Who hasn’t burned something at least once, or like had a cake stick to the bottom of the pan? Cooking comes with its own set of mishaps, but sometimes there’s a remedy. Or well… a sort of best solution as possible hehehehe. Here are some great tips for dealing with some of these sticky situations:
1. Cake Stuck to the Pan
So you forgot to line the pan with parchment paper or grease it, and now your cake is completely stuck.
Solution: The type of cake matters here. A cake with caramel or one where the bottom has solidified is never going to come out cleanly, but with a regular cake, if you let it cool completely (depending on the cake, you can even refrigerate it to make it firmer and harder), then carefully use a knife to separate the sides and gently try to release the cake, it might work out well. If you’re out of luck, you can always use the cake pieces for other things, dry cake makes fantastic French toast, or you can use it in desserts that call for cake crumbs, like cake pops!
2. The Meat Came Out Burnt
Sometimes you forget the meat in the oven or on the stovetop and it comes out a bit charred.
Solution: If the meat has skin, remove the skin, it won’t look as pretty and sometimes the skin is delicious, but it’s way better than eating charcoal. If it doesn’t have skin, it depends on the type of meat. If you can cut off the burnt part and serve it in a sauce, or repurpose the meat for sandwiches or meat croquetes, go for it.
3. The Pie Crust is Burnt
There’s nothing worse, not just because it looks bad but especially because the burnt flavor is pretty unpleasant.
Solution: Sometimes it’s only lightly burnt, try cutting off the worst parts and scraping the rest with a fine grater, then cover with powdered sugar or whipped cream (but do note that powdered sugar or whipped cream might not mask some of the burning flavour). If it’s too badly burnt, you can sometimes save the filling and bake a new crust in the oven, then pour the already cooked filling onto that new base.
4. Overcooked the Vegetables
And now you have a mountain of mushy vegetables with a not-so-appealing appearance (the more you cook vegetables, the more they lose their color).
Solution: Skip serving these like this, make a purée out of the vegetables. You can also use the vegetables for soup or even to make a vegetable broth.
5. The Sauce Curdled
Especially with butter or cream-based sauces, if you cook them too long, the milk proteins start to coagulate.
Solution: If it just started curdling, remove from heat and put it in an ice bath. By rapidly lowering the temperature of the sauce in the pan, it should restabilize. If that’s no longer possible, remove the sauce from heat and start a new sauce to which you’ll gradually add the curdled sauce while stirring vigorously, use a blender in the end for a perfect result.
6. The Food is Too Spicy
When you add a bit of spice at the beginning of cooking and then see that as it reduces you have a super spicy sauce, or when you add hot peppers and get a surprise in the middle of the dish.
Solution: Add some dairy, such as milk, cream, or cheese. That’s because the heat comes from a chemical called capsaicin (which is especially irritating to mammals and which certain plants like hot peppers produce to protect themselves), but milk has another chemical called casein that binds to capsaicin and neutralizes its properties. As an alternative to using dairy, create a side sauce with things like cream cheese, cilantro, and limes to relieve the flavor, and drinking hot beverages also helps ease the spiciness.
7. The Soup or Sauce has Too Much Fat
This happens especially when you use meats, oils, or some sauce that contains too much fat and you end up with way too much grease in the dish.
Solution: A good trick I’ve mentioned before, use ice cubes. Quickly run them through the sauce and remove before they start to melt; the fat will stick to the cubes. If it has a lot of sauce, you can also refrigerate it, as the fat will always rise to the surface and solidify, making it easy to remove after a few hours.
8. Overcooked Rice
When the rice grains break (which is why they say you shouldn’t stir rice too much), the rice becomes mush.
Solution: Make new rice! Heheheh 🙂 However, with the already cooked rice it still has tons of uses. You can fry the rice, use it mixed with eggs and vegetables, also use it to make pudding, rice cake, rice pancakes, or mix a bit with ground meat to make a meatloaf or meatballs.
9. Food That’s Too Salty
This happens especially with soups and sauces that are at the right point but as they reduce, they become too salty.
Solution: The best thing is to add more liquid or broth, or if it’s pasta or rice, make more without salt and add it to what you already have salted to reduce the salt level. If it’s just slightly more salty, then a bit of vinegar or sugar can give just the right touch to soften the salty flavor. Also as a sidenote the “traditional” solution of adding a potato, yeah that doesn’t work all that well, so skip that.
10. Egg Shells Won’t Come Off
Sometimes after cooking an egg, when you peel it, you end up taking chunks of white with the shell.
Solution: If the egg is hard-boiled, after cooking and while still hot, crack the shell a bit and then put it in a bowl with ice-cold water. The cold water will seep under the shell and loosen the membrane from the egg white. Leave it for a couple of minutes, then the shell should come off easily.
11. Food or Sauce Got Burnt on the Bottom
If you don’t pay attention, sometimes it seems like everything’s fine but you already have burnt food stuck to the bottom.
Solution: DON’T STIR! You’re going to try to pour out the sauce or remove the food from the top and return to heat. If you don’t stir, there’s a better chance that the stuck burnt flavor won’t transfer to the rest of the food.
12. Lumpy Sauce
Especially sauces with cornstarch or flour, if you’re not a bit careful, the sauce gets lumpy in an instant.
Solution: Strain the sauce through a sieve, without stirring (because the lumps contain flour that might not be cooked yet), then return to heat to finish cooking and make it smooth.
13. Mistake While Separating Eggs
When you have to separate yolks from whites, it’s important not to have any yolk in the whites or they’ll never whisk properly.
Solution: If a little bit of yolk falls into the whites, use the eggshell to remove it (which works better than a spoon). It’s also a good idea to have one bowl for yolks, another for whites, and another for when you’re separating the white. You crack the egg into the bowl where you separate the white, and if it comes out well, pour the white into the whites bowl; if it comes out badly, you only ruin one egg white, so you never “contaminate” the other whites.
14. Pasta Overcooked
If you’re not careful, you can let pasta cook too long and mushy pasta isn’t very pleasant to eat.
Solution: So make more pasta and this time properly! 🙂 But you can always use the already made pasta in a frittata (eggs with pasta), use it in a noodle soup, add it to eggs and cream and bake to create a kind of quiche.
15. Burnt Garlic
Garlic burns in seconds and can make your whole dish taste bitter.
Solution: Start over, there’s really no saving burnt garlic. To prevent this, add garlic toward the end of your cooking aromatics, or use whole cloves that you can remove, or add it with liquids that will cool the pan down. If you’ve already added burnt garlic to a sauce, your best bet is to start fresh.
16. Dry, Tough Chicken Breast
You meant to make a juicy dinner but ended up with chicken that could double as shoe leather.
Solution: Slice it thin and drown it in sauce! Seriously though, shred the chicken and use it in tacos, chicken salad, or soup, something with liquid where it can rehydrate a bit. For prevention next time, brine your chicken beforehand or cook it to internal temperature of 165°F (74ºC) and let it rest a bit before cutting.
And that’s it! I hope you enjoyed these tips, and that they are helpful to you, do you have any good ones? Share on the comments and see you next time!
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