Hot Food Hacks Posts
Decoding Produce Stickers: The Hidden Meaning Behind Fruit & Vegetable Labels
Like Costco's price codes or the tags on your bread, the numerical codes printed on those sticky little fruit and vegetable labels can reveal a lot of information to us consumers. Once you understand the codes, you can look at that little label (also known as PLU, or "price look up" label) and know whether the produce you're about to buy or eat was treated with pesticides, genetically modified, both, or neither. Before we go any further with deciphering the codes on these labels, let's take a...
How To: Skip the Oven—Microwave Your Fish
Fish are delicate, flaky, and can be damn tricky to cook; more often than not, you end up with a hard, dry block of flesh that makes your taste buds sad. And the best ways to cook fish that you know of—c'mon, who doesn't love a fried fish—take way too much effort for you to bother with on a weeknight. Or maybe you're looking for a healthier way to enjoy fish that doesn't require batter or frying at all.
How To: The Formula to Making a Perfect Cake Without a Recipe
Baking a cake is relatively easy... if you happen to have a cookbook or some boxed cake mix nearby. And though you can use the internet or your favorite cooking app, it can be nice to just cook without a recipe. That seems impossible with baking, which is such an exact science, but it's actually relatively easy.
How To: Ripen an Avocado in 10 Minutes or Less
Summer cookouts and barbecues come with a lot of delicious foods, but to me, there's nothing better than dishes heaped with avocados. From guacamole to simply eating an avocado right out of its skin, I devour this fruit constantly—but it's one that can be tricky to find perfectly ripe.
How To: The Secret Trick to Peeling Shallots More Easily
Certain foods like garlic, onions, and shallots are food staples for a reason—they're unbelievably flavorful and cost very little. However, with their papery thin skins, they're also a pain to peel.
Turkey Day Hacks: 7 Alternatives to Traditional Stuffing
When it comes to Thanksgiving, some people live for stuffing (or dressing, if that's what you call it). Personally, I love all stuffing, even the boxed kind. However, even the classics can start to feel a little staid and dull after a while.
How To: Fix Runny Fruit Pies with These Two Surprising Food Hacks
Pies and soufflés: these are two dishes that can try even the most experienced cook. Berry pies can be especially challenging, since the high water content of cherries, strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries often leads to a big, leaky mess once you cut into your beautiful pie.
How To: 41 Household Cleaning Hacks That You Needed in Your Life Yesterday
Cleanliness is next to godliness. My interpretation of that age-old adage means that keeping your house clean is just as un-fun and boring as being a goody two shoes. That's why they call things like laundry and doing dishes "chores," I assume. Yuck.
How To: Make Truly Crispy Roast Potatoes in the Oven
A perfectly cooked roast potato is a study in contrasts: the outside should be crisp, crunchy, and salty, while the inside is tender and fluffy. Too often, however, roast potatoes come out overcooked, greasy, and tough.
How To: Remove Old Food & Drink Stains with This Cheap, Easy Homemade Solution
I own two aprons—a cute one for company, and another for the hard-core cooking duties, like cutting up chicken and making stock. The sad truth is that I almost never remember to wear either of them. So, much of my clothing ends up spattered with grease, liquid, and bits of fruit and vegetable. While stain-removing sprays, sticks, and pens are all effective to a certain extent, they have two drawbacks—they're expensive and sometimes I need to use them in large quantity, like when a piece of eg...
How To: Make Delicious 3-Minute Meringues in Your Microwave
Meringues are a French and Swiss dessert made of whipped egg whites and sugar, and they are light, sweet, and crispy confections. To make traditional meringues, you beat egg whites into soft foamy peaks, and then keep whipping as you gradually add sugar until the peaks become stiff. Once you've reached the right consistency, you bake them at a low temperature in the oven for a long time. They take both technique and time.
How To: The Ultimate Garlic Cheat Sheet: Which Type of Garlic Goes Best with What?
Go to a chain supermarket, and chances are you'll see one type of garlic—maybe two or three if you're lucky. However, there's a mouthwatering slew of Allium sativum out there, far beyond those papery white bulbs most of us encounter at the nearest Stop 'n' Shop.
How To: Oops! Food Too Spicy? Here's How to Fix It
The headline above may have some spice addicts shaking their heads, but, believe it or not, there are people out there who either don't like or can't handle a ton of spice.
How To: Make a DIY Roasting Rack for Your Turkey
One of the golden rules to cooking a Thanksgiving turkey is to place it on a roasting rack before it goes into the oven. Missing this step and cooking it directly on the pan will burn the bottom of the bird, resulting in overcooked, dry meat.
