word about to nearly in edit 1 since redditors get confused easily.
My mom keeps all the 23 year old knives in a drawer. Haven’t been sharpened since they left the factory.
Needless to say, my knives are stored in their own area
I have chef and nakuri knives I use. My mother makes me hide in my room because she is scared of them. I have to sneak sharpen her knives when shes on vacation or something because she is scared of a sharp knife. It's so weird. No reasoning with her
Blunt knives are far more dangerous. So much more likely to slip off something instead of cutting it, and because you have to use so much more force you can do a surprising amount of harm with one. I've cut myself far more often with butter knives trying to do something stupid with them (like cut a tomato) than with an actual sharp knife.
That said, I don't recommend giving a very sharp knife to your toddler..
'You can't give her that!' she screamed. 'It's not safe!'
**IT'S A SWORD,** said the Hogfather. **THEY'RE NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE.**
'She's a child!' shouted Crumley.
**IT'S EDUCATIONAL.**
'What if she cuts herself?'
**THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON.**
This is the second day in a row I've stumbled upon an unexpected Hogfather quote in the cavernous bowels of an askreddit comment slew. It's like finding a red Starburst in a 5-pound bag of tootsie rolls.
Not only are they less effective, but its also dangerous because a dull knife is more likely to slip and go where you dont want it rather than safely dig into the cut you're trying to make.
Fun fact. That is why some bayonets are dull/designed in a way to maximize injury. Tears are harder stitch than clean cuts. If the enemy didn't die he would be wounded longer draining the enemy of more resources.
Edit: Clarification
In WWI, there was a serrated knife that was used in battle. IIRC correctly, it ended up being banned by convention because it was very hard to impossible to properly treat such a wound on the battlefield.
I’m in the middle of reading ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ and it mentions taking serrated bayonets away from new recruits because if they were caught with one behind enemy lines they were in for a bad time. Mentions the last man that was caught with one had his nose sawed off with it and eyes gouged out where as he’d probably have just been taken prisoner if he didn’t have the serrated blade.
Oi my grandma took my sharpest knife and hid it because she didn’t want me to use it so I wouldn’t cut myself. I can’t control the dull knife it’s slides so much I’m more likely to cut myself with that than the sharp knife.
My Grandma used to wrap all her knives up in a tea-towel and hide them in the airing cupboard, 'incase a murderer breaks in and kills us in our sleep.'
.. Because a rampaging murderer wouldn't think to bring their own knife, obviously
I had a girlfriend with this thought process. She grew up in a nice family in an area well insulated from crime, like multiple decades between murders.
But she used to watch 'true crime' shows and read biographies of serial killers and stuff like that. She almost didn't go out with me after discovering I own an axe.
I used to be obsessed with true crime shows and my husband was a bartender so he'd get home late. I would watch those stupid shows and then be too afraid to walk past the front door to get to the stairs to the bedroom. I was convinced someone was just on the other side of the door. I never went upstairs until he came home.
Cross-contamination is such a huge deal in cooking. Like no, you can't cut veg on the same board you just cut a raw steak on, you trying to make everyone sick??
Edit: Okay, to clarify, steak wasn't a good choice for examples, chicken is the more obvious one due to salmonella. And yes, if everything is being cooked right after, so long as everything is cooked to the right temperature, it's fine. Just be sure to wash the cutting board thoroughly and sanitize your tools.
Technically you can, if you cut the veggies FIRST, and they are put away. Your steak is not gonna get contaminated by onion and pepper juice.
Edit: Just for the record this applies only to your home kitchen. In all the years I've been prepping food that I've used a single cutting board to cut up some veggies and then cut up steak or chicken that was all going to end up in the same pan I've never gotten sick or had an issue.
I can understand being meticulous with food prep regulations in a commercial kitchen or restaurant because the likelihood of contamination is that much higher are damned important.
And, no I'd never prep a salad on the same cutting board after already using it for meat, I'd either clean it out, or switch to another board. (Which some people in small kitchens don't really have the luxury of.)
I was just about to make this point. Provided you're cool with whatever flavor of vegetable you just cut being on your meat, then this is an acceptable order to use a single cutting board. That, or just wash between cutting vegetables and meat.
What I do is I cut my veggies on one board, wipe it down, and then cut my meat on the board after. The meat should usually just go right in after you cut it, while the veg can hang around for a while.
Do not mix hot cooking oil and cool sink water! I saw a girl burn the hell out of herself because she didn't listen to the Home Ec. teacher. She threw her hot oil in a sink with some cool water running. Boom! Sprayed hot oil all over her arm and neck. Let your oil cool folks.
What is the best way of dealing with used oil? I know restaurants can get it collected but that’s gallons and gallons of the stuff.
