‘What’s a cooking tip you never paid attention to until you realised it was right all along?’ – 23 home chefs who reluctantly changed their ways

Unless you go to catering college or are one of Jamie Oliver’s tweely named children, cooking is something you just kind of pick up as you go along, often largely making it up yourself.

This means we often develop bad habits, which we stubbornly refuse to change, even when we are faced with an obviously better way of doing things. Humans are ridiculous like that.

They’ve been discussing belated culinary realisations on the AskUK subreddit after Smush2345 shared their own:

Which prompted lots of other people to jump in with the things they’d been doing wrong for many years, like these…

1.

‘Pre-heat the f*cking oven and the tray.’
–zephyrmox

2.

‘Freeze fresh ginger and just grate it from frozen. Zero fibrous issues and lasts forever. Grates kind of like parmesan. Amazing.’
–Outrageous_Physics65

3.

‘I have a better one. Many supermarkets in more urban areas sell cubes of frozen minced ginger for next to nothing. There is also cubed frozen garlic and cubed mix of garlic and ginger. Total game changer. So cheap and ready whenever you need it.’
–iamnotarobotniks

4.

‘MSG Makes Shit Good.’
–IpromithiusI

5.

‘Over the last few years I’ve started to use a squeeze of lemon in many recipes and it was a game changer. Just helps balance dishes so incredibly well.’
–Jaidor84

6.

‘My mother always taught me to turn pan handles off to the side of the burner so you don’t walk past and knock one accidentally.

I just did it all these years out of a kind of superstitious reflex. Until one day I saw somebody knock a pan full of hot food onto the floor and then I was like ‘Oooooooooh! Thanks mum!’’
–Formal-Proposal7850

7.

‘Cooking is artistic. Baking is a science.

‘You can get a bit creative with dinner dishes but cakes must follow the rules.’
–Jacey_T

8.

‘Add pasta to the sauce and not the sauce to pasta.’
–montyrattus

9.

‘Use salt. Always.’
–Fellattio_Nelson

10.

‘Opening a new tube of tomato puree – don’t grab a sharp knife and hack off the foil seal, turn the lid upside down and use the sharp plastic point to pierce it! My wife showed me that a couple of years ago, only took me 20+ years to realise…’
–PPK_30

11.

‘Cooking to temperature and not time. Spent years wondering if the roast was under or over done. Now though I dont worry at all.’
–sjw_7

12.

‘The quality of really basic ingredients changes a whole dish (i.e. tinned tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, eggs).’
–Agile-Read-238