100 Food Hacks I Learned In Restaurants

• I spent my entire life learning what makes a great chef.
• Many of these tricks are industry secrets and you would never know unless you had done that before.
• Today I'm gonna show you a hundred of my favorite chef hacks.
• The book tour is live, and I would love to see you.
• There are important techniques for washing produce, storing leftovers, and cooking proteins.
• Learning to cook better is all about little hacks that can make a big difference!

I spent my entire life learning what makes a great chef. But many of you know I didn't go to culinary school. I worked in restaurants in real-life scenarios, learning real-life techniques and tricks. Now, many of these tricks are industry secrets and you would never know unless you had done that before. But the irony is that anyone could do them easily at home.

So today I'm gonna show you a hundred of my favorite chef hacks that will ideally make your life easier, make you a better cook, and maybe make you look like you know what you're doing. So let's begin.

But before we get started with our chef hacks, I have something really important. The book tour is live. I'm coming to see you. There's gonna be books, there's gonna be hugging and kissing, talking and signing, and free food. So here are the dates, the link is in the description. If you wanna see more information, come see me. I would love to see you.

Now back to these chef hacks.

How to properly wash produce. I'll be honest, I don't always do this, but when I remember, take three parts of water, one part vinegar, toss that around in a bowl and let them sit for about two to five minutes, then drain, rinse off with water, lightly dry off, and they'll keep in the fridge for significantly longer. And there's no kakap poo poo on it.

Storage in the fridge is a big topic. Stop buying Tupperware and buy deli containers. There's a reason that it's an industry standard. They come in court pint cups. Get one of each. You can store anything in these. They all use the same size lid for every single size. They stack beautifully. Thank you.

The cartouche, no lid, no problem. Now look, if your pots or pans don't have a lid and you need one, then you make something called a cartouche. Take a sheet of parchment paper, fold it in half lengthwise, then fold that half again. Everywhere you look, there's a seam, a seam, a seam, except for this part here where you folded it. From that point is where you're gonna fold, fold, fold, fold, until you get this sort of paper plane looking shape. Cut an eighth of an inch off the top, place that over a pot, use the tip to find the center point and then cut wherever the edge of the pot meets with the parchment paper. Unroll it, and you have a cartouche. Place it in your pot and well, have a very beautiful time.

Peeling many cloves of garlic at once. I'm sure we've all seen this bowl trick. You take all your cloves of garlic, you put them in a bowl and you place an equally sized bowl on top and you shake aggressively. And they should all be peeled, except many of the time only half of them will be. So what do you do? You pour in a little bit of warm water, you let it sit for two minutes and they should all peel easily.

If you intend to add herbs to a soup or broth and you want to maximize their flavor, bruise those herbs first. Just give them a light crush, toss them in and then steep them. You get twice as much flavor, especially if you add them at the end of the cook time.

Instant shredded chicken. You got a cooked chicken breast that needs to be shredded? Don't use your hands. Don't use forks. Instead, I know this is kind of whack, but I've been doing this a lot recently. Place the chicken in a bowl, take your electric beaters out and let her rip. Yes, it will shred your chicken quite quickly actually.

Now while we're on that topic, chicken breast is the hardest protein to cook. You have to cook it at a perfect temperature and it goes dry the second you go one degree over that. This, on the other hand, is much more forgiving. Chicken thigh. You can cook this for longer and it'll just get more tender. It's really hard to overcook these. If you're not anti-dark meat, then please use chicken thighs moving forward for most of your recipes. Juicier, easier to cook, and more flavor.

Towel plus mixing bowl. So let's say you're whisking something in a bowl and it's moving all over the place. If you've ever cooked in your life, this has happened to you. Instead, take a damp towel, wrap it around the bowl, place the bowl on top, and then when you're whisking, it should prevent the bowl from moving around.

The paper towel lid. If you're making pickles or anything that goes into a jar and you need to stay submerged in liquid, you can literally just use a paper towel. Fold it in half, gently press it in just until it's absorbed by the liquid inside.

Don't press too hard now because of the surface tension, this will create a small seal of liquid on top of the veg. You can add another lid. Then place it well at room temperature or in the fridge.