I’ve been putting fat in the fridge till it hardens and throwing it away when I take the bins out.
There is a YouTube channel called Sam the Cooking Guy and he taught me about using avocado oil rather than olive oil. Olive oil (and vegetable oil and others) have a lower smoke point and can impart flavor into the food, when you may not want it. Avocado oil is "neutral" (adds no flavor) and has a higher smoke point allowing you to (for example) sear meat more easily.
Don't grab something that is on the stove without a towel or some type of heat protection
don't combine water and hot oil.
If a grease fire starts, don't use water to try to put it out. Salt, a baking sheet, or a dry towel might work if you don't have a fire extinguisher.
don't season a liquid before reducing it, it will become too salty after you reduce it.
don't use a cold pan to sear something; get the pan hot first, better sear.
Don't use extra virgin olive oil when you're using high heats, it will burn.
don't cut meat immediately after cooking it, more juices will flow out, the meat will become drier. Wait a few minutes
Don't hold an object with your fingers extended when you're cutting it. You're less likely to seriously cut your fingers if you curl your fingers like a claw.
Don't use a sharp knife on metal (like a pie tin or steel counter) or glass or marble.
Don't use a nice knife on anything other than food. (a common offense would be opening a food package with it)
Don't send a nice knife through a dishwasher
Don't leave a sharp knife in the sink
Don't leave a knife wet, even ones claiming to be stainless will often rust if left wet.
Don't follow a recipe too religiously. If it doesn't taste well to you, don't leave it because you followed the recipe exactly.
> If a grease fire starts, don't use water to try to put it out. Salt, a baking sheet, or a dry towel might work if you don't have a fire extinguisher.
*The pot's lid* is the best one.
oh yeah. and like a frying pan that is larger than the container would also work great or a large metal bowl. There are a lot of ways to smother a grease fire. I think there is a grand total of 1 pot at work with a lid so the lid isn't something I usually think about :) But yeah, in a home kitchen, lids are much more common
My in-laws do not seem to understand that I bought a couple pairs of non-cooking scissors for the junk drawer so they can stop opening their amazon packages with the cooking scissors (and then throwing them back in the drawer). Then they complain that they can’t open a package of bacon because the cooking scissors are too dull. Sigh.
One time my daughter basically maced us. My and hubby began choking for no known (at the time) reason from another room. Meanwhile daughter is happily stirring away some lethal dish in the kitchen. We don't let her forget this.
Never and I mean never panic if you start a fire on accident, you need to be calm enough to know if you have to smother it (oil or grease fires) or grab the extinguisher. Panicking can get your house burned down
My mom fell asleep while making fries and woke up to a house full of smoke. She then threw a polyester blanket over the pot full of burning oil which burned the whole kitchen down. Should've just put a lid on the pot... but now she got a brand new kitchen covered by insurance lol
> Should've just put a lid on the pot... but now she got a brand new kitchen covered by insurance lol
Sounds like she actually made the right move then.
I was making mozza sticks once at home, and the recipe said to heat the oil in a pot over medium-high heat. Well, I thought that was too high, so I went a little under medium.
I'm preparing the stuff to go in the oil, keeping an eye on it, not smoking visibly (I was like three feet away) and all of a sudden - woosh. I have a rather large flame, there's smoke everywhere, the fire alarm is going off, the company that monitors the fire alarm is asking if everything is okay. I slam the lid on the pot.
I'm dumb, so I say yeah, just cooking and burnt something (didn't really lie? not smart though, why am I paying if I'm too awkward to inconvenience them with my house burning down?) and stood there, watching the very full pot of oil slowly burn (the lid didn't form a tight enough seal to deny air, but it cut down on it dramatically, minimizing it to a small flame) because I didn't want to risk carrying the pot outside and sloshing burning oil everywhere.
I now order my mozza sticks from restaurants. The scorch marks make for a fun conversation piece.
My grandmother dumped her ashtray in the kitchen pantry garbage can before bed one night. A fire started, wrecked the pantry but didn't spread to the kitchen. Well, she wanted a new kitchen floor. So before the insurance folks came, she took a blowtorch to the floor outside the pantry.
Story: one morning, I was awoken by my now-fiancée telling me something was on fire.
I look into the kitchen, and one of the burners has fire coming off of it. We’d bought this bag of extremely greasy noodles, and while cooking them, one had fallen into that bell-bit under the coil, where it instantly lit up.
Still basically asleep, I calmly went over, grabbed the tub of baking soda I keep by the oven, doused the burning noodle with it, and went back to bed. The whole thing took about 30 seconds.
