Are you striving to follow a healthier diet? Try to prep more meals at home as the saying runs, “Practice makes the man perfect”. Resourcefulness, creativity, experimentation and a heaping dose of passion will minimize the distance between you and a master chef.

While experimenting with different types of food recipes, you can avoid the wrong steps by learning some tips and tricks for cooking. The easy to follow cooking tips not only make the job easier for you but also save you time and money.

Here follows a list of top cooking tips shared by the cooking experts from different cuisines in the world. Just go through them and you will find them easy, engaging and eye-opening.

1. Make Preps Beforehand: When you are going to cook a dish next day, collect ingredients and make other preparations beforehand. It will take away stress and you’ll be able to fully concentrate on cooking.
2. High Temperature for Smaller Items and Vice Versa: If your cooking recipe involves small items, bake them at high temperatures in the oven. On the other hand, big items require slow cooking at low temperature.
3. Preserve Flavor of Spices: You can preserve flavor of spices and herbs by storing them in a cool and dark place. In humid, lighted and heated environments, the spices and herbs will lose their flavor.
4. Soak to Cut Bitterness: If your ingredients include bitter greens, like kale and arugula, you can cut their bitterness by soaking them in a bowl of ice water for an hour or so. Afterwards, dry them with a paper towel. To make greens crisp, pass them through the salad spinner several times.
5. Use Plastic Bags to Freeze: Freeze food items in large quantities and use paper bags for this purpose. So, just pull the bag out of the freezer when you decide to boil veggie, make a nice soup or cook any other dish.
6. Don’t Experiment on Important Occasions: If you are cooking something for an important event, such as a celebration or a festival, never try a new recipe. What if something goes wrong during experimentation? Cook only that dish which you have prepared several times before.
7. Tip to Remove Garlic Odor: Working with garlic leaves strong odor in your hands. To remove odor completely, rub your hands against your stainless sink for 30 seconds and then wash them.
8. Crack Egg on a Flat Surface: Never crack an egg on the edge of a bowl or some other thing. Doing so, you will shell shard and possible contamination of the food. So, it is wise to always crack an egg on a flat surface.
9. Prepare a Test Item: When you are going to cook something in a large number, for example cookies, make a test item first. That way, if the oven is little off that day, you can adjust the baking time accordingly and the rest of the items will come out perfectly.
10. Pay Attention to Every Step: Before you start working on a dish, read the recipe thoroughly and pay due attention to every step. Use your senses of vision, touch, taste and small. While playing with the ingredients, you might make some mistakes, but you will learn so much more in the process.
11. Use Cheese Rind to Add Flavor: Don’t discard the rind of a piece of cheese. You can use it to add flavor to a soup of any kind. Drop it into the pot of soup and remove it just before serving.
12. Freeze Butter to Make Dough: Want to make your biscuits tender and flaky? Freeze the butter and grate it into the dry ingredients to make to dough.
13. Salt & Refrigerate Whole Chicken: When you are going to make a whole roast chicken, salt and chili it and refrigerate, uncovered, for a day. This process helps season the bird and dries out the skin. It will become perfectly crispy when cooked.
14. Always Use Sharp Knife: What is the most dangerous thing in your kitchen? It is a dull knife. As you have to press a dull knife harder, you are likely to cut yourself. So, always keep your knife sharp.
15. Use Water Jar to Keep Herbs Fresh for Longer: Do you know you can keep the herbs fresh two to three times longer than they would in the fridge? Just pluck off what you need from the herbs and store them in a jar of water. But don’t forget to change the water daily.
16. Sauté Onions with Baking Soda: Sautéing onions and want to cut the cooking time by half? Add a pinch of baking soda to speed up browning of onions and cut the cooking time practically by half.
17. Butter Spices to Intensify Taste: Want to disperse the flavours of spices and make the taste much more intense? When you are to add ground spices to bread or cake batter, cream them instead of adding them with other dry ingredients. Fat content of the butter will not only disperse flavors of spices but also make the taste much more intense.
18. Make Your Cocktail Great with Ice: Do you know the secret of preparing a great cocktail lies all in the ice? Make larger chunks of ice with filtered water. In this way, you will need less water and make a great cocktail.
19. Refrigerate Soup Before Serving: If you want to intensify the taste and flavors of soup, make it a day in advance and let it sit in the fridge overnight. Warm it gently before serving and all the flavors will marry beautifully.
20. Brown Meat Before Cooking: Do you want to give your meat a golden crust and also reduce the cooking time? You should brown the meat before cooking. Meanwhile, you can use the meat thermometer to find when the inside is as done as the outside.