8 Culinary Hacks & Kitchen Tips

Here are two tricks for making our favorite oven-fried bacon recipe even better.
A. Minimize cleanup by lining your baking sheet with wide (18-inch) aluminum foil, covering the entire surface, including the sides. Then cook and drain the bacon, as per recipe instructions, and allow the baking sheet and any remaining grease to cool completely. Cleanup is easy: just roll up the soiled foil and discard.
B. Once you’ve started lining your baking sheet with foil for easy cleanup, you can take things a step further by fashioning a makeshift rack from the foil. Crimp the foil at 1-inch intervals before placing the bacon horizontally across the crimps. This technique elevates the strips so that grease drips into the foil crevices during cooking, ensuring a crispier result.

It is important to pick over dried beans to remove any stones or debris before cooking. Try this easy way to accomplish the task: arrange the beans in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet. Sort through the beans, pushing the “checked” beans to one side of the sheet and discarding debris as you go. Rinse the beans before cooking them.

To keep hands stain-free when prepping beets, grasp the cooked (and slightly cooled) beets with a plastic bag, such as one used for produce. Then, working from the outside of the bag, you can rub the skins right off.

Butter can be a tricky thing to measure, especially once the wrapper gets discarded. Here are a few tricks for simplifying the process.
A. When unwrapping a new stick of butter, cut it into tablespoons (using the markings on the wrapper as a guide) before placing it in a butter dish. Now you can grab as many tablespoons as you need without stopping to cut them when you’re busy cooking. Plus, if a recipe calls for softened butter, the smaller pieces will soften faster. Precut butter also ensures that any new or inexperienced cooks in your home will get the right measure of butter without having to cut it themselves.
B. For a less decisive trick, lightly mark all 8 tablespoons with a knife before unwrapping a stick of butter, so you’re always able to easily measure out the amount that you need.
C. For a long-term solution, make yourself a cheat sheet. Staple a clean butter wrapper around an index card and use that to measure small portions of unwrapped butter from the butter dish.

Cutting cold butter with a chef’s knife can be a slippery proposition. When you’re cutting butter straight from the refrigerator, try using the sharp edge of a metal bench scraper to cut it into uniform pieces instead of a knife.

Use an egg slicer to quickly and precisely cut butter into small pieces for pie dough and biscuits.
1. Place up to 4 tablespoons of butter in an egg slicer and push down on the slicing blades to create planks.
2. Rotate the butter a quarter turn, then push down on the slicing blades to create small pieces.

When preparing a recipe that calls for melted butter cooled to room temperature, speed up the process with this method: melt three-quarters of the desired amount of butter on the stovetop or in the microwave. Off the heat, whisk the remaining one-quarter cold butter into the melted butter. The unmelted portion will help lower the warm butter’s temperature in less time than it takes to heat and then cool the full amount.

Make slippery bacon a cinch to mince with the following tip.
1. Wrap the bacon in plastic wrap and freeze for 15 minutes.
2. The bacon will harden just enough so that, using a chef’s knife, it can be chopped as fine as needed with nary a slip.