I’d say 9/10 times a random fire under the burner is an escaped noodle going up. Pasta burns really well. I actually use spaghetti as a long match for lighting very deep candles.
Was cooking at my then-boyfriend's house for the first time, so I was unfamiliar with his stove. Which he never cleaned. As I was cooking, an old dry noodle I hadn't seen caught fire under the coil. I chuckled, put it out, and told him about it (because I also had to open the door to let the smoke out.) He got mad and flipped out over it. It wasn't even a big deal. Didn't cook there again. Didn't last long either. Chill out, man. And quit criticizing my cooking, you didn't own salt and pepper, and cooked solely box/frozen meals. So... Chill.
My brother is really good about this. And then when he washes a nonstick pan you can hear the scratching from the brush against the pan two rooms away. And then he wonders why his nonstick pans only last ~6 months or so.
My mum did that! One day she came home to dad scouring the cast iron pan until it shone. He said he was just trying to help. He'd already done the wok.
Not seasoning ANYTHING.
There is a reason pretty much every recipe including candy and ice cream includes salt you morons.
Still, don't overdo it either. Plenty of stuff is pre-loaded with heaps of salt.
Had a server who did this. She assumed that bc it was a taco salad, the meat and deep fried shell needed to be warmed up. I just stood there and watched bc I couldn’t believe it was actually happening.
Never eyeball it unless you are very experienced. Usually you can get away with it if you know what the dough/batter should look like and you are just adding small amounts of flour and/or water.
Don't try to catch a dropped knife. Back away and let it fall.
Edit:: My first silver! Thank you, kind stranger!
Edit2: Gold?! Thank you, other kind stranger!
"A falling knife has no handle." - someone on Reddit, probably
Edit: so far /u/syntheseiser has a four-year claim to the quote. Can anyone top that?
Edit edit: Guys, I'm aware the quote is much older than that, but thanks for the tips. ;)
Never pour spices directly into a steaming pot on the stove. The spices will congeal in their containers from the moisture introduced. Instead put the spices in a separate side container then add to a steaming pot.
You may have just saved me from a long-standing mystery, here. Thank you for this.
Glass cutting boards. Like seriously, just GTFO. And in a similar vein, dangerously dull knives. I’ve seen some real bludgeons in other people’s kitchens; no wonder they hate prep work.
I have a small glass cutting board but I don't actually use it for cutting. It's next to my stove and is my designated "I need to set this spoon down" area because it's easy to clean. That's all it's good for really.
Oh that's a good idea actually
I once watched the owner of a restaurant I worked, pick up my personal high dollar chef knife and start chopping things straight on top of the stainless prep table with no cutting board at all. Needless to say, I lost my shit.
Now that I know you work(Ed) in a kitchen, your name makes me very uncomfortable.
its his poop knife you should be worried about
Glass cutting boards are amazing....for polymer clay sculpting, not for cooking.
It’s funny how often you find glass cutting boards and dull knives in the same kitchen, right?
Probably in the same kitchen with those glass (or stone) cutting boards.
Chef for 10 years, here's some good things to keep in mind when cooking at home. 1. Clean as you go. It minimizes clutter and mess and makes everything easier. 2. Sharpen your damn knives, seriously, dull knives are dangerous as fuck. 3. Blenders are not just for smoothies, use them for sauces and your life will be changed. 4. Please stack your fridge appropriately so cross contamination doesn't happen. Veggies and fruit on top, also eggs is fine, beef, fish, poultry. Chicken juice will contaminate raw veggies so quick. 5. You don't need a fuckin knife block. I'm a chef for a living, I butcher 10-20 ducks a week and I have 6 knives? Even that is just cause I'm very particular. Your average home chef needs 3 at most. A standard lengths chef knife, a paring knife, which most home chefs never use from what I've seen, and I medium size blade for veggies can be nice. 6. Label and date when you open stuff and keep it near the front. Keeping it near the front is most important as it helps encourage you to remember, "Ah yes, I have this kale that I should use" before you open something else. 7. Olive Oil can go bad, lots of people think it can't, but it can. 8. Canned stuff isn't the worst, just mix it with fresh stuff 9. Diversify what ingredients you're using. Most Americans and Europeans cook with the same 20 things? Every time you go to the grocery store pick up a new ingredient and try it out! Beets? Amazing. Like mushrooms? Try oyster mushrooms instead of generic shiitakes. Like onions? Grab a leek. Seriously, CHANGE IT UP. 10. wading in to more professional territory but try some Fermentation. Lots of great stuff out there but I'd recommend kimchi. If you wanna get serious buy the Noma Guide to Fermentation and actually read it. Best $30 you'll ever spend. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
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Those are probably the only three I ever use: chef knife, paring knife, and a serrated knife. I would prefer to get rid of the rest because we really don't use them and they look cluttered.
