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You don’t have to be a professional cook to make delicious food. However, we all would love to get some tips from real chefs on how to make our dishes more tasty. CNET asked chef instructor Kierin Baldwin to debunk some of the most popular kitchen and cooking hacks.
She says that using a wine bottle instead of a rolling pin is completely okay – you just have to make sure that the bottle is clean. The chef also confirms a cooking hack that’s been debated online and among cooking enthusiasts for some time. She says that some oil in pasta water really does prevent it from sticking together. You just have to make sure to put the oil in before adding the pasta.
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One less popular hack Baldwin shares is cutting a pizza with scissors. This hack definitely sounds strange, but you just have to make sure that the scissors you use for slicing your pizza weren’t used to cut a kid’s school project with glitter glue.
As long as they’re clean and sufficiently long, it should be fine. Culinary scissors, of course, would be the ideal choice, but who has those just casually laying around the house?
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Another hack you might have heard about is using dental floss to slice soft baked goods or cheese. It doesn’t add the pressure that using a knife would and results in a clean and sleek cut. One thing to remember is that the floss should be without flavor. You certainly wouldn’t want your cinnamon rolls to taste of mint, would you?
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From watching Gordon Ramsay, I first learned that freezing mozzarella makes it easier to grate it. What I did not know was that the same can be applied to ginger. When I was in my Asian cuisine phase, I learned that ginger can be quite difficult to dice or grate. Baldwin advises to freeze it prior to grating. That way you can even skip peeling it.
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Refinery29 also has some one-ingredient cooking hacks. They recommend putting some miso paste in your baked sweet potato. Depending on what kind of miso you use – white, yellow or red – the taste of the filling will be progressively intense accordingly. Miso paste has the combination of all five basic tastes: sweet, sour, umami, salty, and bitter. It’s guaranteed to elevate your simple baked potato to new heights.
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Another cooking tip from Refinery29 that involves only a single ingredient is a budget version of a chicken soup. You can make canned chicken soup taste better if you add a dash of freshly chopped dill. It gives the soup a fresh-veggie flavor that might trick your mind into thinking you’re eating the real deal.
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