Like many areas of life, the kitchen is ripe for hacking. Technology has brought us so many new tools, after all, so why not use them to make food preparation and cooking a much more fun task than it would otherwise be? The new book Kitchen Hacks: How Clever Cooks Get Things Done shows us tons of these new tricks, providing “innovative solutions to everyday cooking challenges.”
Created by the folks behind Cook’s Illustrated, the book collects a treasure trove of quirky but clever tricks for saving time and money, apart from improving the outcome of any cooking endeavor. You know, stuff like using a power drill to turbocharge a pepper grinder. Or using an apple slicer to make fry-sized potato wedges. Or ditching the knife in favor of dental floss for gently slicing soft and fragile food items like goat cheese and cinnamon rolls.
Kitchen Hacks compiles numerous ideas from Quick Tips, one of the most popular features in Cook’s Illustrated magazine, and combines them with all new hacks from the crew over at America’s Test Kitchen. The result is this clever compendium of hundreds upon hundreds of useful, actively-tested, and easy-to-follow advice for every imaginable kitchen duty. Aside from food prep and cooking tricks, the book includes innovative ideas for such areas as kitchen cleaning, kitchen organization (e.g. drill holes into the knife block to add storage space for thermometers and other small tools), food transport, food storage, and food preparation. There’s even a chapter on “Substitution Hacks” to give you a good grip of what ingredients you can use in place of one that isn’t readily available in your kitchen.
Available in paperback and ebook formats, Kitchen Hacks: How Clever Cooks Get Things Done is priced at $12.50.