Cooking and baking can be fun, but sometimes also quite tedious. But the following 15 tips and tricks will help you prepare food with less effort, significantly reduce your cooking and baking time, keep you fresh longer , and much more.
1) Prepare eggs in the oven
Especially if you want to prepare many eggs at the same time, the oven offers itself as an alternative to the cooking pot. Put the eggs in a muffin tray so they do not roll around and can be easily pushed into the oven and taken out again.
In order to get soft eggs, you cook them at 200 ° C for 10 minutes in the oven, hard eggs need 14 minutes at the same temperature.
2) Shorten the cooking time of potatoes
To shorten the cooking time of potatoes, use a straw to drill one or two holes across the potato. Thus, the cooking water can now reach the inside of the potato, which would otherwise cook until very late.
To drill the straw into the potato, it is best to hold one end of the straw with your thumb and drill the straw into the potato with force and the open end first.
3) Refresh hard bread
In a paper bag, bread is less moldy than in a plastic bag, where moisture can form. However, bread in a paper bag becomes hard as stone over time. To make the bread soft again and therefore enjoyable again, all you need is a plate, a pot and some water.
Place the pot on the stove and fill it with water only one or two fingers wide. Place the plate in the pot and place the loaf on it. Put on the lid and heat the water. The steam makes the old bread fresh after a few minutes.
4) Protect the cake base from softening
For fruit pies there is a risk that the fruits soften the cake bottom. To prevent this, sprinkle the cake bottom with custard powder. The fruit juice is bound by the custard powder and thus does not penetrate into the dough.
5) Skin hazelnuts
If you need not only peeled but even skinned hazelnuts for a recipe, you can remove the brown skin with little effort by first removing the nuts from the skin and roasting for 10 minutes at 180 ° C on a baking tray in the oven.
Then put the nuts in a sieve and shake it vigorously. Due to the friction, the skin, which has already broken open after roasting, almost dissolves by itself.
6) Make half fat butter yourself
Semi-fat butter from the supermarket often contains chemical additives such as emulsifiers. If you want to do without such additives, but not a reduced fat spread, you can easily make your own semi-fat butter.
All you have to do is stir a piece of roomy butter with condensed milk. Since you basically dilute the butter with the help of the condensed milk or stretch it, the fat content of the resulting mass is reduced by about 50%.
7) Keep half onion fresh
If you only need one onion half while cooking, you can keep the other half fresh longer if you lay them unpeeled with the cut surface on a waxed sheet of paper. The coating protects the onion from drying out just as well as the onion skin.
8) Peel egg by blowing
A hard-boiled egg can be peeled without cumbersome frying and without damaging the protein by removing the top and bottom of the shell. Blow vigorously into one of the two holes, causing the egg to slip out on the other side.
This is possible because the injected air pushes between egg and shell and separates them.
9) Keep fresh pie
At birthday parties or other family celebrations, the cake is rarely eaten completely. To help you enjoy the cake a few days later, without drying up your inside, a couple of slices of toast will help you.
Cut the toast bread slices to the height of the cake, press them on the cut surfaces and fix them with a toothpick. Instead of the cake, the toast bread slices now become dry and sticky.
10) Remove with ice cubes grease eyes
The professional chef speaks of “degraising” when skimming fat from sauces and meat broths. To free your soup of grease eyes, you need nothing more than a very cold metal trowel.
Put a few ice cubes in the trowel and drive over the soup. As soon as the cold metal touches the soup, the fat sticks to the trowel.
11) Grill fish in rhubarb leaves instead of aluminum foil
When fish is prepared during a summer barbecue, it is wrapped in aluminum foil so that it does not stick to the rust. However, an environmentally friendly alternative to aluminum foil is rhubarb leaves.
Halve the rhubarb leaf, wrap the food in it, and puncture the leaf with toothpicks to hold it together. As wrapped in aluminum foil, you can now grill the meat from all sides without it crumbling or sticking to the grill. In addition, the rhubarb leaf gives off a slightly citrusy taste, which harmonises best with the taste of the fish.
12) Enjoy ketchup sliced drip-free
What would a real hamburger be without ketchup? If only the sweet red sauce would not drip down the sides! But this annoyance can be avoided by drying the ketchup and slicing it to place it on the burger like cheese.
To do this, spread the ketchup on a sheet of baking paper and heat it for about 90 minutes at 80 ° C in the oven. Then you can slice the dried ketchup and put it on the burger. Unlike in the liquid state, the ketchup in slices will not soften the bun.
13) Cut soft tomatoes
Soft tomatoes are almost impossible to cut. The slices, which one gets painstakingly, are usually still politely circumscribed with “shapeless”. To counter this, put the soft tomatoes in ice water for 15 minutes before splitting them. As a result, the skin contracts, the tomatoes are fixed again and you can slice them without much effort.
14) Bake without eggs
If you do not have an egg on hand or want to do without animal products, you can use bananas instead of eggs for baking. Because they contain protein and starch, ripe bananas can also bind the dough. Half a banana corresponds to one egg.
15) Prepare with champagne bottle of Christmas goose
Some settle for Christmas Eve with potato salad and sausages, others are content with nothing less than a Christmas goose. In addition to the elaborate and lengthy preparation is still half an eternity in the oven added until the poultry is ready for consumption.
But a small champagne bottle can shorten the cooking time by up to 30 minutes. Prepare the goose and stuff it as usual. But before you put it in the oven, you additionally push a small, clean, label-free glass bottle with the bottleneck into the goose. The bottle heats up in the oven, causing faster cooking inside the goose.
No complicated handles, no extraordinary everyday items that have nothing to look for in the kitchen: These 15 tips are easy to implement and everything you need for it, you certainly already have at hand. Just try it out the next time you cook or bake.
