9 Easy Tricks to Improve Dishes
Better flavor, little effort
Bring out the flavor with these simple tips!
Chana dal
For the ultimate creamy hummus, either spend a frustrating half-hour peeling a couple of cups of cooked chickpeas or buy chana dal—split chickpeas without the skins—and decide how to spend all that time you just saved. Don’t get me wrong—unpeeled whole chickpeas you cook yourself from dry make wonderful hummus. But chana dal renders next-level hummus with zero extra work.
Go here for the chana dal hummus recipe.
Go here for chocolate hummus made with chana dal.
Whole spices
When my daughter Charlotte makes dal or chana masala, she first cooks whole spices in hot oil—cumin seed, cloves, a cinnamon stick, black peppercorns a bay leaf and cardamom pods. So good!
Cardamom pods also find their way into my black tea. I brew looseleaf black tea along with 6 or 7 cardamom pods per pot. You can’t go back to bags of tea dust after drinking this. Sometimes I also add whole cloves, peppercorns, a cinnamon stick and fresh sliced ginger for simple chai.
For baking, we grind cinnamon sticks in an electric coffee grinder from the thrift shop. (Our thrift shop never seems to run out of these.) We grind small amounts so our cinnamon stays fresh.
Fresh ginger
Once I started adding fresh minced ginger to my pumpkin pie, I couldn’t go back. I spied sugar pie pumpkins at the farmers’ market last weekend so I’ll be making pumpkin pie after the weather cools down. Go here for the pumpkin pie recipe in my cookbook.
Shallots
In his book Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain revealed several secrets for cooking food at home that tastes as good as restaurant food. One of them: cook with shallots.
You almost never see this item in a home kitchen, but out in the world they’re an essential ingredient. Shallots are one of the things—a basic prep item in every mise-en-place—which make restaurant food taste different from your food.
Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential
Shallots cost more than onions but other money-saving ingredients on this list will compensate for their higher price.
Whey
If you make ricotta or paneer or another type of cheese, you’ll have lots of whey on your hands. Save that to bake with. It softens bread dough and adds flavor. If you won’t use it right away, freeze it.
Wine vinegar
A bit of acid brightens the flavor of savory dishes like soups and sauces. It’s one of the easiest ways to elevate a dish.
If you want to cook with spectacular wine vinegar, you may want to try making your own. You’ll need wine, water and either a mother of vinegar or some Bragg’s apple cider vinegar containing the live mother (because most people don’t have a mother of vinegar lying around). You stir your ingredients together and wait. In my kitchen environment (high 60s to low 70s Fahrenheit), the vinegar ferments in about a month. Go here for the full instructions.
Roasted vegetables
Roasting vegetables concentrates the flavor. If you have a glut of vegetables on hand and don’t know what to do with them, roast them. This time of year, I roast lots of eggplant, zucchini, bell peppers, tomatoes and onions for ratatouille.
Cut the vegetables into bite-size pieces, toss in olive oil, top with herbs (fresh rosemary is wonderful) and smashed garlic if desired, sprinkle with salt and roast at 400°F. I like to use separate trays for each variety of vegetable because their cooking times vary. Bell peppers may be ready after 20 minutes, onions after 40, for example.
Eat the roasted vegetables as is, fill a frittata or crepes, toss them in a grain bowl or salad (we love sweet potatoes or beets in our salads) or add them to pitas. You’ll find something to do with them!
Toasted nuts
Similar to vegetables, toasting brings out the flavor of nuts. If you take the few minutes necessary to toast raw nuts before baking muffins or tossing them into a salad or making nut butter, you will not be disappointed.
To toast nuts, spread them in a single layer on a baking sheet or cast-iron pan and toast them in the oven at 350°F. Shake the pan or stir the nuts after 5 minutes. Nuts such as pecans and walnuts may need only one or two more minutes of toasting. Denser almonds may need 4 to 5 more minutes. Keep a close eye on them. You want them fragrant, not burnt. Remove them from the pan immediately to stop toasting.
If I turn on the oven to bake sourdough discard banana bread, while it heats up, I toast the nuts that go into the bread. They toast more slowly as the oven heats but that doesn’t mean you can neglect them!
Cleanup is easy too. After the pan cools, wipe it clean with a cloth and put it away.
Wheat berries
I’m a bit obsessed with wheat berries. I wrote a full blog post on them here, which includes cooking instructions. I add cooked wheat berries to salads, grain bowls and vegetarian chili. They add a wonderful chewy bite and nutty flavor.
Ground up in my grain mill, wheat berries transform my sourdough bread. (I generally use about 40 percent freshly milled flour.) When I bite into a fresh slice of my bread made with home-milled wheat and rye, I get a little thrill knowing that even here in obscenely wealthy Silicon Valley, no one is eating bread better than what I produce in my small, modest kitchen.
My cookbook is a finalist for a cookbook award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals and has been shortlisted for a Taste Canada award! You can check out the book here.
Great tips. I always have shallots on hand. Steel cut oatmeal also tastes better if you roast it.Spaghetti squash shines in tacos. Better than trying to make it a substitute for pasta. Thx. Congrats on your recognition.