Easy Ideas To Boost Your Cooking Skills

Cooking is a mundane chore to a lot of people. The following article will give you ideas to make your cooking experience a fun one.

Ensure that you properly maintain your cooking utensils on a regular basis. A chef's knife, for example, is of no use to you when blunt so ensure that these are sharpened on a regular basis. When purchasing a chef's knife look for one with a long and wide blade as this will give you better control and chopping speed.

To prevent the crust of your filled pies from getting soggy, coat the dough with egg white first and then bake it for about five minutes to allow it to set. You should then fill and bake as you normally would. This will stop your crust from absorbing too much of the filling during baking and becoming soft and wet.

When you are chopping herbs before your meal, a tip that you can follow is to throw a little bit of salt on the chopping board. This will give you extra friction so that you can maximize your cuts. Quality cuts of herbs will lead to a great meal when everything is complete.

Always add oil to the side of the pan when sautéing. If you find that you need more oil in your pan while you are cooking, never put it right in the middle. Add it to the side of your pan. That way, it will be sufficiently heated by the time it reaches the food.

Basil is one of the best things that you can add to a dish and looks great as a decoration to any type of meal. Simply add a few pieces of basil to give your meal spice and improve the overall aesthetic beauty to the dish you put on the table.

For a good pumpkin cooking method, make sure the pumpkin is upright, you then want to cut it directly down in half, in the middle. Place the two halves on baking sheets. Sprinkle some water on the sheets and bake them around 350 degrees Fahrenheit; they will be done in about an hour.

Replace your spices twice a year. Quite often, spices pass their sell-by-date before you use them up, losing their flavor. If you know you will not use the whole spice bottle, give some of it to someone you know.

If you find yourself with part of a loaf of stale bread, don't throw it away or feed it to the birds. Instead, turn it into croutons for a soup or salad by tossing cubes of bread with oil and seasonings and baking them until crispy. You can also turn stale bread into breadcrumbs for many recipes.

Keep a supply of chopped onions all ready to go, in your freezer. It is easy to be dissuaded from cooking a particular recipe because you don't want to go through the tears and smell of cutting up onions. When you are cutting one onion, you might as well take the time and cut up several of them. Put them in a baggie and freeze them!

As we have discussed, there are a large variety of things you can do to make cooking much more fun and enjoyable. Follow the easy tips laid out in this article to turn cooking from a bore into something you'll look forward to.