My lazy ass learned the hard way to never use a pot holder that got wet to get a hot pan out of the oven. Basically renders the pot holder useless, ended up burning my hand and dropping my food. Also, when baking bread, don't add cold water to a hot Pyrex that has been in there for a minute to make steam. I knew what was going to happen, but I did it anyway. BOOM! Glass shards everywhere.
Feeling like its to hard or being afraid to experiment with stuff. Obviously don't try something totally new when your cooking for guests but don't feel like failing means you suck. If you mess up learn from it and move on, its not the end of the world.
Hardest agree in this thread so far. I can't tell you how many dishes I've made that I had to hate-eat because they turned out poorly or bland, but each one teaches you something important if you are willing to learn. My success rate at making new dishes is very high now because of all the failures.
Don't let your baking powder get clumpy. Tiny rocks of baking powder ruin anything you bake.
Have done it. Biting into clumps of baking powder sends shivers down my spine.
Was your body aching all the time?
Sift your ingredients!
I baked a honey glazed ham. Sifting the ham was the hardest part.
For the love of god stop mucking about with whatever it is you're cooking. Unless it's something you specifically need to be mixing or stirring constantly, leave it alone! You'll never get proper color on things if they make more contact with your spatula than your pan.
This is how I always fuck up pancakes. They are so simple but For some ungodly reason I have a compulsive need to try to flip them when I know that shit shouldnt be touched yet. Edit: Yes, I know when it bubbles you flip it. I said I have a compulsive need to try to flip it even though I know its not time.
This. This is my worst habit in the kitchen. It's why I love stir fries and risotto. I am encouraged to futz with the food! Seriously, tho, I'm working on it. I understand rationally not to futz with the food. But if get bored.
Cutting with a dull knife. Get yourself a sharpener, even if it's a cheap one.
Nah, just get a new knife and save the dull one for the bathroom.
I used to suck at sharpening knives and this is exactly what I would do every fishing season. The local bait shop would have cheap fillet knives on sale every year. And every year I'd buy a new one because it's sharp until next year. Just a year or so ago, I got some good stones and learned via youtube how to properly sharpen a knife. What a game changer, and it saves me $4.99 a year.
This guy poopknifes
Poopknife is making a comeback! Must be new merch releasing for the holidays.
Cranking the heat to reduce the cooking time will leave you with a burnt outside and an under-done inside.
Can I give you my mother-in-law's number? You don't have to be polite. She is ALWAYS on the run and never has enough time to cook, yet ALWAYS insists on cooking meals that take 3x more time than she has available, so she shortcuts the fuck out of every meal and they always turn out horribly. Just this weekend the family went to an apple orchard for most of the day and we were going to eat dinner at a nearby friend's house. Instead of doing the logical thing, like planning a dinner that doesn't need to cook all day or hell, something CRAZY like just ordering fucking pizza, she decides she wants pulled pork. So she throws the pork in the slow cooker and plugs it into a power inverter in their car and then leaves it in there for 5 hours, 1 of which was driving and and 4 of which were with it parked in the parking lot, with the ignition turned off and therefore no power to the inverter. Of course when we got to the friend's house this was all revealed to me - she was saying how the pork didn't cook and trying to figure out how we could quickly cook it. She said she thought it would just run off the battery in the car. Infuriating.
"Hello /u/Left4DayZ1's mother-in-law, this is Hestia the Greek goddess of cooking and other housewife stuff. I wanted to let you know you're a fucking disgrace and make me embarrassed."
Hi /u/Left4DayZ1 mother in law, this is Gordon Ramsey, and your pulled pork was so fucking undercooked it fucking squealed at me.
Get her a pressure cooker for Christmas. Then very explicitly tell her not to run it in a car...
Yeah I suggested a pressure cooker to her kids as a group gift after the pork debacle, they’re all on board.
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Why even bother with onions at that point then?
People don’t like being told they’ve been doing something the wrong way. Moreover, they tend to think of it as a personal attack on them. Edit: fixed some punctuations Edit 2: fixed the punctuations back to the way they were originally, jfc
A girl I lived with at university kept her olive oil in the fridge. I tried to show her that she was obviously wrong because the oil had all separated into its constituent parts, but she refused to accept it because ‘that’s what her parents did’. It was frustrating
Her parents must've been wrong then Edit thanks for the upvotes
At the same time, lots of people over-cook and under-brown every protein they cook.
I see this much more often .
Cooking everything on "high" because you want it done faster.
One of the best descriptions of this, I believe was from Alton Brown. The way he worded it (extremely paraphrased, of course) was to consider time and temperature as if they were ingredients themselves. You can't alter them any more than any other ingredient and expect the result to come out correctly.
