Stay sharp in the kitchen
It can be tempting to cut corners to try to save time.
You can’t be bothered washing a colander so you try to drain your pasta by gingerly holding it back with a fork as you pour away the water, but what happens?
After getting a face full of steam and burning your hand, you end up losing half your spaghetti into the sink anyway.
The fastest and most efficient way of doing something is to use the correct equipment. I can guarantee trying to work out how to get away without using a colander, grater, or extra tray is going to take you longer than the 10 seconds it takes to wash it.
We live in a golden age of technology and that goes for the kitchen, too. Induction cooktops, steam ovens, pressure cookers, and food processors, are fast, but the ultimate time-saving appliances are ones that most of us already have, and which don’t cost an arm and a leg: a microwave and a kettle.
A kettle is the most efficient water boiler in your kitchen. Cook vegetables or seafood by simply pouring hot water over them, no pot required.
Cut 10 minutes off your pasta water heating time by boiling water in the kettle first. Pour hot water over plates to heat them in seconds.
As for the microwave, use it to par-cook vegetables before stir-frying, or even to cook them completely.
Hit potatoes with 10 minutes in the microwave to shave half an hour of their time in the oven. Rice that takes 40 minutes in a rice cooker or 20 minutes on a stovetop, can be done in a microwave in 12-15 minutes.
It’s not cheating, it’s smart.
An efficient kitchen has the things you cook with regularly set up right next to the cooktop.
Go to a Chinese restaurant and you’ll find salt, sugar, shao xing wine, stock, vinegars, soy sauce, oyster sauce, cornflour, and perhaps garlic and ginger, all within reach of the chef at the wok.
In a French kitchen, it might be butter, salt, pepper, wines, brandy, stocks, and a few other odds and ends.
There are no rules about this. What goes on to your own seasoning station will depend on what you like to cook.
Next to my stove I have salt, sugar, soy sauce, oils (olive and canola), peppers (black and white), shao xing wine, homemade teriyaki sauce, vermouth, and the remnants of any bottles of wine I’ve opened recently.
They are all things I use regularly in my cooking, and having them on hand makes things much faster and easier. – goodfood.com.au