Twelve Incredible Kitchen Tips You’ll Wish You’d Discovered Earlier

12 Amazing Kitchen Hacks You’ll Wish You Knew Sooner

1. Freezing Herbs in Olive Oil

When it comes to food, achieving that perfect flavor profile can often be a matter of herbs and oils. Using them fresh can make the world of difference! Trouble is, when you buy herbs, you always end up with more than you needed for that one recipe. What to do with the leftovers before they turn bad? Quite a simple solution actually – freeze them in olive oil.

What’s even better is that this hack not just preserves herbs but enhances their flavor too. Afterall, herbs steeped in oil is famously appetising. So next time you find yourself fretting about saving those herbs, remember this trick up your chef’s sleeve.

Rest assured, this is much more than a preservation technique; prepare to be amazed at how it steps up your cooking game. Just think, you’ve got your chicken browning nicely in the pan and then you pop in a cube of rosemary infused olive oil. Delicious!

• The first step is to carefully wash and dry your herbs.
• Next, chop them finely.
• Then place each type of herb in a separate compartment of an ice tray.
• Pour olive oil over the herbs in each compartment.
• Place the tray in the freezer overnight.
• The following day, you can remove the cubes and store them in a bag or container in the freezer.

2. Ripening Avocados Quickly

Ah, avocados – versatile, delicious, but also mighty unpredictable on ripening schedules. They’re hard as rocks, and the next thing you know, they’re mushy and overripe. This can make planning meals involving avocados quite frustrating. Fortunately, we’ve got a hack for this.

The trick is to use the heat from your oven to speed up the ripening process. It turns a seemingly unripe avocado into one ready for that perfect guacamole or toast in no time at all. This way, you can buy avocados whenever they’re on sale and not worry about them going bad.

Now picture this: You planned a fancy avocado-toast breakfast only to realise that your avocados have other plans. No worries! Pop them in the oven and they’ll be right on track to make your meal a success.

• Wrap an unripe avocado tightly in aluminium foil.
• Preheat your oven to 200 °F (93 °C).
• Place the wrapped avocado in the oven for 10 minutes.
• Check if it has softened; if not, leave it for another 10 minutes in the oven.
• Once ripe, remove the avocado and let it cool before unwrapping.
• The accelerated ripening process isn’t perfect, but it achieves fairly good results.

3. Keeping Bananas Fresh Longer

We all love bananas – easy access snacks that come in their own wrappers. But what’s not to love when they turn from bright and sunny to brown and squishy quicker than you can say banana split? Well, there’s quite an easy fix to this problem, albeit a tad unconventional.

As it turns out, bananas ripen much slower when you separate them. So when you get home with a bunch of bananas, just break them apart to slow the ripening process. In addition, wrapping the crown of each banana with plastic wrap reduces exposure to air and further slows down aging.

Consider the following: You’ve returned from grocery shopping with a bunch of bananas, planning to enjoy them throughout the upcoming week. But you notice by mid-week they’re already turning brown. Fret not. Just break them apart, wrap up the crowns and say hello to fresh bananas for longer.

• Separate the bananas after bringing them home from the grocery store.
• Wrap each stalk individually with plastic wrap.
• The wrapping will keep ethylene gas produced by the bananas from reaching other parts of the fruit and fast-forwarding ripening.
• Whenever you take a banana, carefully unwrap and then rewrap the remaining stalks.
• With this, bananas last at least a few days more than usual.
• To make them last even longer, put your wrapped bananas in the refrigerator.

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