How To: A Step-by-Step Guide to Homemade Sushi Rolls
Without a doubt, sushi is one of my favorite foods—dainty and delectable, while also fun to make. So let's get started with maki rolls, aka makizushi, probably the most iconic form of sushi. You know, the one filled with rice and your standard sushi ingredients, rolled up in a sheet of dried seaweed.
How To: Use Cake Flour to Get Pillowy Soft-Baked Cookies
For those of you that prefer a soft-baked cookie that is fluffy in the middle, using cake flour instead of regular all-purpose (AP) flour is your secret baking weapon. "But I don't have cake flour," you protest. Fear not: if your kitchen is sans cake flour, you can easily whip some up by mixing together AP flour and a little bit of cornstarch for the same results.
How To: Turn a Tortilla into a French Crêpe
Making a good crêpe takes practice and commitment. The batter is rich—most recipes incorporate melted butter, whole milk, and several eggs—and the cooking of the crêpe requires good technique. You have to learn to deposit and swirl just the right amount of batter to get the thinnest possible crêpe, and then learn how to loosen the entire circle and flip it over without tearing or snagging.
How To: Cold-Smoke Meats Indoors Without Any Expensive Equipment
For me, the smoky brilliance of a good barbecue can't be beat. The way the smoke flavor seems to permeate every part of the meat is, in my opinion, the closest thing we have to food magic. Throw a piece of meat in a smoker with some select wood choices, wait a few hours, and suddenly you have something rich, complex, and bursting with smoky flavors.
How To: Get Crab & Lobster Meat Out Without Any Special Tools
For many of you, the carving fork only comes out at Thanksgiving as an essential turkey-slicing aid. Perhaps you pull it out of the knife block to slice up the occasional roast. But the carving fork (also known as kitchen fork) can be used for many more tasks around the kitchen, and some of the more unusual involve your favorite shellfish.
How To: The Unexplainable Trick to Removing Bitterness from Cucumbers
Every now and then, you'll bite into the end piece of a perfectly good cucumber only to get an unwelcome bitter and acrid taste. This happened to me for years, no matter how carefully I selected my cukes, although I generally had better luck with ones I got from local growers and the farmer's market.
How To: Make Perfectly Sized, Uniform Patties for Sliders & Mini Burgers Without Getting Your Hands Dirty
There is no such thing as a pulled pork slider. In fact, there is no such thing as a pork slider. Or a chicken slider. Or turkey or fish. The term "slider" actually means a lot more than just a hot miniature sandwich, and if it's not beef, it automatically missed the first cut. Sorry, but that is not a slider above.
How To: The Science of Sourdough & Why It Tastes So Much Better in San Francisco
As a lover of food, I'm often asked, “If you could only have one food the rest of your life, what would it be?” My answer is always the same: sourdough bread. (Okay, it's not always the same... I usually cheat and say sourdough, fancy cheese, and a good beer.) Admittedly, I'm biased by my own sentimentality. My mother is an expert bread baker, with a major in making sourdough. Her sourdough starter is older than I am, and in all honesty, she's made thousands of loaves, each better than the ne...
How To: This Yogurt Trick Will Help You Get Professional-Tasting Sourdough Bread at Home
Sourdough is a delightful twist on your traditional bread, but creating and maintaining a sourdough starter can be a headache for many home bakers.
Cook Like a Chef: Use Parchment Paper Lids Instead
Simmering or poaching food is a total pain sometimes. The problems are numerous: a layer exposed to air often dries out and creates a gross skin that can ruin the texture of the sauce, the poaching liquid evaporates too quickly and causes the poached protein to burn, and so on.
How To: 5 Simple Tips to Upgrade Your Packaged Ramen Noodles from Instant to Gourmet
Instant ramen has been popular in the States for decades, and restaurants that serve the real thing in any variety you can imagine have been popping up everywhere in the last few years. But you don't have to go out or cook all day to have a gourmet ramen experience.
How To: Zest Citrus Fruits Without a Zester Tool or Microplane
When I first started cooking, if I saw lemon juice or zest in a recipe, I almost always left it out. Unless it was a main component, I never thought it made much of a difference in the overall flavor of the dish, but I couldn't have been more wrong.
News: Ditch Your Mandoline for a Handheld Slicer Instead
At first glance, mandolines seem like such a good idea. After all, who wouldn't want a tool that can create picture-perfect and paper-thin slices of fruits and vegetables that would put even the sharpest chef's knife to shame? Your French fry game would never be the same. Salads would become works of art. Your casseroles would cook perfectly evenly, since the ingredients would be cut uniformly.
How To: 6 Delicious Ways to Use Up Leftover Champagne
Unlike wine, you can't re-cork or stopper leftover bubbly after you've opened it, but all is not lost even if you haven't managed to finish every last drop. You can use your leftover champagne to make light-as-air crêpes or pancakes, to create a detox face mask, to cook seafood and rice, or to make dips and salad dressings.
