RECOGNIZABLE? THOSE COOKING TIPS YOU HAVE TO LOOK UP EVERY TIME
Say wine, snacks, or haute cuisine and the food lovers of online food magazine FavorFlav know where to drink, how to eat, and what to cook. This time our chefs serve you: Recognizable? Those cooking tips you have to look up every time
Just like everyone has those go-to recipes that go in rotation (sometimes I eat pasta pesto every week and you don't hear me complain), there are also those fixed cooking facts that I just can't remember. Do you have that too or should I be worried about my memory?
How hot should the oven be?
Somehow I can't get it in my head how hot I should set the oven when I want to roast potatoes or vegetables. I now have a post-it memo in the book Cooking with Karin where that is written. Do you want to know? 175 degrees, 20 minutes. Right? Let me check.
How much couscous
I make couscous at least once a week couscous, and every week I look it up: how much couscous per person, and how much water? It doesn't say on the package. Making couscous by feel results in nothing: couscous soup or a gigantic pot full. I've now written it with a marker on the bag, maybe this helps.
Rice cooker
Cooking rice in a rice cooker is a gift from heaven. Really, buy one of those: perfect grains, not dry and not sticky. If you can remember how much rice and how much water you need to put in. Every time googling on my phone to find it back.
1-2-3 dough
That was an easy mnemonic in culinary school: for sand cookies you just make a simple 1-2-3 dough. That stands for 1 part sugar, 2 times as much butter, and 3 parts flour. And an egg. Or was it the other way around? In short, looking it up every time.
Cooking caramel
Do you have to stir the sugar that caramelizes or not? Just check a video before I make caramel sauce for the thousandth time.
Hot water or not?
Which vegetables do you put in with cold water and which go in hot water? Constantly flipping through the old Margriet cookbook of my mother to find out until I learned a handy rule: everything that grows above ground goes in boiling water, what grows underground (potatoes, beets, and carrots) wants to go in the pan with cold water.
Pasta per person
And again enough pasta cooked for a small Italian village, and we are eating for two. Not only a waste to throw away, but the ratio of sauce-cheese-pasta is also completely off. A pasta ring is the solution, or the scale: 75 grams uncooked per person is really enough, even if you eat like a construction worker.
