Tips & Tricks

Seasoning

You should try to salt your dish in layers. Salt can do all sorts of great things to your dish when done correctly and with the right kind of salt. For example, when you are cooking onions, pop a pinch of salt in the pan along with them. This will draw out some of the moisture from the onions helping them to sweat and cook evenly without burning.

The type of salt you use in different stages of cooking also matters. You should avoid using regular table salt during the cooking process as if heated too much it can oxidize and produce a metallic after taste. Stick to kosher or Himalayan salt here. When finishing a dish opt for a flaky sea salt to provide a little saltiness and some crunchy texture.

Cooking Time

Do not just add everything at once. Different foods cook at different rates. A particularly common mistake is adding garlic to a pan at the same time as onions. When frying this will most often result in your garlic burning and giving a nasty bitter taste. Garlic cooks very quickly so add it to your pan just before you break the fry with some kind of liquid.

Flavours

Preparation

A simple tip, but I almost always boil my kettle when I start cooking. By doing this I have hot water at the ready when I need it. This means that you will not spend long waiting about for your water to boil wasting time that could lead to some parts of your dish being ready before others. Preparation is KEY!

When you are stir frying or frying multiple things that have slightly different cooking times, always chop everything in advance. The quick nature of stir frying means you only have so long in between adding in your ingredients. If you chop as you go you could risk things overcooking or burning.

A great tip I have learned over the years is to freeze my fresh ginger root! Too often I had gone to my fridge and my ginger root was mouldy. I also like to grate my fresh ginger with a microplane which was quite hard. Freezing the ginger means you always have fresh ginger on hand and when it comes to grating, its so much easier with frozen ginger.

Useful Equipment

If you can, try to purchase a thermometer. It does not need to be anything fancy, but it is an extremely useful tool in both cooking and baking. When you are cooking meats, prod it at the thickest point to test the temperature, this will allow you to cook your meats to perfection. When baking temperature is a very important factor and can often make or break your success. A thermometer will be particularly useful for working with chocolate, Swiss meringue etc.

One of my most used pieces of kitchen equipment is my pasta machine. It is nothing fancy, just a simple pasta machine which you can find on amazon for around £20. Not only do I use it for pasta but, as you may have seen in some of my recipes, I use it for making gyoza, tortillas, pastry and even marzipan. It is a very multi-functional tool that allows you to roll doughs out very thin and even.