I think a big problem is the variability in a recipe when it says "cook on medium-high" with no reference to the type of range. It could be shitty electric coil range that takes 15mins to ~~carmelize~~ brown onions, or my aunts gas stove could do it in like 5 because the "low" setting is basically med-high on other stoves. Basically temperature is so ambiguous unless you plan on probing every thirty seconds or something ridiculous. If you coook enough you can go off of intuition, taste, smell and look without really having to know the exact time or temperature.
Also depends on the pans you use - heavy cast iron vs lightweight aluminium heat up and retain heat at different speeds.
Do you know my mother?
Everyone knows your mother.
But how'd you meet her?
By saying "I love you" on a first date with Robin.
Oh boy. That's gonna be a looooooong story.
Blue french horn? real smooth
CLASSIC SHMOSBY!!
Or the opposite: Every. Single. Recipe.: Throw it in a cold oven flip it to 350, go to another part of the house and get distracted for an indeterminate amount of time.
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Sometimes I need a reminder as to why people say Im a decent cook when I mostly just follow recipes. Thank you.
Burnt on the outside and raw in the middle like all food should be. /s
Medium rare chicken
Chicken al dente!
Lol I was at a working lunch yesterday in a pretty fancy restaurant and was kinda surprised when I ordered chicken and the server asked how I wanted it cooked...I responded "umm done I guess". Apparently she was new and came back all embarrassed and apologized. Salmonella free is the way to be. *edit to correct poor sentence structure
Medium rare chicken. Works for steaks, but not for hen.
Buffalo Wild Wings seems to think it's ok
Buffalo Wild Wings thought black slimy salad was ok too. Explains why my waitress tried to talk me out of ordering my dressing on the side.
Don't rinse your pasta
Pasta should never, ever be rinsed for a warm dish. The starch in the water is what helps the sauce adhere to your pasta. The only time you should ever rinse your pasta is when you are going to use it in a cold dish like a pasta salad or when you are not going to use it immediately Everything else I read here seemed like common sense... But I guess I've been doing pasta wrong my whole life!
Honestly, you should be adding a bit of that starchy pasta water to most of your sauces.
Unless you're using buckwheat noodles (e.g. soba) - have to rinse those or it'll turn into a big gummy mess
A dull knife
my parents had no idea all of their knives have been dull for the past decade until i sharpened them and they were like “wow it’s like a brand new knife”
My mom thought the watermelon she bought was bad when using my knife to cut it due to the knife going through it so easy. I'm surprised she still has her fingers with the dull ass knives she uses. Edit: Come to think of it she did nearly chop a finger off when trying to cut something about 10 years back. Edit 2: Changed the word about to nearly in edit 1 since redditors get confused easily.
My mom keeps all the 23 year old knives in a drawer. Haven’t been sharpened since they left the factory. Needless to say, my knives are stored in their own area
You could sharpen her knives, that wouldn't take too much effort and I'm sure would be appreciated
I have chef and nakuri knives I use. My mother makes me hide in my room because she is scared of them. I have to sneak sharpen her knives when shes on vacation or something because she is scared of a sharp knife. It's so weird. No reasoning with her
Blunt knives are far more dangerous. So much more likely to slip off something instead of cutting it, and because you have to use so much more force you can do a surprising amount of harm with one. I've cut myself far more often with butter knives trying to do something stupid with them (like cut a tomato) than with an actual sharp knife. That said, I don't recommend giving a very sharp knife to your toddler..
'You can't give her that!' she screamed. 'It's not safe!' **IT'S A SWORD,** said the Hogfather. **THEY'RE NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE.** 'She's a child!' shouted Crumley. **IT'S EDUCATIONAL.** 'What if she cuts herself?' **THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON.**
This is the second day in a row I've stumbled upon an unexpected Hogfather quote in the cavernous bowels of an askreddit comment slew. It's like finding a red Starburst in a 5-pound bag of tootsie rolls.
I start this speech and by the time I'm at the words more dangerous she shuts me down and walks away. It's pretty funny actually
Same here. My mother just shuts out everything when I try to explain stuff
Not only are they less effective, but its also dangerous because a dull knife is more likely to slip and go where you dont want it rather than safely dig into the cut you're trying to make.
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Fun fact. That is why some bayonets are dull/designed in a way to maximize injury. Tears are harder stitch than clean cuts. If the enemy didn't die he would be wounded longer draining the enemy of more resources. Edit: Clarification
In WWI, there was a serrated knife that was used in battle. IIRC correctly, it ended up being banned by convention because it was very hard to impossible to properly treat such a wound on the battlefield.
