Top Kitchen Tips

Here are some of the top kitchen tips that I've come across in various books:

1. Use a raw spaghetti noodle to see if a deep cake is done baking.
2. When a recipe calls for dough to be formed into balls, use a melon scoop to ensure that the balls are uniform in size.
3. If you make your own bread crumbs or croûtons, make them with the leftover heat in your oven after you turn the oven off from baking another item.
4. Rather than paying too much for premade dough in a plastic tub, make the dough yourself ahead of time and store it in your own plastic tub. Sugar cookie, chocolate chip, and peanut butter dough all freeze well.
5. Use an onion chopper to quickly make graham or saltine cracker crumbs. The crumbs will have the added benefit of being more uniform in shape than those made with a rolling pin.
6. Instead of warming stick butter up repeatedly to take small pats off of, use a potato peeler. The pats will be uniform in size and you don't risk the danger of allowing a dairy product to warm and cool repeatedly.
7. Out of confectioner's sugar? Run granulated sugar through the blender. The texture won't be exact, but it will be close enough.
8. When you need to add butter or shortening to a recipe with your mixer, heat the blades in hot water first. The warm blades will aid in the butter and shortening mixing quicker and will prevent the butter and shortening from sticking to the blades.
9. To make it easier to find recipes in a cookbook, highlight the titles of your favorite recipes in the cookbook index.
10. A pipe cleaner can be used to clean the nooks and crannies of a mounted can-opener. Don't forget to clean the blade of your can opener regularly!

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