Check out the video above for more details. When working with beginning cooks, the most common inefficiency I see is in task planning. Say you've got four onions that need to be peeled, finely diced, and transferred to a large bowl. If you do each of these steps to each onion one at a time, you spend a lot of time moving back and forth between the board, the compost bin, and the bowl, picking up and putting down your knife, and mentally preparing yourself for the next task.

Instead, work like a factory: start by cutting off the end and splitting all of the onions. Next peel all of the onions. Then make all of your horizontal cuts, followed by all of your vertical cuts. Finally, transfer all of your perfect dice to the bowl and clean down your board and countertop before you move on to the next task.

Apply this kind of thinking to all of your tasks and you'll find that the time you spend in the kitchen will not only be more efficient, but also neater, cleaner, and more organized.

New York Site Editor Max recommends always having a garbage bowl near your work station. I wholeheartedly agree, and I'd add that a bench scraper is an essential piece kit as well. Not having to walk back and forth to the garbage every few minutes can take a lot of drudgery our of your prep, and nothing's better than a bench scraper for moving large quantities of fiddly ingredients or scraps from point A to point B.

Serious Eats Drinks Site Editor Maggie Hoffman says that she freezes wine in ice cube trays and stores them in the freezer, ready to be pulled out one at a time and added to pan sauces and stews, saving you from having to open a whole bottle every time a recipe calls for some wine.

Similarly, if you make yourself a large batch of stock, freeze it in convenient portion sizes in the freezer—ice cube trays and half-pint deli containers are great for this—then transfer them to a plastic freezer bag to be pulled out an used whenever you need fresh stock.

One more freezer trick: freeze things flat and stack them. Whether it's soups, stews, or ground meat, the flatter and wider you can get them, the faster they'll freeze and defrost, which not only makes you more efficient, it also improves the quality of the food the longer something takes to freeze, the more cellular damage it will suffer.

When freezing raw meat, soups, and stews, if you have a vacuum sealer, use it! Otherwise, place foods in heavy-duty freezer bags, squeeze out all the air, lay the bag flat, and use your hands to work the contents into as flat and even a shape as possible.

When freezing vegetables, cut them into pieces 1-inch or less and blanch any green vegetables. Place them on a large plate or sheet tray spaced apart from each other and freeze them solid before transferring to a plastic freezer bag and storing flat. The fastest way to defrost meat is under a cold running tap.

But if you want to save water and speed things up a bit, place your meat on an aluminum sheet tray or skillet. Aluminum is a great conductor of heat and will draw energy from the surrounding environment into your frozen meat much faster than a wooden cutting board or wood or stone countertop.

You can cut defrosting times down by about 30 percent this way. It also works on soups, stews, and anything frozen flat. To slice avocados for salads or guacamole, split them in half , remove the pit by whacking it with the heel of your knife and twisting it out, then slice it directly in the skin using the tip of a paring knife or chef's knife.

When you then scoop it out with a spoon, you'll have slices ready to go, with less mess than trying to fiddle with slippery peeled avocado a cutting board. I might get a lot of hate for this one, but truth be told, I use pre-peeled garlic almost exclusively.

I find peeling garlic form a whole head to be a bit of a pain in the butt and usually can't be bothered. The pre-peeled stuff, so long as you buy it fresh, will last for weeks in the refrigerator and despite what some snooty chefs may tell you, it tastes just fine. In fact, I challenge anyone to taste identical dishes made in a triangle test with pre-peeled and whole head garlic and identify the odd one out.

Associate Editor Niki suggested this one and it might sound like the most obvious one on the list. But let me tell you something: back when I use to work for Cook's Illustrated magazine, part of our interview process for new hires was to have them cook through recipes.

Their only task was to read the recipe and follow it exactly as written. You wouldn't believe the number of folks who would start cooking before reading through every step only to find that they were missing a tool they needed at a time sensitive juncture, or that they hadn't divided ingredients properly.

Do you REALLY need to have two pans going at once, or can the processes be combined? There are two reasons to use a precise scale when baking: accuracy and efficiency. Using volumetric cup measures is extremely inaccurate for compressible foods like flour.

Depending on your scooping or sifting method, a cup of flour can weight anywhere between four and six ounces. That's a difference of 50 percent! With a scale, on the other hand, you know that your cup of flour is exactly the same time after time, giving you better, more consistent results.

On Serious Eats, our standard cup conversion is five ounces of all-purpose flour per cup. A scale will also save you clean up! Rather than using different cups to measure out every ingredient, just place a bowl on your scale, and measure directly into the work bowl as you go.

For instance, when making a pizza dough, I know I can add 1 kilogram of flour, grams of water, 25 grams of salt, and 10 grams of yeast and have a dough that will behave exactly as I expect it to, all with only a single bowl to clean. Measure content performance. Understand audiences through statistics or combinations of data from different sources.