Fixing fry oil that's too hot. You ever heat up a pan full of oil or a pot with frying oil? And it gets a little too hot. Yeah, over 400 degrees. Not good. Just add room temperature oil until it decreases to the temperature that you want. That's it.

Obviously, pay attention to not overfilling your pot. You may need to take some oil out in order to add more, so be smart.

Now, let's talk about seasoning your tomatoes. I told you to salt your tomatoes. Where you put on a goddamn sandwich you can’t even taste. It's diluting all of the flavor of everything that you're eating.

This is a hack. You might think, oh, it's a technique. No, it's a hack because it makes your sandwich taste 10 times better. Your watery tomato sandwich? Please season them with salt first on both sides.

When you're mixing a dough, cleaning your hands is not fun. But before you rinse with water and ruin your sinking garbage disposal, take some dry, dry flour. Rub it all over your hands aggressively. Kind of like if it were soap and water. Lather your hands. Then after about 20 to 30 seconds of rubbing, your hands are mostly clean. Then just use a little bit of water, and you're good to go.

The perfect peeled eggs. I get this asked so many times. "Josh, how do you get the perfect peeled egg?" I'm about to tell you. First off, boil your eggs and get a bowl of water. Crack lightly on one side. And this is the trick. Roll your eggs around and around so that they get tiny little crackles all over it. Then submerge your eggs in the water and peel them underneath the water. What you'll see is they're extremely easy to peel.

The wire rack dice. If you need to quickly dice or rough chop something soft like hard-boiled eggs, cooked squash, or cooked potatoes, then just place a wire rack over a bowl and push the food through the wire rack. That's it. Don't overthink it. Just do it.

A lot of restaurants will do this for things like egg salad because imagine cutting this by knife with 300 eggs.

You've seen it on my YouTube shorts. Most people, when they zest things, do this big problem. It does work. There's nothing really necessarily wrong with it, but it's not gonna maximize the zest. This applies to any citrus.

Using kitchen shears for everything. When it comes to cutting things such as vegetables or even a piece of meat like a steak. Look, I get it. What if you just use a pair of kitchen scissors? You can cut directly into a heated pot, into a bowl, onto a plate. This is less of a hack and more of just something people don't even think to do.

Parchment paper clean-up. When you're peeling a lot of potatoes or anything for that matter, always do it over a single sheet of parchment paper. Then as you're peeling, let all those peels fall into the parchment. Once you're done, gather up the parchment and toss it in the trash. You can obviously recycle the parchment paper separately.

Now a five-minute cleanup becomes a ten-second cleanup.

Curing proteins for maximum flavor. Any protein literally doesn't matter. Put it on a small sheet tray with a wire rack. This is for airflow. Season generously with salt. You can also add other spices if you want.

Pat it down on both sides and let it sit in the fridge overnight. This will provide juicier results, a better Maillard reaction. I mean, look at this. Look at this darn Maillard. Plus, the meat will be equally seasoned throughout because the salt has had time to penetrate the meat.

We've all seen that way to core a pepper; you cut down the sides, right? This method is easier and applies to anything including jalapeños, serrano, any chili or pepper.

So, pepper goes down. Cut the top off, the bottom off. Now it's flat. You can start slow, but just cut down just until you make it past that first wall. Open it up, and you can see where everything connects to that core. You're just gonna cut around and unroll your pepper, and the core is no more. Ha!

Now you can julienne beautifully or do whatever else you want.

Stop your onions from making you cry. When you're cutting an onion, sure, not cutting into the core can sometimes help prevent crying, but for the most part, that's kind of bull. If your knife is dull, you might start tearing up. If the onion gets torn somehow, you might start tearing up.

Take a little bit of water from your hands and flick or drip it onto your onions. This may not work for every type of cooking scenario, but obviously, if you're slicing a lot of onions, believe it or not, a little bit of water dripped on your onions will help prevent the irritation to your eyes.

Using fat trim from meats for cooking. Every time you get a piece of meat, whether it be steak or a big pork butt, every time you cut off excess fat, save it in a little baggie in the freezer. Once you can fill around a 1-pint container, then you just lightly chop it up, place it in a pan over low heat, and render all the fat out. Strain that out. And now you have liquid gold.

That's animal fat you can cook with, and you're not wasting product that you would normally throw away.

