Chefs’ secrets to spice up your food
Make your home cooking restaurant-level delicious with these tips and tricks
Why does restaurant food often taste better than what we cook at home?
It’s tempting to blame excessive quantities of butter and cream — and occasionally that is the case — but more often the chefs know things that home cooks simply don’t.
Don’t feel bad! They do this for a living, so chefs are bound to have all sorts of tricks. Here are a few to steal and incorporate into your own cooking.
Time
Without a doubt, time is one of a chef’s best tools and most valuable ingredients. It’s long, slow cooking that produces the richest broths, the sweetest caramelized onions and the most tender braises.
Alas, this precious resource isn’t easy for us home cooks to come by. So what can we do?
Accept the fact that rushing rarely does any good, and choose recipes wisely: Don’t start making caramelized onion pizza when the family is already hangry, or pop a pot roast in the oven when dinner guests are expected in an hour.
Lean on pressure or slow cookers, and when you’re able to carve out some cooking time, stock the freezer with long-simmered broths and all-afternoon Bolognese sauce.
35-per-cent cream
When a dish needs richness, smoothness or more body, chefs use cream — 35-per-cent whipping cream, and nothing less.
Just one or two spoonfuls added to a soup or sauce provides more creaminess and velvety texture than five times that amount of half-and-half. Try adding a drizzle to your next pot of chicken curry or steel-cut oatmeal.
Salt
Professional chefs use salt liberally, assertively and with extraordinary agility. This is an easy, big-impact trick to use at home right away.
Tonight, increase the salt you add to pasta cooking water, steamed greens, steaks, roasts or burgers, and by a lot (for every four litres of pasta cooking water, add one tablespoon (15 mL) table salt). These dishes won’t taste salty, but they will taste more intense, like a deliciously concentrated version of themselves.
And before anyone falls to pieces about sodium, remember that Canadians get almost 80 per cent of their sodium not from home-cooked meals, but from packaged and processed foods.
Citrus juice and zest
A squeeze of fresh lemon or lime juice can turn a dish from good to outstanding, and chefs use this trick all the time. Serve fish, steaks and vegetables with a lemon wedge alongside. Even pancakes with maple syrup are brightened by a squeeze of lime juice.
As well, since restaurant kitchens run on such thin margins, every ingredient must be used to its fullest impact. When chefs have citrus fruits, they never waste the zest. In the words of one of my favourite chef-teachers, “you paid for it, don’t throw it out!”
Take the peel off lemons, limes and oranges with a vegetable peeler then wrap in plastic and keep in the fridge for up to a few days. Better yet, when a recipe calls for citrus juice, go ahead and add the freshly grated zest as well.
Heat
They’ve got the burns to prove it, but chefs aren’t afraid to use serious heat, particularly when it comes to meat. The browning that develops on a steak or roast chicken is intensely flavourful, and short of using a blowtorch, you can only create it at the beginning of the cooking process.
When cooking a steak, make sure the pan or barbecue is heated on high for several minutes before adding the meat. For any roast, start the oven at 450 F (230 C) (or higher) for 10 to 20 minutes before reducing it to 325 F (160 C) or so. A headsup for home cooks: high-heat cooking can set off the fire alarm (if only we had restaurant-strength exhaust hoods!).
Fresh spices
When chefs use spices, they usually toast and grind the whole spices themselves. A curry, dry rub or gingerbread made with freshly toasted and ground spices has much more flavour, fragrance and impact. It’s an easy trick to use at home, and all you’ll need is an inexpensive coffee grinder reserved for spices only.
Toast whole spices in a dry frying pan over medium to medium-high heat until they smell fragrant, then grind until powdery. Shell out for certain ingredients Chefs are frugal by necessity, so when they splash out on special ingredients, you know it’s worth it. Best-quality fresh fish and meat are at the top of the list, as are cured meats such as prosciutto and bacon. Pastry chefs often splurge on higherfat butter, good chocolate and pure vanilla.