People Online Trashed These Well-Known Food Hacks That Are Useless In Real Life (28 Responses)

Cooking can be extremely fun or tiring, depending on whether you enjoy the process or not. A Gallup and Cookpad study of cooking across the world found that Northern, Southern, and Western Europe cooked the most, with an average of 7.8 home-cooked meals a week. That’s a lot of tasty dishes being prepared!

A survey about cooking habits of people in the United States found that 50% of the respondents were okay with spending 30–60 minutes cooking a weekday meal. Creating a meal from scratch can be time-consuming, especially if you have to wash the dishes afterward. Culinary hacks can make your life easier, but this list shows that not all tips are useful.

Bored Panda reached out to Eb Gargano, the creator of Easy Peasy Foodie and a professional blogger and foodie. She shared examples of food hacks that didn’t work for her, along with great cooking hacks and tips to make the process simpler. One tip she didn’t like was: “Peeling ginger with a spoon: It’s super fiddly, and there’s absolutely no need – just leave the skin on and grate your ginger on the small side of a cheese grater! (Much cheaper than buying it pre-chopped, too!)” 

Another interesting example that Eb Gargano shared was, “Removing the stone from an avocado with a knife: I’ve nearly sliced my hand so many times trying to do this until I realized that you can just cut lengthways down the middle of the remaining half avocado and the 2 avocado quarters just come right off. I reckon I’ve probably saved myself a trip to A&E (The ER) by avoiding this hack!” It’s shocking to note that there have been 50,413 avocado-related knife injuries from 1998 to 2017.

Eb had a few more examples to share with us, like: “Peeling chickpeas to make smoother hummus: Who on earth has time for that? Just invest in a decent blender, use canned chickpeas, and follow a good recipe… and you can make really great homemade hummus in 5 minutes.”

“A garlic press: Just why? They are so annoying and fiddly to use… and just about impossible to get clean! Again, just grate it on the small side of a cheese grater. Much cheaper than buying it pre-chopped, and you can just throw the cheese grater in the dishwasher afterwards… and it actually gets clean,” she stated. If you love cooking, you’ll probably also agree with most of the examples she shared.

All of these food hack examples might seem absurd when you actually think about it, but there are certain gems that you should definitely try. For example, meal prepping is something that can save you time and energy so that you don’t have to constantly plan what to cook. Research has found that nearly 9 out of 10 Americans have meal prepped at least once, and 44% tend to meal prep on a regular basis.

Here are a few tips from Eb that you’ll actually find useful when cooking: “Traybakes: just throw a bunch of ingredients into a tray and then let the oven do all the hard work! Using plain microwave rice for egg fried rice: This saves so much time and palaver! You need rice to be cold to make good egg-fried rice, which means you either need to cook and cool rice or magically have some you made yesterday in the fridge… Instead, I use plain microwave rice, and it means I can have a really authentic-tasting egg-fried rice on the table in under 15 minutes.”

A poll of 2000 adults found that 31% didn’t have enough time to cook, 24% didn’t have enough knowledge of cooking, and around 15% worked too late to be able to cook fresh meals. People find it daunting to start cooking, and many don’t even know what to begin with. To help beginners in the kitchen, here’s what Eb advises, “Find a good recipe book or website (ahem, like mine) that has simple, straightforward recipes that are written in plain English and just have a go!”

“Start with simple recipes, like traybakes, soup, egg fried rice, pasta dishes and easy cakes. And don’t be afraid of making mistakes. In fact, don’t think of them as mistakes at all, but rather ‘experiments’… you won’t love everything you cook, but that’s part of the fun! You learn through experimentation,” she says.