Kitchen Hacks are addictive to watch and often seem too good to be true and that’s mostly because they are too good to be true. Many YouTube channels and blogs show you how amazing their kitchen tricks are and how much easier they make your life. When you actually test them, however, they are far from convenient and most often don’t even work.
So I have gone through hundreds of kitchen hack videos and have tested a large amount of them and filtered a list of five kitchen hacks that actually work.
1. Testing Egg’s in Cold Water
This myth came up probably right after the question of what was first, the egg or the chicken. But is it just a myth or is it a true kitchen hack? The answer is, it is a true kitchen hack based on science and logic. Here is how it works.
Egg shells are semipermeable, this means that they actually allow air to pass through at a very small rate. When an Egg is fresh the amount of air beneath the shell is almost zero. This is why fresh egg’s don’t float. The content is denser than water and there is no air so it sinks.
As an egg ages more and more air penetrates the shell. Eventually, there is so much air that the egg starts to float. You need to use cold water for this test as warm water expands the oxygen in the egg and might cause a false positive.
2. Easy Shredded Chicken Breast
We simply love Mexican recipes. Anything from quesadillas to tacos and burritos. They just seem to find their way on to our kitchen table every week. A lot of these recipes call for shredded chicken. I have often tried to thinly slice chicken or pull it apart but it never seems to work out like the restaurant. So here is what you do.
Cook your chicken breast with your preferred method. I tend to boil chicken breast and then fry them with the spices and the rest of the recipe. So once my chicken breast has been boiled, I put them into my stand mixer with the dough attachment and give them a few minute spin and medium/low speed. Voila, your shredded chicken is done.
3. Slicing Sticky or Rich Cake
Slicing cake is something I do A LOT :D. This is a trick that I use whenever I film my weekly cake video I need to cut the perfect slice of cake. And that’s not an easy task. Also, I only get one try. So if you have a rich cake that is sticky or hard to cut do the following.
Run your knife under warm water for a couple of minutes before slicing the cake. This will cut through the cake a LOT easier than a cold knife. This works especially well with Chocolate cake.
4. Make Buttermilk
I live in Cyprus, and buttermilk is not a thing here. As a matter of fact, I have never seen buttermilk in any supermarket. This is why I learned early in my baking adventures how to make buttermilk. First of all, let’s understand what buttermilk actually is. Buttermilk is basically fermented milk. The acidic content of buttermilk softens gluten and gives your cakes, biscuits and breads a soft tangy texture.
Now here is how you make it, to bring up the fermentation of Milk you can simply add an acid such as vinegar or lemon. Adding a teaspoon of lemon juice to a cup of milk will turn it into buttermilk in 20-30 minutes. Just give it a stir, rest it and voila. Your buttermilk is ready.
This concludes our list of 4 Kitchen hacks that ACTUALLY WORK. Check out the rest of our tips, tricks and blog posts or check out our latest recipes. Thank you for reading.