Our 10 Most Loved Cooking Techniques, Tips, & Tricks

Kitchen Stories turns 10! To celebrate our birthday, we are launching a series of articles to bring you our Kitchen Stories Top 10: most loved recipes, best cooking hacks, quickest weeknight dinners, personal team favorites, and most controversial recipes. Ready for the best of the best? Let's go!

In 10 years, we have not only shared with you countless recipes for everyday cooking, classics from international cuisines as well as gourmet dishes, but also learned a lot ourselves along the way! As part of the Kitchen Stories community, we wanted to pass our learnings on to you, which is why we have created a variety of cooking tutorials as well as tips and tricks to make cooking easier and faster for you.

Here are our best 10 kitchen tips that have become an integral part of our cooking routine in the past 10 years.

By the way: To celebrate the anniversary, we are publishing our brand new cookbook "Everyday Cooking" on October 2nd. Pre-order now via our store! (Available in German language only and shipping to Germany, Austria & Switzerland)

1. Silky smooth pasta sauce

20 min

13.5k

Cacio e Pepe

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For a creamy pasta with a silky sauce, you don't need any other ingredient than the water you cooked your pasta in. The pasta water absorbs the starch of the pasta during cooking, which naturally thickens your sauce. You can find more information and recipes in our article.

2. Homemade hollandaise: easy and fast

10 min

vegetarian

5.2k

Super easy blender hollandaise

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It is not always easy to make a perfect hollandaise sauce at home. Traditionally, egg yolks are whisked in a bowl over a water bath until creamy. Instead of a water bath and a stove, all you need for this recipe is a blender! This way you'll always get the perfectly creamy hollandaise sauce without fail. Extra tip: This trick can also be used for homemade mayonnaise.

3. The crispiest potatoes

30 min

vegan

10k

The best crispy roast potatoes

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All you need is a common household ingredient to give you the crispiest potato experience: baking soda! Also, use floury potatoes that you boil in water before baking. What ends up looking like overcooked potatoes is the trick to deliciously crispy potatoes when fried or roasted.

4. Get the most out of your ginger

Instead of laboriously cutting away the peel of your ginger with a knife, you can easily scrape it off with a teaspoon. You can even get to the tricky crevices and crooks! In addition, less ends up in the organic waste and you can use up as much of the ginger flesh as you can without peeling it away.

5. Get more juice out of your lemon

A super trick to squeeze more lemon juice without a citrus press: Use the microwave! Yes, you have read that write. Simply place your untreated lemon in the microwave for about 10 seconds on high heat, let it cool briefly, and you will be rewarded with plenty of sunny lemon juice when squeezing. My colleague Annelie does it in the video and shows you the (impressive!) difference.

6. Rethink the way you use the strainer

You probably use your strainer to drain pasta, vegetables, and more. But how do you use it exactly? Here's a simple but genius trick we've learned over the years: Place the strainer on or inside the pot before draining to remove the water from the pot, instead of pouring out the contents of the pot into the strainer. This way, the contents stay in and don't have to be transported back into the pot.

7. Super crispy salmon skin

30 min

3k

Crispy salmon rice bowl

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According to my colleague Harriette, these three points are the key to a successful, crispy salmon skin: 1. Remove the fish from the packaging. 2. Pat the skin side dry. And 3. place skin side up on a plate, uncovered, in the refrigerator for about 1 hour to allow the skin to dry. The result can be seen and heard!

8. Always perfectly poached egg

A delicate poached egg with runny yolks is always a highlight at a weekend brunch. However, mastering this is not always easy. The ingenious trick is to just add vinegar to the water. By adding it, the egg white coagulates better and clings directly to the golden-orange yolk. Important: The water should not boil, but only simmer.

9. Crispy, sizzling bacon without standing vigil by the stove

Another highlight in the morning is crispy fried bacon. To keep your morning more leisurely and less multitasking, the oven does most of the work here! These bacon strips from the baking sheet are just as crispy as from the pan, only you don't have to stand (un)patiently by the stove for them.

10. Best way to heat pizza the next day

Pizza from the day before still tastes good cold, but with this hack, you can recreate the last night’s warmth in no time without sacrificing the flavor! No wonder one of our most popular video tutorials tells you how to do this in 3 different ways: once using a pan and in two ways in the oven.

Do you also have a favorite cooking tip? Then share it with us below in the comments!