7 Tips, tricks and kitchen hacks to make your life easier.
Hack your kitchen with the tips and tricks below:
- Keep your butter in the freezer and then grate it for baking and pastries. It mixes into the flour more easily and melts much quicker.
- It will be easier to slice meat into wafer-thin carpaccio, if you place your meat in the freezer for a bit.
- Pineapple contains a chemical called bromelain, which boasts a mixture of enzymes capable of digesting proteins. Jelly and other gelatines get their structure from links formed between chains of collagen, which is a protein. When you add pineapple to jelly or gelatine, you break the links as fast as they form, so the gelatine never sets. The enzymes in bromelain are deactivated once they have been heated to about 70°C. So, while fresh pineapple prevents jelly from gelling, gelatine made using canned pineapple (which was heated during the canning process) won’t ruin your dessert.
- Store your tomatoes at room temperature and not in the fridge. It prevents them from losing their flavour.
- Use overripe tomatoes to make tomato purée, but make sure you rinse them first and trim away any mould. Roughly chop the tomatoes, transfer them to a food processor, season generously with salt – this will help extract more juice – and blitz to a purée. Use in your Bolognese sauce or to make tomato sugo.
- It is much easier to peel the shells off your boiled eggs if you add some bicarbonate of soda to the boiling water. Pop the eggs into cold water once boiled and peel after they have cooled.
- Grease measuring cups with cooking oil or coat with cooking spray before measuring sticky ingredients like honey and syrup. This helps them to slide right out!
READ MORE: 7 more kitchen hacks to improve your life
