Five Ingredients to Have Around Your Kitchen

I hope this list gives you some ideas on other ways to prepare your food.

1. Water

One of the single most important ingredients, yet so often left behind. When you microwave food, add just a little touch of water, enough to put a thin layer on the bottom the dish, cover the whole lot with cling film, then microwave as you normally would. The water will gently steam whatever is with it, and hydrate it. Therefore, your food will not have that nasty dryness that usually comes with microwaving. This works VERY well when microwaving vegetables. If your sauces are a little too thick, then add some water. This may seem obvious, but it’s amazing how many people don’t think about it.

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Water is also useful for cleaning your microwave- but not just for scrubbing it. Pour out a plastic container full of water (about a butter tub full), but make sure you put it into a very sturdy container (Not a butter container!). Microwave it for about five minutes and the water will evaporate, soaking the inside of your microwave. Take a sponge, and just wipe that grime away!

When pan frying food in a sauce, add a little water very slowly (Too fast and you risk a fire). This will keep your sauce from burning dry quite nicely.

2. Butter

Try pan frying chicken using butter instead of oil- the change in taste is dramatic. This also works with many other meats, including burgers, mince and pork. You’ll get a much richer taste, but be warned this can make your food much more filling.

Butter is also the basis of many sauces, including rue. If you heat it up and melt it, you can also use it for greasing baking tins and other kitchenware. Adding a nice layer of butter onto a joint of meat before you roast it can also ensure your meat does not become too dry (also called basing). This works especially well with poultry, but I’d advise against using it with red meat.

3. Salt, Pepper, Vinegar, and Sugar

These are great for altering the basic taste of your food. For example, if you are making a tomato sauce and find that it’s a bit too bitter (as tomatoes can often be), adding a little sugar (which is sweet), can kill the bitterness outright. Remember, the tongue only tastes bitter, sweet, sour, salty and umami (the rest of taste comes from smell). If you can’t get these quite right, then the taste of the food will be off. All you need to do is add the “opposite” taste. For example, if something is too bitter, add a little sugar.

Always put a little salt into everything as it helps preserve food, and also brings out the flavor. Just a pinch is needed, no more.

4. White Wine, Red Wine, and Beer

A little expensive for some kitchens, but the flavor that can be added to food when using these is extraordinary, especially when used with sauces. Red wine can turn a passable tomato sauce into a delight, adding some white wine to pork can have a similar effect. Adding a good strong beer to just about anything can improve the flavor. As a rule of thumb, never roast food with wine unless you have already put it into a sauce and prepared that sauce. Wine does not have a very high alcohol level, but at the temperatures involved in cooking it can quite easily ignite- especially on a gas cooker. To avoid this, we burn off the alcohol in a controlled fashion:

When frying food, add your wine slowly, then shake the pan a little. You should see a large jet of fire leap out of the pan as the alcohol burns off! This is called flambéing.

If using wine in a sauce, provided you boil the sauce for long enough, the alcohol should just burn out nice and slowly.

Naturally, as the alcohol is burnt off, this means even drivers and teetotalers can enjoy the taste of food enhanced with these drinks- you will not get drunk from eating this food, and if you do, then you’ve done something very wrong (or possibly very right…) somewhere along the line.

Beer is far less likely to ignite and so is safe for oven cooking. Don’t use cheap lagers though, go and buy a strong ale, stout or porter. Try slow cooking a joint of beef and vegetables with a bottle of beer poured into the mix. You will find the result pleasantly surprising. Another good use of beer in the kitchen (apart from fuelling the cook) is as a liquid base in gravy. Simply make your gravy as you normally would, but instead of using meat juices or water, use a bottle of beer. Depending on the type of beer you use, you can get many flavors.

5. Garlic

Many top chefs and chefing styles say that onions are vital to cooking. I personally despise the damn things; they actually make me physically sick. So I found a much better substitute- garlic.

I love the flavor of garlic, but I’m aware many people are not big fans, so if you’re not you can stop reading now. Garlic works well in adding subtle flavor to foods when included in a marinade. To strengthen the flavor further, cook the food with a clove or two of garlic, crushed and diced. Cut it into slightly larger chunks and it will add a nice crunchy texture when mixed in with things like burgers.