30 Times People Discovered A Game-Changing Cooking Hack And Just Had To Share (New Pics)

The r/FoodHacks Reddit community is dedicated to delivering quick and simple tips and tricks on prepping food that would be delicious, nutritious, and wouldn’t demand architectural nor spiritual sacrifices to make it happen.

The last time Bored Panda covered hacks, tips and tricks from the community, it had 2.1 million members but has since then (almost two years later at this point) doubled and stands at 4.3 million, making it the Top 1% by size on Reddit.

As you probably might have already expected, the community is all about sharing advice that’s both simple and useful for every caliber of cook.

Advice spans across pretty much any domain of the cooking process: everything from preparation to technique and methodology to frugal solutions to make cooking convenient. And fun, don’t forget that! Oh, and creative, definitely that too.

Much, if not all of it, is all about making it approachable for everyone. And once you’ve mastered it, you can go full gourmet all while being an amateur underneath it all.

Now, sure, you can argue that cooking isn’t easy. Skill is only part of the equation, and lacking even that can seem like a hurdle that’s impossible to overcome.

All around food expert and historian Rachel Laudan elaborated on why cooking is hard in a blog post of hers. Besides actual skill, there’s also things like supermarket inventory, food handling and storage, mental capacity for recipes, basic knowledge of chemistry, alchemy, and any other -y to even begin to understand how to turn something raw into something edible.

If you were to consciously consider all the fine detail that goes into cooking, it’s not just throwing peas into a pan and calling it a day. No, Laudan estimates even after decades of cooking, it still takes her at least 8 to 12—at least—hours per week to make cooking happen at all. In context, that’s a work day and a half. Throw in planning, shopping and all that jazz and you got yourself a part time job as a domestic chef without even interviewing for the position.

But, practice makes perfect. Cooking is no exception. If you can get across the initial hurdle of deciding what you want to cook and invest yourself in it, you’ll get progressively better.

Nobody is born a master at it. Blogger Christine Amorose Merrill points that out in a piece of hers on how practice makes perfect in the kitchen. One thing she always hears from her grandmother, who in her eyes is the epitome of cooking, is “I’ve had years to practice. Of course I’m going to be better at it than you!” It takes time, patience and reflection to make it work. No other way about it.

And you’d be surprised how far simple culinary tricks can take you. You don’t need dimensional thinking or the fingers of a god to perfectly line a tray with baking paper. You don’t need to cut yourself, nor be meticulous with how you cut an onion. Heck, you don’t even need to cut open a butter packet at a restaurant and use anything other than a fork and fingers to spread it on bread as an appetizer or side-whatever-those-things-are-called. Learn that and you’re golden!