While many of us enjoy cooking at home, it can often feel like a faff when the list of ingredients, kitchen tools, and time spent seems to stack up. However, a professional chef has revealed her cooking hacks that can cut down the time you spend on each dish — and make your life much simpler in the kitchen. Chef Kelly Scott, known to her 1.2 million TikTok followers as @kellyscleankitchen, explained that you should always keep a bowl of salt out on your kitchen counter for grabbing pinches of salt to add to dishes.
This is much better than a salt shaker, she said, because this allows you to know exactly how much salt you’re adding to a dish or pan. A salt shaker or grinder will also slow you down, and getting “a feel for salt is much better”, Kelly added.
Scott also recommended keeping chefs’ towels around your kitchen, and said they can be bought cheaply online on sites like Amazon. They not only help to clear up messes effectively, but also serve as a heat protectant. She said: “I’m constantly using them to grab hot pans and pots.”
Another kitchen tool you should invest in to make your life easier when cooking is a bench scraper. This comes in handy when you’re doing lots of prep work like slicing and dicing vegetables as instead of having to pick up ingredients one at a time, you can scoop it all up and throw it into a bowl.
Deli containers can also come in handy, particularly when you are following a recipe that requires lots of ingredients being measured out.
These also work as measuring cups, so not only can you store lots of ingredients in them, either on the counter or in the fridge, as they have lids, they also help you to know the exact measurements at a glance.
As a professional chef and teacher, Scott has learnt a range of hacks over the years to help her in the kitchen. For example, she suggested dampening a cloth or paper towel and placing it flat underneath a cutting board to stop it from moving around. “This will prevent it from sliding, which in turn keeps your fingers a little safer when cutting,” she told her followers.
Scott explained that she also keeps a bowl nearby when she is cooking on the counter to act as a trash can. Instead of having to go back and forth to her kitchen bin, which wastes time, she just throws the food waste in there as it is “so much easier”.
