8 Cooking Secrets & Tips

Whether you're a novice or a professional chef when it comes to cooking, you'll benefit from all-time useful hacks & simple solutions. Discover handy tips for anyone who loves cooking and wants to simplify their time in the kitchen. These quick and effective cooking tricks are hopefully going to make your time in the kitchen just a little bit happier!

1. Perfect cherries—nailed it!

Here’s a cheap, clever way to pit cherries without a specialized tool.

1. Drive three clean stainless-steel nails close together through a piece of clean, thin scrap wood in a triangle.

2. Gently push a cherry down onto the sharp tips of the nails to extract the pit. Entry and exit wounds are minimal.

2. Handling a ham with a hacksaw

A country ham’s large size makes it unwieldy to cook, especially because the ham should be simmered in a stockpot before being roasted. To get around this problem, use a hacksaw to remove the hock end of the ham. The ham should then fit into a large stockpot or roasting pan. Save the hock for use in cooking beans or greens, or for making soup.

3. Alternative turkey tool

If cutting the backbone out of a turkey or chicken to butterfly it is too much for your kitchen shears or knives, try a clean (or new) pair of garden clippers. After cutting the bird’s skin with a knife, use the sturdy blades of the clippers to cut through the bones and wing tips.

4. Clever cleaver substitute

If you don’t have a meat cleaver or the heavy chef’s knife or kitchen shears required for hacking up meat, you can make do with a new hatchet from the hardware store. Not only is this an excellent substitute, but it also costs under $10.

5. Pastry toolbox

Baking buffs know how quickly all the necessary tools of the trade can overtake limited space in their kitchen drawers. Avoid this problem by storing your baking gadgets (cookie cutters, icing spatulas, measuring cups, and the like) in an inexpensive plastic toolbox, purchased from a hardware store.

6. Hardware pie

If you can’t find your pie weights next time you’re baking a pie (or if you just don’t own any), improvise with a handful of nails, bolts, and screws. Placed on top of the aluminum foil on the dough, they work just as well as fancy weights. They will get very hot in the oven, however, so be careful when removing them.

7. Make any bowl a nonslip bowl

To keep bowls from slipping in the test kitchen, we usually set the bowl on top of a damp cloth. For a more permanent solution, apply rubber coating (the kind used to coat the handles of tools, available in hardware stores) to bowls that tend to run away. To create a nonskid surface on the bottom of a slippery bowl, dip its bottom in rubber coating. (do not put the coated bowl in the dishwasher.)

8. Instant ice water for pastry

A plant mister is a terrific device for distributing a minimal amount of water evenly over a mixture of fat and flour when making pie dough. Fill a mister bottle with about ¼ cup water and store it on its side in the freezer. When making pastry, just grab the bottle from the freezer and fill it with cold water, which quickly chills even further upon contact with the ice.