8 kitchen hacks and tips for easy cooking

You have guests over but no chilled drinks? Before you put beer bottles in cold water, we have a tip for you: Take a towel and put it under cold water. After wringing it out, wrap your drinks in it and place them in the freezer compartment. This way, they’ll be ice-cold in no time and your guests will be delighted with the refreshment.

On hot evenings, nothing tastes as delicious as ice cream. But when you take the ice cream out of the freezer, it is rock hard and takes a while before you can portion it. There’s a super simple kitchen hack for this: take a plastic bag with a press seal and store the entire ice cream pack in it. The ice cream retains exactly the right consistency in the bag and is ready to scoop out at any time.

The pasta is boiling, you are peeling the garlic, and suddenly you hear hissing: cooking water is spreading all over the hob. To prevent this from happening, it is best to place a wooden spoon across the pot in which you are cooking the pasta. The spoon ensures that the water doesn’t spill, and you can get on with other tasks in peace.

Peeling garlic can be a chore that leaves its scent on your fingers. There’s a simple trick to make it much easier: put one or more cloves of garlic in a jam jar. Once you’ve sealed it, shake everything briefly and vigorously. After just a few seconds, the skin will have come off, and you can process the garlic further. This tip is particularly helpful if you need several cloves of garlic at once.

Bay leaves, cloves or star anise give many dishes a very special flavour – but they are not eaten. To prevent you from accidentally biting into them, you can boil these spices in a tea bag or tea infuser and remove them before serving. This is an important tip for soups, curries and stews, as it also makes it easier to flavour your dish.

If you want to spread butter on your breakfast bread, but it simply will not spread as a hard lump, we have a tip for you. You can easily cut butter into small cubes. Take these out of the fridge in the morning and the butter cubes will be soft and spreadable in no time at all.

Sometimes things have to be quick: You cut your homemade sponge roll, and the delicacy disintegrates under the knife into a mountain of pastry and cream. Dental floss is ideal for cutting soft foods such as cheese, cakes and some fruit. It glides through these foods much more easily than a knife, even with just a little pressure. This is particularly practical when a cake consists of several layers, for example our fantastic strawberry and chocolate cake with sponge. Cake bases can also be easily divided horizontally by applying dental floss all the way round and then gently pulling the ends together.

We hope our kitchen hacks make your life a little easier. In addition, we have some more tips for you, for example for grilling or different cooking methods.