"Dill Pickle Juice": 50 People Share Their 'I'll Never Tell' Cooking Secrets

I throw a cinnamon stick or two into my pot of chili.

I take lazy shortcuts, make the guests do the work, and pretend it’s part of the dining experience. People literally eat it up. Like roasting an entire unprocessed bulb of garlic in oil and showing guests how they can squeeze the garlic out of the skin like a paste and dip bread in the oil. Takes 2 minutes and I don’t have to peel the garlic. Or setting out ingredients for people to make DIY pizzas or paninis.

DIY dishes have been some of my most popular dinner parties, and nobody will ever know I chose the dish at the last minute because I had to clean my house and didn’t have time to make something. I don’t even roll out the pizza dough, I just sprinkle down some flour with a rolling pin and say that’s part of it.

Coffee & chocolate have always complimented & enhanced each other.. As a French chef once explained to me. When in Switzerland you get a small cube of chocolate with your coffee, you put the cube of chocolate under your tongue - every time you take a swig of coffee you wiggle the coffee around in your mouth slowly melting the chocolate which enhances the coffee. Inexperienced people just eat the chocolate & then drink their coffee.

Tripling the butter in mashed potatoes.

My meatloaf is packed with carrots, celery, onions, spinach, and other healthy stuff that my mother's family would avoid. I blitzed in the food processor, sweat them in a pan, and add to the mix. They love it, and request my meatloaf often, they'll never know I'm poisoning them with health.

Also, I add oyster sauce to my pasta salad. My wife knows, but everyone else would probably wig out. Everyone says I have the best pasta salad around.

The absolute key to all of my curries is tomato paste. No fresh tomatoes, or tinned, chopped, diced etc. it creates silky, umami, concentrated flavor.

Putting a couple of drops of toasted sesame oil into the water before making my rice pilaf.

When making home fries, dredge the boiled potato chunks in instant mashed potatoes. It gives them a lovely, crunchy coating.

Huge Secret: DC area resident here. There is a chain of restaurants around the DC area called Flame Kabob that has homemade 'White Sauce" that they serve, which is more addictive than crack c*****e. I spent several years trying to replicate the sauce, trying several dozen recipes. It is said by most kabob gurus to be a "Yogurt" based sauce. I finally managed to get a peek at someone making a large vat of this white sauce in the kitchen of one of their restaurants. Newsflash: It f*****g made mostly from Hellman's mayonnaise, spices, and cucumber, with VERY little yogurt in it. I was shocked, to say the least. Yes, I can now reliably replicate the sauce, and my entire social circle thinks I am some sort of cooking God...lol.

Everyone loves my meatloaf recipe and I’m happy to share the ‘secret ingredient’ - its chorizo. A pound of ground beef, half a pound of ground pork, and a ~3 inch chunk of chorizo. It hides in the background just enough.

I always add around a tablespoon of dill pickle juice into my creamy potato salad and pasta salad dressings.

Also a touch of honey instead of sugar in mayo based dressings is divine.

* Parmesan on tomatoes for sandwiches
* Chili crisp oil on eggs for salads
* Salt in coffee grounds
* Instant coffee in dry rubs
* Turmeric replacing saffron
* Cold day old rice for fried rice
* Yellow potatoes any time a recipe calls for Russets
* Dot of mustard to keep any mayo base from separating
* Taco seasoning instead of standard chili seasoning
* Wrap burgers and subs
* Salt egg mix before scrambling
* Don't stir the rice. Just leave it covered till it looks dry then wait 5-10 minutes.

Tiny cubes of apple in a potatoe salad is the most amazing surprise blast of flavor ever.

I don’t gatekeep if asked, hell I’ll just share for the joy of it.


Gatekeeping “secret” recipes or ingredients is so lame and will make me not want to eat someone’s food anymore.


I’m also really good at reverse engineering dishes anyways. So I have pissed a few snooty people off pointing out I can taste the “secret” ingredient.


Good. You shouldn’t be trying to prevent the sharing of ideas and good food.


Here’s one of my weirder ones that is really nice; when making a blackberry pie or cobbler- add about 1/8-1/2 tsp basil, finely ground. Yes. Basil. Also about 1/2 tsp black pepper, freshly ground is best.


It brings out the deep jammy berry flavors more but you can’t taste the spices.



(And it very well may be a thing already but I did stumble across it on my own).

Oh, that soup I made that you think is so flavorful and restaurant-like? I just made it with a pressure cooker like the restaurant would lol

Also butter. SO much butter.

Adding gochujang paste to cheese toasties adds umami in a way that adding more cheese doesn't. Not a secret tho, just that I only just discovered this myself.

There is a specific meal in my country which requieres weird combo of ingredients to be perfect. Imagine hash browns, sauerkraut and slow roasted pulled pork all mixed in one fatty and fulfilling dish. To keep the hash browns from soaking up the fat so much and to keep the whole think moist, a little milk or cream should be poured in before adding the meat. Which, combined with sauerkraut, is the the ultimate hell for many people.

I'm not gatekeeping this because I want to keep my secret recipe, but because people find it disgusting. I don't get it, but it's true. Nobody cares about cream in sauerkraut soup, but find it weird in this one.

I sub espresso for the water in the Ghirardelli box brownies. I also love adding a good tahini swirl (chocolate tahini is next level) & some flakey salt on top. If I’m feeling lazy, I use blonde espresso from Starbucks. Not a secret, and I will tell anyone who asks. If you need something easy but exciting to bring to a party, make these and enjoy complements & a slight ego boost lol.

Vegemite in bolognese.

I know there's a well-known cookbook that covers this, but:

If anything you make seems bland, you need to add more fat (oil or butter), more acid (tomato, citrus, or vinegar), more heat (cayenne, hot sauce), or - most of the time, and especially with desserts - more salt.

No matter what spices, no matter how fresh your ingredients, whatever is not popping with your dish can be fixed this way.