Five Quick Tips to Help Your Pans in the Kitchen

Five Quick Tips to Help Your Pans in the Kitchen

Cooking in the kitchen will almost always require some pot or pan. Previously, we talked about how to take care of those pans to make their shelf life longer, depending on the kind of pot you have. However, there are a few other things that you can do to keep your pan in good shape for longer.

Today, we’re going into six quick and little known tips that can help you in the kitchen. If you’ve ever wanted your pans to last longer, your food to cook better, and your hands to feel safer, then this post if for you! Let’s get started!

kitchen

One: Keep the Flame Down

If you are cooking with gas, then you should be careful with your pots and pans. Cooking on a gas stove with the heat too high can cause the pan to age faster. If you need to cook with hot flames, make sure that they are never farther than two-thirds of the way up the pot. If they are, get a bigger pan or turn the flame down to preserve the skillet for longer!

If you’ve been cooking with high heat for a long time, take a look at your pans. If you see shiny rainbow-colored marks on the pot, you’ve been cooking at too high of a heat. Also, ensure that you’re not cooking your skillet to a higher temp than it was intended to be at using a laser thermometer! Finally, never lear an empty pan over heat for longer than a few minutes.

Two: Know Your Spots

Each pan and stove cook different based on many factors from the creation to the cooking that it’s been through. You should work to make sure you know how your oven heats as well as how your pans heats.

Knowing the hot and cold spots that your pans produce when being cooked on will help you to create the best meal possible without over or undercooking something on accident. If you don’t know how to find your hot and cold spots, check out some information about that over on Bon Appétit.

Three: Remove Gunk without Scraping

If you’ve cooked something that left a residue on the pan, you might be tempted to scrape it all off. However, this can result in damage to the pan and a shortened lifespan. You could also soak it. However, this can hurt the pan depending on the material that the pan is made from. On the other hand, you could use tea to break up the gunk.

If you’ve been cooking and have residue sticking to the pan, fill it with water and simmer a tea bag in it. This simple trick will make your post-dinner dishes a breeze. The acid in the tea, as well as the boiling, will help to break down the stuck on food. Just make sure not to drink this tea!

Four: Unstick a Lid

If you’ve ever left a covered pot on the stove to cool down, you might have come back to find that the lid was stuck on. This is due to the way air pressure works when heated and cooled. When you’re cooking food and cover the pot, the air pressure inside the pot increases. Once you turn off the pan, it decreases, resulting in the outside air pressure being higher and making the lid “stick.”

Turn back on the heat for a few minutes to heat back up the air and let the air in the pot heat back up. Once you’ve waited a minute or two with the pan over medium heat, the lid should come right off. Just remember to be careful when trying to pull it off in case it sticks for a moment.

Five: Look Impressive

Have you ever wanted to surprise your friends while you cook? This trick could help you do just that while also saving your hands from getting burnt. As you may know, cooking for a long time can heat the handles of the pans that you are cooking with. In many cases, you might have a pot holder to keep your hand from getting burnt. However, if you don’t have one, you can use aluminum foil.

If your pans have a hollow handle (as many non-stick handles will,) then put some aluminum foil inside that spot, the foil will block the heat from traveling up the handle and therefore keep the handle cool to the touch. If you don’t tell anyone, you’ll impress your friends!