Happy Monday everyone. I thought I would start this week off with a few cooking tips that will brighten your week. Enjoy!

Rock Hard Avocado

There are few things worse than going to the grocery store to buy avocados only to find that they are all hard as a rock. Waiting two or three days for the avocados to ripen before you can make your guacamole is really annoying. Luckily, there is a quick tip that can take your avocado from rock hard to ready-to-guac overnight.

The secret is flour. Regular old all purpose flour. Take your avocados and completely submerge them in it.  Don’t peel them or anything. They go in the flour completely whole. The reason this works is that there is an enzyme in the flour that speeds up the ripening process. When you are ready to use your avocados just give them a rinse in cold water and you are ready to go.

Sweet Corn 

Corn on the cob is one of those great summertime treats. Covered in butter, salt and pepper, and eaten under the summer sun; there are few things better. But what if I told you that there was a way to make that sweet corn taste even better.

Generally, when we cook things in water we add salt. The raises the boiling temperature which ideally allows the water to stay at the boiling point when we add items to be cooked. This is true when we cook most things. However, corn and beans actually toughen when cooked with salt. When cooking corn on the cob rather than adding salt to the water, add sugar. Add the same amount of sugar as you normally would salt.

Adding sugar to the cooking water for corn will cause it to be more tender and flavourful. It will come away from the cob easier and overall will just be more delicious.

Preheat 

One mistake that people often make when cooking is they don’t let things preheat. Whether it’s your oven, bbq, or pan, 99% of the time you want to preheat fully. There are a few different reasons for this.

Number 1. When searing meat or seafood in a pan or on a barbecue, preheating helps to prevent things from sticking. When a piece of meat or seafood hits the surface of a hot pan a brown crust will be formed.This is called the Maillard reaction. The amino acids in the meat are reacting with the heat of the pan and turning brown and forming a crust. This crust causes a release from the pan or grill making things not stick.

If you are cooking, and meat is sticking to the pan or grill chances are you didn’t let it heat up enough, or your trying to flip it too soon. Let the item sit for another minute or two and it should release on it’s own.

Number 2. When stir-frying vegetables the whole idea is to use high heat to cook quickly. It’s very important that the wok or pan be very hot when the vegetables go in. As the vegetables cook they release moisture. The pan needs to be hot enough that this moisture evaporates on contact or you will end up with a pool of liquid in the bottom of the pan. This will drastically cool the pan leading to more liquid coming out of the vegetables and more liquid pooling in the pan. Rather than having crisp yet tender stir-fried vegetables, you will have soggy boiled veg which is not what you want at all.

This principle this the same when cooking in the oven.

Cold Pan Crispy Bacon

This is one of the few exceptions to the above rule. When cooking bacon, if you want it really crispy but not burnt to a crisp, start it in a cold pan. By cold I just mean room temperature. No oil, nothing. Just bacon in a pan. Put the pan on the burner over medium low heat and let it do it’s thing.

What’s going to happen is that as the pan heats up, the fat from the bacon is going to be rendered. This just meats the fat will melt away from the bacon. The bacon will then slowly cook in it’s own fat. The temperature of the pan won’t reach a point where the bacon is going to burn. This technique will lead to bacon that crispy, delicious, and flavorful.

Lemons

Juicing citrus can be kind of a pain in the ass sometimes. Occasionally, it seems that you can squeeze until your hearts content and nothing is coming out. To get around this problem and maximize the amount of juice you can get out of your citrus there is a two step process.

*This works if you are juicing citrus by hand. If you have a machine then disregard this tip. 

Step 1 – The first step is to roll the citrus between your hand and your counter. The idea is that you want to loosen the insides of the citrus. You don’t want to use too much force because the fruit can break open.

Step 2 – The second and final step is to cut the citrus north to south and off center rather than across the equator like would be normally done. Hopefully you can see what I mean from the crude diagram below. When you cut citrus like this you are working with the natural structure of the fruit rather than fighting against it. This cause the citrus to release way more juice than it normally would.

The first thing you want to do is cut off two sides. Then put the citrus down flat and cut of the two smaller side. Squeeze these four sides plus the middle part.

**Disclaimer** If you have any cuts on your hand this is going to sting like a son of a bitch but the citrus juice is actually very good for the cuts. 

So there you go, five quick cooking tips to start your week off. I hope that you all have a great Monday and I will be back soon.

P.S. I’m going to take a second and shamelessly plug myself. If you live in or around Halifax, Nova Scotia and are looking for cooking classes, and if you are hosting a dinner party or family barbecue or something like that check out my other site https://www.chefbenkelly.com/ I may be just what your looking for.

Thanks everyone.