People Are Sharing Their Favorite Food Hacks On This Dedicated Group, Here Are 50 Of The Best (New Pics)

While these posts by home cooks are certainly innovative and deserve their attention, we can also check out what the pros are saying. For that, we can look at a piece by Tony Naylor, where he chatted with quite a few of them on reviving traditional habits, developing vogueish approaches to seasoning, and how to maximize flavor at minimum expense.

For example, before recycling jars of pesto, mayonnaise, tomato paste, mustard, and such, you can add oil and give it a vigorous shake. This creates the base for a “delicious dressing while ensuring you’ve got the last bits out”, says Samantha Harvey, the head chef at the Laundry in Brixton, London.

Adding leftover parmesan rind to a meaty sauce as it cooks will give it "a strong, savory, umami backbone," says Tom Tsappis, the chef patron at Killiekrankie House in Perthshire, Scotland. Just don't forget to remove it before serving!

Equally effectively, you can put any old rinds or hardened cheese ends in milk for a day before using them to create an intensively cheesy béchamel sauce. These are your options, he says: you’ll either end up not needing to grate so much cheese into a mornay sauce for fish or on macaroni cheese, or “you’ll end up with a more luxurious mac’n’cheese”.

Merely diluting stock cubes in water doesn't get the most out of this versatile seasoning. For instance, they can also be used as a dry rub for roast meats or as an everyday salt replacement. Rather than provide a familiar lick of sodium chloride, it will give a more rounded, “savory umami hit”, says the chef Si Toft, owner of the Dining Room in Abersoch, Gwynedd.

Toft’s “biggie” is compound stock butter: three or four chicken stock cubes – “beef is too intense” – whisked into a block of softened butter, then rolled, refrigerated, sliced into coins, and frozen to create instantly deployable nuggets of fat and flavor: “Stir them into a sauce, bang into a tray with roast potatoes, over steamed veg, whatever.”

When rinsing white rice to ensure distinct, fluffy grains, retain the starchy water for boiling your vegetables. This is a traditional Japanese method, often used to take the edge off daikon radish (or mooli): “The minerals in the water remove any bitterness,” says Masaki Sugisaki, the chef-owner at the restaurant Dinings SW3.

Besides being energy efficient, cooking extra batches for later in the week or for the freezer has potential flavor upsides, too.

Leafier vegetable dishes aren't very good candidates for reheating. “With some, you end up with mush,” says Mayur Patel, the co-founder of Bundobust. But meat- or pulse-based soups, stews, curries, ragus, and even some hardier salads retain their texture and often develop far punchier, more cohesive flavors after a period in the freezer or 24 hours in the fridge.

The science of this unexpected bonus – how flavor molecules slowly disperse, or how calcium receptors are activated on your tongue – is complex, but the phenomenon is so self-evident that the Japanese word kokumi is used to describe the greater complexity many cooked foods exhibit when reheated next day.

If you're making instant gravy for a roast, dilute the meat juices with the cooking water from your potatoes, says Oli Marlow, executive chef at Aulis, London. “It’s added flavor that you don’t get from tap water.”

Another good steer, from Ben Mulock, the executive chef at Balans in London, is to puree any veg you stuffed under your roasting joint as aromatics (onion, carrots, celery), and blend that puree into your gravy “to give it body and flavor”. This, according to him, should largely remove the need to use thickening flour, the common cause of lumpy gravy.

Chefs talk about seasoning with acidity in the way we average folks talk of salt. As Toft explains, its flavor shouldn’t be overt and most people wouldn’t realize it is missing. “But, as soon as it’s there, you’re like, ‘Ah, there we are.’ It makes everything sing.”

There are several ways you can start incorporating it. James Simpson, the co-founder and chef at Owt in Leeds, likes to enhance pasta, “especially with tomato-based sauces”, ratatouille, braised pork, or roast chicken with a few strokes of very finely grated lemon zest. It gives dishes a subtle brightness.