Super Quick Video Tips: How To Make a Homemade Knife Protector
High-res
Bake Like a Boss
If your baking marathon has left you with a shortage of cooling racks, place three or four canning jar rings on the countertop. The elevation of the rings allows for air to circulate below the cooling item. Find more cooking tips and tricks here.
High-res
Protect Your Recipes While Cooking
Place a zipper-lock bag flat on the counter, slide the paper recipe right into it, and zip it shut. Gallon-sized bags work nicely for 8½ by 11-inch sheets, while sandwich-sized bags work well for recipes mounted on index cards. Here are more useful cooking tips and tricks.
High-res
Portion Your Butter, Better!
Cutting butter with a chef’s knife can be a slippery proposition. Avoid that by using the sharp edge of a metal bench scraper to cut cold butter into uniform pieces. Find more tips here.
3 Tips For Banana Success
1. Place overripe bananas in a zipper-lock plastic bag and freeze them. When you’re ready to make banana bread, thaw the bananas on the counter until softened.
2. Know your banana. There are hundreds of varieties - baby bananas are floral sweet, Orinoco bananas have lemon undertones, and red bananas offer apple and raspberry aftertastes.
3. Kick up your banana bread with caramelized bananas: roast bananas for 20 minutes until black-skinned, cool, and peel and mash as the recipe directs. The bananas will be sweeter and more intensely flavorful.
Ready to go bananas? Our Banana Split Cake is cool and creamy.
3 Tips For Avocado Success
1. Use a pastry blender instead of a fork to mash avocados more quickly.
2. Check an avocado for ripeness by flicking its small stem. If it comes off easily and you can see green underneath, the avocado is ripe. If the stem does not come off or if you see brown underneath it, the avocado is not ripe.
3. To cleanly remove pits, slice around the avocado with a chef’s knife. Twist the two halves apart. Stick the blade sharply into the pit. Lift the knife, twisting the blade if necessary to loosen the pit. Use a large wooden spoon to safely pry the pit off the knife.
Now try our Pineapple-Avocado Salsa, amazing with fish, chicken, or by the spoonful.
High-res
STALE COOKIES NO MORE
Sure, you can try to eat an entire tin of soft, chewy cookies before they grow stale and harden—or you can store them along with tortillas and parchment paper. The tortillas fit tidily into the tin, where their moisture keeps cookies soft for days. Start by tracing the bottom of a cookie tin on a sheet of parchment paper, then cut it out and repeat as needed. Layer the parchment, a tortilla, parchment, and layer of completely cooled cookies in the tin. Repeat until the tin is full, ending with a layer of cookies. Get more tips here.
High-res
Sticky ingredients like honey take their time flowing out of a measuring cup and require a spoon to scrape out the remaining bits. To make neat and quick work of this task, spray the measuring cup with nonstick cooking spray before filling it. When emptied, the liquid will slip right out of the cup. Get more tips here.
High-res
It can be difficult to use up a pound of bacon before it becomes rancid. Freezing is the best way to preserve it, but if frozen in the original package, it’s impossible to later remove just a few slices at a time. To solve the dilemma, roll up the bacon in tight cylinders, each with two to four slices of bacon. Place the cylinders in a zipper-lock bag and place the bag flat in the freezer. (Once the slices are frozen, the bag can be stored as you like.) When bacon is needed, simply pull out the desired number of slices and defrost.
Whack Your Pomegranate Free of Seeds.
(Source: youtu.be)
3 Tips For Corn Success
1. When grilling, you can tell that corn is ready to come off when the husk picks up the dark silhouette of kernels and begins to pull away from the tip of the ear.
2. Using a knife to butter an ear of corn can be messy. If serving sliced bread with dinner, spread a thick layer of butter on the bread. Hold the bread in one hand and roll the hot ear of corn over the buttered bread, evenly coating the corn with butter.
3. Here’s an easy way to husk corn: with the husk still attached, cut off both ends of an ear of corn (a serrated knife works best.) Roll the ear on the counter and the husk comes right off. Finish by removing any remaining threads of silk.
Ready to cook? Try our simple, classic Grilled Corn on the Cob.
High-res
How To Know if an Avocado is Ripe
Squeezing the fruit is a good way to determine its doneness—the flesh should yield to moderate pressure—but it’s also a good way to mistake a bruised avocado for a ripe one. To be sure, flick the small stem of the avocado. If it comes off easily and you can see green underneath it, the avocado is ripe. If the stem does not come off or if you see brown underneath it, the avocado is not ripe.