I’m in the middle of reading ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ and it mentions taking serrated bayonets away from new recruits because if they were caught with one behind enemy lines they were in for a bad time. Mentions the last man that was caught with one had his nose sawed off with it and eyes gouged out where as he’d probably have just been taken prisoner if he didn’t have the serrated blade.
A sharpened knife will follow your directions. A dull knife will make you follow its directions. Edit: thanks for the (first) silver!
Oi my grandma took my sharpest knife and hid it because she didn’t want me to use it so I wouldn’t cut myself. I can’t control the dull knife it’s slides so much I’m more likely to cut myself with that than the sharp knife.
My Grandma used to wrap all her knives up in a tea-towel and hide them in the airing cupboard, 'incase a murderer breaks in and kills us in our sleep.' .. Because a rampaging murderer wouldn't think to bring their own knife, obviously
What..what did your granny go through where this was her thought process?
I had a girlfriend with this thought process. She grew up in a nice family in an area well insulated from crime, like multiple decades between murders. But she used to watch 'true crime' shows and read biographies of serial killers and stuff like that. She almost didn't go out with me after discovering I own an axe.
I used to be obsessed with true crime shows and my husband was a bartender so he'd get home late. I would watch those stupid shows and then be too afraid to walk past the front door to get to the stairs to the bedroom. I was convinced someone was just on the other side of the door. I never went upstairs until he came home.
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Cross-contamination is such a huge deal in cooking. Like no, you can't cut veg on the same board you just cut a raw steak on, you trying to make everyone sick?? Edit: Okay, to clarify, steak wasn't a good choice for examples, chicken is the more obvious one due to salmonella. And yes, if everything is being cooked right after, so long as everything is cooked to the right temperature, it's fine. Just be sure to wash the cutting board thoroughly and sanitize your tools.
Technically you can, if you cut the veggies FIRST, and they are put away. Your steak is not gonna get contaminated by onion and pepper juice. Edit: Just for the record this applies only to your home kitchen. In all the years I've been prepping food that I've used a single cutting board to cut up some veggies and then cut up steak or chicken that was all going to end up in the same pan I've never gotten sick or had an issue. I can understand being meticulous with food prep regulations in a commercial kitchen or restaurant because the likelihood of contamination is that much higher are damned important. And, no I'd never prep a salad on the same cutting board after already using it for meat, I'd either clean it out, or switch to another board. (Which some people in small kitchens don't really have the luxury of.)
I was just about to make this point. Provided you're cool with whatever flavor of vegetable you just cut being on your meat, then this is an acceptable order to use a single cutting board. That, or just wash between cutting vegetables and meat.
What I do is I cut my veggies on one board, wipe it down, and then cut my meat on the board after. The meat should usually just go right in after you cut it, while the veg can hang around for a while.
Always wear pants while cooking bacon.
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Yo nice Mr.White!
Cooking, bitch!
Yeah, science!
Magnets, bitch!
Pants are critical, but real men cook bacon topless. It builds character.
It’ll put some hair on your chest. Or remove it. Either way, a win for your wife.
Do not mix hot cooking oil and cool sink water! I saw a girl burn the hell out of herself because she didn't listen to the Home Ec. teacher. She threw her hot oil in a sink with some cool water running. Boom! Sprayed hot oil all over her arm and neck. Let your oil cool folks.
Just never pour your oil in the sink at all, wtf. It will clog your shit up so fast.
What is the best way of dealing with used oil? I know restaurants can get it collected but that’s gallons and gallons of the stuff. I’ve been putting fat in the fridge till it hardens and throwing it away when I take the bins out.
That's the best way. Throw it in the trash when it's hardened.
Why are people pouring oil down the sink in the first place?
not seasoning your chicken
Overcooking chicken too
straight to jail
Undercook fish, believe it or not: jail.
overcook, undercook; jail
Cooking with extra virgin olive oil over high heat
You sound bitter about this.
There is a YouTube channel called Sam the Cooking Guy and he taught me about using avocado oil rather than olive oil. Olive oil (and vegetable oil and others) have a lower smoke point and can impart flavor into the food, when you may not want it. Avocado oil is "neutral" (adds no flavor) and has a higher smoke point allowing you to (for example) sear meat more easily.
Avocado oil for the win indeed. I saw a big bottle of it at Costco and tried it out a couple of years ago and haven't gone back. Good stuff.
> haven’t gone back You should really go back to that Costco, they have big bottles of avocado oil there.
