Home Cooking Hacks to Elevate Your Meals

April 23, 2020
by Mimi Morley Learn

    Chef Mimi is a whizz when it comes to whipping something up something delicious, no matter how many ingredients you have on hand. Here are some home cooking hacks that will elevate your meals and don’t require any fancy ingredients, simply what you’ll already have in your store cupboard!

    Consider contrasting flavours

    It may seem wrong, but adding salt to sweet dishes and sugar to savoury dishes will make your feed taste delicious! Salt brings out the flavours and adds some nice savouriness (that you didn’t even know you needed, but you did!) – think salted caramel! Adding sugar to tomatoey dishes balances out acidity – sometimes you will taste a tomato sauce you are making and you know it needs something… it’s probably sugar, some people even use tomato ketchup!

    It’s all in the seasoning

    Adding salt during the cooking process rather than at the end when making a stew or curry will make  your food taste so more delicious – that way the salt can penetrate the food slowly and bring out the flavour of the ingredients.

    Here’s a few other tips on salt:

    Salting mushrooms when they’re cooking draws out the moisture so will make it hard to get them nice and crispy – salt them at the end!

    If you‘re wanting to make a delicious dressing for tomatoes, but don’t have much to hand, just simply chop them  up, pop them in a bowl with some olive oil and some salt and pepper. Set aside for a few minutes and the salt will bring out the delicious tomato juices. This will mix with the olive oil to make a delicious homemade dressing!

    Salting your potato, pasta and rice water is really important – if you‘ve ever had a roast potato and thought ‘how does this taste so delicious’ (other than being crunchy and golden), it’s probably because the water was salted when the potato was parboiled (think back to GCSE science and osmosis).

    Don’t pour away your pasta water

    It’s a classic Italian trick to use pasta water in sauces, but the same principle can be used with potato water – both cooking waters will contain starch which will help thicken the sauce and create a lovely silky finish.

    Fresh herbs

    Constantly having a source of fresh herbs might seem impossible. However, a simple trick is to store herbs like flowers – cut the bottom 2cm off the stems and keep them in a vase of water for ultimate longevity.

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