How To: Form a Makeshift Roasting Rack Out of Foil for Crispier & Healthier Oven-Cooked Bacon
There are so many kitchen gadgets that only do one thing. You can buy a special tool to strip the kernels off an ear of corn, de-stem your strawberries, or cut bananas into perfectly uniform slices, but that's all it'll do. It's easy to get carried away, and before you know it you find yourself designating an "everything" or "miscellaneous" drawer. Then there are the tools that have multiple functions, but you know you'd never use them often enough to justify spending the money. Unless you co...
How To: Tell When Your Chef's Knives Are Truly Sharp (And Keep Them That Way)
After years of making do with a cheap knife, I finally bought a really good 8" chef's knife—a Henckels, although I was also eyeing a Global santoku. It quietly but literally changed my life.
How To: Burn Your Cake? Keep Calm & Make Delicious Desserts
We've all been there before. Preheated the oven, popped in the cake, and then became distracted by this, that, or the other... until we either smelled burning or had the smoke detector pierce our eardrums.
How To: Don't Have a Special Cupcake Pan? Here's How to Bake Cupcakes and Muffins Without One
Love or hate 'em, you've got to admit that cupcakes really had their moment. They started rising in popularity back in 2003 with the opening of Crumbs Bake Shop in Manhattan, and quickly became one of the most annoyingly ubiquitous food trends to date. Seriously. Type "cupcake" into Google. While I wouldn't turn it down if you put one in front of me (red velvet, please), I can't say that I was particularly disappointed to hear that the cupcake trend is coming to an end. I'm more of a cheeseca...
How To: One Thing You're Not Doing That You Should for Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies
I have a theory that chocolate chip cookies are the gateway drug to cooking. The recipe is easy, no special equipment is required, and at the end, you get warm, fresh-from-the-oven cookies that are simply irresistible. It's how I got hooked on baking and cooking, and anecdotal evidence (i.e. me asking my other kitchen-obsessed friends and a few culinary students) supports me.
How To: Clone Taco Bell's Meat (AKA 'Taco Meat Filling')
Taco Bell's in the news for umpteenth time, and today the controversy is over their infamous beef taco meat. Gizmodo leaked a picture of Taco Bell's "Taco Meat Filling" and surprise, surprise— it's missing a lot of the "meat" that it claims in its advertisements. Taco Meat Filling Ingredients
Cook for Garlic & Onion Haters: Alternatives & Substitutes
Hard as it is to imagine, there are people out there who loathe garlic and onions. Some might have allergies or medical conditions like IBS, or are supertasters (i.e. people who carry a certain gene that makes them extremely sensitive to how certain foods taste). Others might just be picky eaters.
How To: Use Up Lettuce & Other Greens Before They Go Bad (Without Making Any Salads)
I love me some salad, but I'm also kind of a big baby when it comes to eating them. The greens have to be perfectly crisp and fresh, which is why I'm such a nut about storing them properly, including rethinking how I use my refrigerator, using a paper towel or dry cloth to wrap them, or even puffing a little CO2 into the plastic bag to keep them fresh. I've even developed an arsenal of tricks to restore life to soggy greens.
How To: Dry Fruit in Your Oven—No Dehydrator Required
Dried fruit makes a great, healthy snack by itself, and it's a nice addition to both sweet and savory dishes. Most people assume you have to have a dehydrator to make it at home, but you don't really need one unless you plan on drying fruit pretty frequently. Your oven does the job just fine. Drying fruit in an oven is a pretty simple process: just bake it at a low temperature for a long time. It's usually cheaper than buying dried fruit from the grocery store, and a great way to use extra fr...
How to Prep Tofu Properly: A Beginner's Guide for Tofu Haters
When you know how to cook it, tofu is a delicious dish in and of itself—truly. Too many people have been subjected to poor quality or badly cooked tofu and told to eat it because it's a "healthy alternative" to meat. Usually what they bite into is a bland, rubbery mess coated with a random array of flavors.
Hot vs. Cold Brew Tea & Coffee: Which Ones Are Better for You?
Cold brewing tea and coffee are all the rage, and for good reason: they're idiot-proof. I, personally, am a total dunce at brewing coffee. It either ends up strong enough to peel paint from a car or so weak that you can see through it. Meanwhile, I have friends who inevitably brew green tea to the point where it's painful to drink it.
How To: Yes, You Can Roast Ginger—It's Simple & Gives Any Dish an Intense, Smoky Flavor
Ah, ginger. From stir fry to smoothies, ginger is a reliably sharp and refreshing flavor that adds zing to everything it touches. It may be a pain in the ass to remove the skin from ginger (or not), but the zest it brings to food is well worth the trouble. Don't Miss: How to Brew Your Own Ginger Beer Like a Boss