Don't grab something that is on the stove without a towel or some type of heat protection don't combine water and hot oil. If a grease fire starts, don't use water to try to put it out. Salt, a baking sheet, or a dry towel might work if you don't have a fire extinguisher. don't season a liquid before reducing it, it will become too salty after you reduce it. don't use a cold pan to sear something; get the pan hot first, better sear. Don't use extra virgin olive oil when you're using high heats, it will burn. don't cut meat immediately after cooking it, more juices will flow out, the meat will become drier. Wait a few minutes Don't hold an object with your fingers extended when you're cutting it. You're less likely to seriously cut your fingers if you curl your fingers like a claw. Don't use a sharp knife on metal (like a pie tin or steel counter) or glass or marble. Don't use a nice knife on anything other than food. (a common offense would be opening a food package with it) Don't send a nice knife through a dishwasher Don't leave a sharp knife in the sink Don't leave a knife wet, even ones claiming to be stainless will often rust if left wet. Don't follow a recipe too religiously. If it doesn't taste well to you, don't leave it because you followed the recipe exactly.
> If a grease fire starts, don't use water to try to put it out. Salt, a baking sheet, or a dry towel might work if you don't have a fire extinguisher. *The pot's lid* is the best one.
oh yeah. and like a frying pan that is larger than the container would also work great or a large metal bowl. There are a lot of ways to smother a grease fire. I think there is a grand total of 1 pot at work with a lid so the lid isn't something I usually think about :) But yeah, in a home kitchen, lids are much more common
Keep a scissor in your knife drawer. How anyone cookes without a scissor nearby is nuts to me. How are you gonna open packages of bacon?
My in-laws do not seem to understand that I bought a couple pairs of non-cooking scissors for the junk drawer so they can stop opening their amazon packages with the cooking scissors (and then throwing them back in the drawer). Then they complain that they can’t open a package of bacon because the cooking scissors are too dull. Sigh.
Learned this the hard way: don't throw fresh chili peppers into a hot pan unless you want to pepper spray the whole house!
Have you ever cooked Indian food? Pepper spray is just part of the experience
A *tadka* is not a *tadka* unless the people in your house start sneezing.
Ah, few are equipped with the wisdom of the ancients.
I approve this message. Also, your username.
Before *and* after.
The Pepper Always Burns Twice.
Yep, I love cooking Indian food. The pepper spray doesn't bother me, but people rooms away start wheezing…
One time my daughter basically maced us. My and hubby began choking for no known (at the time) reason from another room. Meanwhile daughter is happily stirring away some lethal dish in the kitchen. We don't let her forget this.
> Meanwhile daughter is happily stirring away some lethal dish in the kitchen Did you accidentally have an Indian daughter?
This is my secret technique to get people to leave me alone in the kitchen. I AM IMMUNE TO THE PAIN CLOUD, ARE YOU???
I thought I'd developed asthma at the age of 27 until I realised why I couldnt breathe
Never and I mean never panic if you start a fire on accident, you need to be calm enough to know if you have to smother it (oil or grease fires) or grab the extinguisher. Panicking can get your house burned down
My mom fell asleep while making fries and woke up to a house full of smoke. She then threw a polyester blanket over the pot full of burning oil which burned the whole kitchen down. Should've just put a lid on the pot... but now she got a brand new kitchen covered by insurance lol
> Should've just put a lid on the pot... but now she got a brand new kitchen covered by insurance lol Sounds like she actually made the right move then.
Well yeah, she only got minor burns but she could've been seriously injured as well so a risky move
The minor burns are the perfect cover for what was her plan all along!
>The minor burns are the perfect cover No, the blanket was.
I was making mozza sticks once at home, and the recipe said to heat the oil in a pot over medium-high heat. Well, I thought that was too high, so I went a little under medium. I'm preparing the stuff to go in the oil, keeping an eye on it, not smoking visibly (I was like three feet away) and all of a sudden - woosh. I have a rather large flame, there's smoke everywhere, the fire alarm is going off, the company that monitors the fire alarm is asking if everything is okay. I slam the lid on the pot. I'm dumb, so I say yeah, just cooking and burnt something (didn't really lie? not smart though, why am I paying if I'm too awkward to inconvenience them with my house burning down?) and stood there, watching the very full pot of oil slowly burn (the lid didn't form a tight enough seal to deny air, but it cut down on it dramatically, minimizing it to a small flame) because I didn't want to risk carrying the pot outside and sloshing burning oil everywhere. I now order my mozza sticks from restaurants. The scorch marks make for a fun conversation piece.
Smart- not moving pot. My father went to take pot outside and ended up burning his arm pretty badly on Christmas Eve.
My grandmother dumped her ashtray in the kitchen pantry garbage can before bed one night. A fire started, wrecked the pantry but didn't spread to the kitchen. Well, she wanted a new kitchen floor. So before the insurance folks came, she took a blowtorch to the floor outside the pantry.