This is my favorite tomato trick. Now you can use cherry or grape tomatoes. It doesn't matter. I know a lot of people say "those are grape, not cherry." It's the same. Okay, it's a different shape. You're gonna use two dinner plates or two deli container lids in this.

Just throw in as many cherry or grape tomatoes that'll fit comfortably. Place your other lid on top and then run a knife in between those two. And I just instantly cut all of these in half evenly.

Whenever you're trimming a piece of meat and you remove bits of protein, again, this works with any protein. Save that up, place it in a container in the freezer, and then once you have at least a pound, you can grind it all together to make sausages, burgers, meatballs.

That's assuming you have a grinder. But guess what? You don't need a fancy grinder; you just need a knife.

I mean, granted, it's nice to have the fancy one, but take any protein, ideally one with a high fat content. Start by slicing that as thin as possible, then run your blade through the meat, chopping constantly, as if you were finely chopping herbs.

Alternatively, you can also use a cleaver if you have one. Keep chopping and folding until it's as fine as you like. Yes, it works. You will see this become effective.

Don't be a little baby. Okay? It only takes like five minutes for like a pound of meat. See, it even forms a meatball.

Now, when you're slicing chives, you could just line them up and slice them like this. If your knife is really sharp, it shouldn't be too hard, but if it's not, well, they're eventually gonna get messed up and disaligned. To make chive cutting easier, take one strip of paper towel. Lay your chives onto the paper towel with your chives sticking out of one end, roll it up very tightly, clean up the edges, and now they're all even.

Do you want an easy julienne? Fine dice or Brunois? Yeah, one of these bad boys, the mandolin. So first, pick your thickness. Don't go too thick. Cut your suspected vegetable or fruit.

Then for your julienne, cut the same thickness against your sliced veg or fruit as the thickness that you sliced it at, and you get a perfect matchstick julienne. They literally look like matchsticks.

If you want a perfect Brunois, you literally take your matchsticks and cut against them and you get a beautiful Brunois.

This is my favorite kitchen tool. It is, to me, the secret chef tip for all tools. Every chef loves this thing. It can do all the big tasks in a small package. Just keep it on you next time you're cooking.

Got burnt in a pan? Here’s how to fix it. Fill your pan halfway with water. Set that onto your stove over high. You can add a little splash of white vinegar. Let that come to a boil, swirl it around the pan to help get that hot water up the sides of the pan.

Then in about five minutes, dump out the liquid, rinse with water, and it should be close to completely clean. This also works with getting caramel and burnt sugars out of pans.

Instant minced garlic? You don't have a garlic mincer? No problem. Place your clove down. Using the flat side of a knife, smash it aggressively, then give it a few rough chop passes with your knife and within a few seconds it's minced.

The secret to cooking evenly is even cuts. Use a mandolin. When you do this, not only is it faster and slightly more dangerous, but you end up with perfectly evenly sliced vegetables.

Rest longer than you think. When you cook a protein, or more specifically, a steak, rest time matters. I know a lot of people have said it doesn't. It does.

Always let it rest longer than you think.

The longer rest retained its juices, while the unrested loses juice and loses flavor. This is more of an aesthetic trick. When you thinly slice vegetables, such as green onion, carrot, or radish, place them into a bowl of ice water, and you'll see they naturally curl up, making them look nicer and crunchier.

Quick note: Always slice your steak against the grain, which is gonna be different for every steak. This New York strip, you can see that the grain is running this way.

No one wants a stick with long strips like that. So you cut it in half. Then you’re going to cut in the direction against it.

Now you cut against the grain. This is gonna make the steak significantly more tender.

Stop your onions from making you cry. When you're cutting an onion, you can help prevent irritation to your eyes by flicking a little bit of water onto the onion. It actually works!

Using fat trim from meats for cooking. Keep the fat trim every time you cut off excess fat. It saves time and gives you liquid gold in animal fat to cook with.

This is a great tomato trick.

Using two plates, you can easily slice all your cherry or grape tomatoes in half. Cut the trends without worrying about having to do it individually.

Whenever you're trimming meat, save any excess to grind later for sausages or burgers.

That’s a wrap! These tips will make you cook like a pro.