Develop and improve services. Use limited data to select content. List of Partners vendors. Here in Cooking School, we offer tips and techniques that every at-home-chef should know. Like we make brittles with caramelized sugar. We can caramelize onions and carrots by cooking these high-carb veggies on slow heat for a very long duration till they naturally turn brown and develop a caramelized flavor.

You can also add very little sugar to intensify the effect. That is another french technique where you soak fresh or dried fruit in liquids like vinegar, alcohol, or sugar syrup.

You macerate fresh fruit to bring out the liquids like in jam making, to make them soft. This is a french cuisine technique that is used to create moist heat in the oven that helps bake soft texture cheesecake and pudding without cracking and getting dry.

It can also be used to cook or heat food in controlled heat rather than placing food on direct heat. For example, melting chocolate on bain Marie as direct heat can burn the chocolate.

Pickling is a method of preserving food in an acidic solution using vinegar, or salt solution brine. Common examples are pickling gherkins, olives, cheese, chilies, mangoes, and so on. Similarly, oil pickles are also popular in South Asia where food is completely immersed in the oil to avoid bacterial growth by restricting oxygen through the oil barrier.

Basting is another precious technique in which melted fat or pan dripping is poured over meat to keep it moist and introduce flavors.

This technique is used in making steak as well as making roasted chicken or turkey in the oven. It is an Indian technique very much like searing to bring thick concentrated, mildly caramelized flavors.

It also helps release oil and darken the color of the gravy. When you cook your curry or stew on high heat until most of the water dries and you reach the stage where the oil is released from the gravy and visible on the sides of the vessel.

You've done the bhunai correctly. And curry has rich intense flavors. Glaze is a widely used cooking technique all around the world. As the word denotes glaze means to add a shine to the food by adding sugar, honey, or brown-based sauce.

Glazing is often attained through the icing, frosting, and jams on desserts. On bread and other bakery goods, glazing is often attained by brushing egg white or just some fat.

On vegetables, glazing is attained by cooking veggies with little honey and sugar. The veggies are cooked until naturally savory fluids and sugars are realized and caramelized producing a glazed on the veggies as well as imparting delicious flavor.

This is another South Asian technique in which smoked nutty flavor is added as the final touch to the food. The flavor is similar to charcoal grilled food. This ancient technique was first used to preserve uncooked food. To do smoking food is placed in a lidded pot.

A piece of red hot charcoal is placed in the middle of the food and a few drops of oil are drizzled to create smoke.

The lid is covered immediately over the pot to trap the smoke. The trapped smoke is slowly absorbed in the food creating a chargrilled flavor.

This technique is used to flavor pan-grilled meat and kebab as well as rice dishes and lentil soups. As the name implies it simply means leaving food in the fridge or in the pantry for a certain period of time so the color, flavor, and texture of the food changes.

Aging helps mellow down acidic flavors in food, in certain food it develops umami flavor like in cheese and beef. Some examples are alcoholic beverages, cheese, condiments like mustard sauce, balsamic vinegar, hoisin sauce, and certain pickles. Similarly aged and cured beef and salmon are examples of concentrated taste.

Aging of raw rice specifically basmati rice is a practice that helps produce less sticky and separated rice grains after cooking. Bhagaar or tempering is a South Asian cooking technique where spices and herbs fried in ghee or butter are added as the last touch to the curries and daal lentil soup.

This introduces a desirable flavor and aroma to the dish. Bhagaar is not to be confused with chocolate tempering which is a completely different concept.

Dum means holding steam in the pot. The involves wet heat cooking or steaming the food placed in a sealed pot. This technique is used in cooking meat as in Rosh as well as cooking rice like in biryani.

This is an age-old South Asian cooking technique in which wheat flour dough is glued between the pot and lid to seal the pot and trap the steam. The food is cooked on slow heat. This technique makes highly aromatic rice and absolutely tender and juicy meat. Useful Read: Biryani Making Secret Tips.

This one's simple and most of us are doing this all the time. After cooking food, you add a little liquid to the pan to dissolve the brown residue. This flavored liquid can be used to make sauce or gravy. This technique is called deglazing the pan. After baking or grilling let the meat rest for a short while this allows the juices to permeate the food.

While if served and chopped immediately the juices are likely to overflow quickly losing a lot of flavors and moisture making the meat dry. The dairy-based foods are like yogurt-based sauces and desserts get more flavorful after resting for a few hours.

Similarly, most vinaigrette and dressing also benefit from resting. Finally, many South Asian food like nihari , korma , haleem also taste best the next day. Your email address will not be published. Skip to main content Skip to primary sidebar Skip to footer menu icon.

search icon. Home » Cooking Tips Posted by Mariam Sodawater on Aug 1, Updated Aug 1, These techniques will help you get those desired results from your recipes. Roasting: It is very similar to baking as it is done in an oven and has moderate heat exposure for longer periods.

Barbecuing: In simple terms, it is grilling food on hot coal creating charbroiled or smoked taste in the food.

Broil: In this method, food is exposed to direct and intense heat in the oven. Rotisserie Rotisserie is a method of spit roasting in which meat is skewed on a spit and cooked slowly.