The kitchen is a battlefield that can be incredibly stressful for beginner cooks. The kitchen doesn’t have to be a place of stress and discord— elevate your experience in the kitchen with these five tips today!

 

Properly Heat Stainless Steel Cookware To Avoid Sticking

To avoid having food stuck to your stainless steel pans, you need to learn how to heat it properly before frying it. The best way to test if your pan is hot enough to avoid sticking is to drop a few drops of water on it. The pot or pan will be ready when the drops of water immediately sizzle, forming beads that roll around freely on the pan. 

After the pan is sufficiently heated up, add oil and wait another minute for the oil to heat up. Once all of those steps are done, add your food to the surface and enjoy.

A stainless steel pan can turn non-stick if it’s heated well enough and can even brown delicate food like fish or eggs.

 

Season Your Food To Taste

The trick to getting fantastic food every time is ensuring that it’s properly seasoned to your taste. If your food often feels bland or lacks something, you should start learning how to season it! You can’t do much about variables like the freshness of ingredients, but you can ensure that you season your dishes properly before you eat them.

Add a little salt and pepper first, and then add more if you need. Remember, you can always add, but you can never take away. Make sure that you add seasoning little by little as a rule of thumb. Sprinkling salt and pepper higher up allows the seasoning to coat your food evenly, so make sure you do that too.

 

Invest In Proper Measuring Tools

Getting measuring cups for your kitchen saves you the hassle of trying to eyeball ingredients for a dish that requires exact measurements. For beginners, eyeballing measurements for ingredients can be incredibly difficult, so having a tool that can help make it marginally easier is a blessing.

Make sure you get dry and liquid measuring cups to make sure that your measurements are as accurate as possible, even in different mediums. Measuring spoons are also an excellent middle ground for liquid, and dry ingredients since the differences in the amounts are menial.

 

Forgo The Bench Scraper

Although the bench scraper is an amazing tool if you frequently bake or make bread, if you’re just chopping food— you don’t need it. After chopping your food or ingredients, just use the dull end of your knife to scrape the contents from the work surface to a bowl or pan.

Using your hands to transfer your onions or meat to a pan is unsanitary and considerably less efficient. Using the hole on your chopping board also makes it so that you avoid spilling your chopped ingredients.

 

Always Cover The Pot

When boiling water or simmering your food—you should always cover the pot. Putting your pot on high but having the lid off is a waste of energy.

The water heats up and boils faster when the lid of your pot is on because you trap in the heat and steam inside the pot. The only time you may want to have an open lid when boiling water is if you’re cooking pasta since it wouldn’t fit in the pan and since pasta already cooks incredibly fast on the onset.

 

The more you cook, the more you gather experience. Learn from that experience, and you’ll be an outstanding home cook in the future!