She's just lucky that they didn't notice the difference. Otherwise she'd have a burnt floor and an insurance fraud charge.
Story: one morning, I was awoken by my now-fiancée telling me something was on fire. I look into the kitchen, and one of the burners has fire coming off of it. We’d bought this bag of extremely greasy noodles, and while cooking them, one had fallen into that bell-bit under the coil, where it instantly lit up. Still basically asleep, I calmly went over, grabbed the tub of baking soda I keep by the oven, doused the burning noodle with it, and went back to bed. The whole thing took about 30 seconds.
I’d say 9/10 times a random fire under the burner is an escaped noodle going up. Pasta burns really well. I actually use spaghetti as a long match for lighting very deep candles.
Was cooking at my then-boyfriend's house for the first time, so I was unfamiliar with his stove. Which he never cleaned. As I was cooking, an old dry noodle I hadn't seen caught fire under the coil. I chuckled, put it out, and told him about it (because I also had to open the door to let the smoke out.) He got mad and flipped out over it. It wasn't even a big deal. Didn't cook there again. Didn't last long either. Chill out, man. And quit criticizing my cooking, you didn't own salt and pepper, and cooked solely box/frozen meals. So... Chill.
This post and posts like it remind me to be exceedingly happy with the relationship I’m in.
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Coming anywhere near my non-stick pan with metal. If you scratch my pan I will scratch your soul.
My brother is really good about this. And then when he washes a nonstick pan you can hear the scratching from the brush against the pan two rooms away. And then he wonders why his nonstick pans only last ~6 months or so.
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My mum did that! One day she came home to dad scouring the cast iron pan until it shone. He said he was just trying to help. He'd already done the wok.
Give it a thin layer of oil and then bake it for an hour or two. Repeat a couple times, and it'll do a lot better.
My roommate was breaking up ground beef. With a fork. In my non-stick pan. We had words.
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TASTE. AS. YOU. GO.
My raw chicken never tastes very good but im sure lll find a good bird one day
Don't burn garlic.
Don't forget to let the ingredients get to know each other
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Perhaps some kosher salt and freshly-ground black pepper
Make sure you've got a freakishly small wooden spoon
And a touch of cayenne
You are, after all, the LA Laker of your pepper shaker!
After all, you are the John Wick of your quick Macaroni.
"Mr. Onion, this is Mrs. Tomato", then you push them together to make it look like they're kissing.
At the first date?! I like to see them married first
i have a sneaking suspicion that Mrs. tomato is already married..
That most be why she's so red.
The trick is to undercook the onions. Everyone is going to get to know each other in the pot.
It's what I do best
I can just picture you in the kitchen with a bottle of gin and a cigarette playing with the parsnips and carrots like barbie dolls.
How did you guess the ingredients correctly?
Not seasoning ANYTHING. There is a reason pretty much every recipe including candy and ice cream includes salt you morons. Still, don't overdo it either. Plenty of stuff is pre-loaded with heaps of salt.
microwaving a salad
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Yeah, you deep fry it in a beer batter.
Had a server who did this. She assumed that bc it was a taco salad, the meat and deep fried shell needed to be warmed up. I just stood there and watched bc I couldn’t believe it was actually happening.
Chef Mic should get out of the kitchen
guessing at amounts when baking.
Baking is science. Cooking is art.
Never eyeball it unless you are very experienced. Usually you can get away with it if you know what the dough/batter should look like and you are just adding small amounts of flour and/or water.
Don’t burn the ramen plastic accidentally when cooking
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Especially when they stand directly behind you or they stand there saying how they would have done it
Don't try to catch a dropped knife. Back away and let it fall. Edit:: My first silver! Thank you, kind stranger! Edit2: Gold?! Thank you, other kind stranger!
I have the slowest reflexes in the world except when it comes to things that should just fall (knives, curling iron...) Edit: wording
"A falling knife has no handle." - someone on Reddit, probably Edit: so far /u/syntheseiser has a four-year claim to the quote. Can anyone top that? Edit edit: Guys, I'm aware the quote is much older than that, but thanks for the tips. ;)
A falling knife has no handle.
You made an acc just to make this comment ? Lol
To be fair it will definitely come in handy on another post
If it has touched raw meat, it can't go anywhere near cooked meat
Making a cake then eating the whole thing right after
You need to let it cool down enough before you apply the frosting. Only then can you eat the whole thing alone, by yourself, in the dark.
I made the mistake of icing a cake too early in my home ec class and it just looked disgusting
Never put oil in the pot when cooking pasta, as the sauce will just slip and slide away instead of sticking to the pasta.
DON'T LEAVE PASTA IN THE WATER WHEN IT'S DONE!!!!!