8 Kitchen Hacks To Make Your Every Day Smoother And Easier

Kitchen disasters have the worst timing! Right when you have hungry guests waiting is when your dish burns to a tarry black and all of your efforts are wasted. And that’s just one type of kitchen tragedy. There are many more that, try as you may to prevent it, are too far gone to salvage in any way!

But don’t worry – you’re not alone. Even the best chefs go through bad days. But they can be turned into good ones with the help of some simple kitchen hacks that, to be honest, almost work like magic! Here are 8 of them to save your day when you need it the most.

1. Perfectly Crispy French Fries

Your French fries aren’t going to turn out as crispy as you want them to every time. Sometimes, they get soggy, tasteless, and (quite frankly) ruined. To get goldenly, crunchy fries the next time (and all the times after that), here’s what you have to do:

• Cut peeled potatoes into 1cm wide juliennes.
• Wash the cut potatoes with water.
• Put the washed potatoes in a pot with water and salt and boil them for 30 minutes.
• Strain and allow it to cool. Once cool, put them in the freezer for a few hours.
• Once frozen, take them out and fry them in hot oil to get super crispy fries!

2. Prevent Mold On Bread

If you bake your own bread or are just too lazy to get a fresh loaf every day and want your bread to last long, here’s what you have to do:

Preserve your bread by putting it in a plastic bag along with a stalk of a celery and sealing it tight. The bread will absorb the moisture present in the celery in order to stay fresh for longer. Also, since celery doesn’t have a strong taste or odor, your bread will retain its original flavor!

3. Maintain The Color Of Veggies

Cooked vegetables tend to lose their original color. However, you can keep your veggies as colorful as they were when fresh by rubbing them with lemon before cooking them. This works really well on red veggies such as bell peppers and carrots! The flavonoids in the juice of a lemon help impart color to certain types of fruits such as cranberries, apples, strawberries, and onions!

4. Salty Soup Fixer

Added too much salt to your soup by accident? A quick way to fix is this is to add one peeled and quartered potato in your pot of soup as it boils. The potato will absorb the extra salt so that your soup is saved from being inedible! You can add more potatoes if you feel the salt content is too high.

5. Easy Meat Tenderizer

If you’re a non-vegetarian, you know tenderizing meat is no easy task. And that chewy, rubbery taste is the worst of all! But no more. Here’s a simple way to tenderize meat:

Unwrap the meat and clean it (in case it’s fresh from the butcher’s). Now, sprinkle some baking soda all over it and thoroughly rub it in. Put the meat on a tray and place it in your freezer for about 4 hours. Next, defrost the meat and wash it with water to remove the baking soda. Baking soda breaks down the proteins in the meat, tenderizing it as a result.

6. Superfast Ice Cubes

On hot summer days, nothing beats the heat as an icy cool drink! But what if you run out of ice? As counterproductive as it may sound, the quickest way to get some ice is to freeze boiled water!

Just boil some water in a pot and pour it into the tray. Put this tray in the freezer and voilà! Your ice will freeze quicker than before. Boiling water freezes way faster than that at room temperature, which is known as the ‘Mpemba effect’ (1).

7. Prolong Your Knife’s Life

Over time and with constant use, knives tend to lose their sharpness. However, you can prolong the life of your knives by keeping them in wooden cabinets or on top of a magnet. Some other things you can do to achieve the same purpose is not use them on glass, marble or ceramic surfaces. Drying them off immediately after washing them will also help.

8. Remove Burn Stains From Frying Pans

Once your dish burns, not only is your meal ruined but so is the frying pan you cooked it in. Burnt food is very hard to scrub off and ordinary soap and water just won’t help! This simple trick will help though:

Take a wooden spoon and use it to scrape off burnt food from the pan. This will help preserve the Teflon coating. Next, pour 2 tbsps. of vinegar into the pan and boil it on the stove. Remove the pan and let it cool. Next, pour the vinegar out and wash your pan as you would. The burn stains will be wiped clean!

These easy hacks can prove to be life-savers in the trickiest of situations! So, bookmark this page and keep it handy for when you need it.

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