Five TikTok food hacks that really work (and a few that don’t)

If in case you have even a passing curiosity in meals and an web connection, you have got most likely heard of tomato feta pasta, four-ingredient bread or 15-hour potatoes. They’re all recipes that went viral on TikTok, then made it into mainstream information feeds.

However there’s much more to #TikTokFood (a hashtag that has garnered TikTok greater than 25 billion views) than recipes. Certainly, a lot of the meals content material on TikTok isn’t full recipes in any respect: it’s what are generally known as hacks.

A meals hack, like its extra generally identified grandparent, the life hack, is a type of shortcut that makes a cumbersome job easier, or means that you can skip a couple of steps in a prolonged course of. A superb hack makes your life simpler, will increase effectivity with out affecting (and even whereas enhancing) the result, and usually provides you bragging rights.

A hack video is brief, shocking and considerably clickbait-y. TikTok customers, with a median age of 18 to 24, love them.

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Some hacks, I really feel, are in the end extra about cleverness or trickery than ease. One common TikTok egg hack, for instance, encourages customers to poach an egg by lining a bowl with plastic wrap, cracking an egg into the wrap, then – protecting the yolk intact, thoughts you – gathering the perimeters of the plastic, twisting them closed, then dropping the entire thing in simmering water. I can’t see how that’s presumably any simpler than cracking an egg immediately right into a pan, nevertheless it does look cuter.

Boiling pasta immediately in cream sauce is one other such hack. In line with some TikTok customers, it saves time and improves flavour, however you would wish to begin with lots of sauce, which is able to cut back down drastically within the time it takes to cook dinner the pasta.

That may be a truthful chunk of change going up in smoke (and it’ll change the flavour and texture of the sauce) and, assuming you have got not less than two burners and may cook dinner pasta and sauce on the similar time, all this “hack” saves is the time it takes you fill a pot with water, then drain it when the pasta is cooked.

Then there are the hacks that aren’t actually hacks in any respect. TikTok customers, for instance, have gone loopy over the tip to pour a bit olive oil into pasta water to keep away from clumping – one thing Italians have been doing for hundreds of years.

And there are some hacks that simply sound terrible.

No thanks, TikTok, I don’t need to coat my cheese sandwich in mayonnaise earlier than grilling it. Nor do I need to eat a cereal product of pancakes; a pickle wrapped in bacon or a Snickers bar wrapped in a pickle or, actually, something involving pickles and wrapping.

However there are some TikTok hacks that completely fulfil our hack standards: they make a chore simpler, are themselves easy and ship you one thing tasty.

Listed here are 5 of my favourites.

Coat your cups or spoons earlier than measuring sticky elements

An instance of a very nice hack, this one solves a niggly downside sufficiently small that you simply most likely haven’t gone out of your option to appropriate it your self, however large enough that you’ll expertise a rush of pleasure if you realise it really works, which it actually does.

It’s easy. Your downside right here is that when a baking recipe requires one thing sticky reminiscent of honey or golden syrup, the ingredient sticks to the within of the vessel you utilize to measure it. Baking portions should be actual, so that you spend effort and time utilizing a spatula to get the rest out of the cup, then utilizing a knife to scrape extra off the spoon. Annoying, proper?

Effectively, you received’t be aggravated any extra. This hack directs you to evenly coat the within of the cup or spoon with some type of oil (I exploit spray-on canola) earlier than including the sticky ingredient, permitting it to slip proper out with virtually none left behind.

Strip herbs utilizing a field grater

if you get a handful of contemporary herbs, then spend ages selecting the leaves off the woody stems? This hack turns that right into a 10-second course of. All you might want to do is take an bizarre grater, feed the stalks via one of many greatest holes (you’ll match fairly a couple of via one gap), then attain up and pull them out from the within. Hey presto, or perhaps pesto, solely leaves stay.

Use dental floss to chop a cake

Sure, you learn that proper. I do know it sounds ridiculous, however when you concentrate on it, it makes good sense.

Desserts – notably the multi-layer, iced confections you may prove for a giant celebration – are tough to chop cleanly with a knife. They tend to take half the icing with them, collapse a cake of sunshine texture, and usually get very messy.

You should purchase fancy contraptions for chopping good slices of cake, however many people would use one so not often they aren’t value shopping for.

However you may nicely have the answer to this downside in your toilet cupboard. A size of dental floss a few centimetres longer than the cake on all sides and pulled tightly throughout will do nearly pretty much as good a job, and higher than a knife.

Grate chilly butter

Butter is a paradox. It must be stored within the fridge to keep away from going rancid, however nearly each time you need to use butter – for baking, making a sandwich, or spreading on toast – it must be smooth. Meaning taking it out of the fridge in time to melt (as all bakers know, attempting to get butter smooth however not melted within the microwave is a fraught enterprise), and that’s one thing all of us overlook to do.

As soon as once more, your grater turns out to be useful right here, although you want the small facet of a field grater or a microplane. It’s then as simple as taking a block of chilly butter and grating as a lot as you want. The friction of the motion mixed with the small items of butter make for a wonderfully smooth dairy product. This can be a game-changer.

Take away wayward eggshell

TikTok is obsessive about egg hacks: methods to boil them, methods to separate them, anxiety-inducing methods to peel them – egg hacks take up a disproportionate quantity of house on meals TikTok, so I really feel I have to embrace one.

The hack I’ve chosen is the best on this record. It’s, maybe, one of many easiest on the platform however, in that sense, it’s also the purest. It requires no further tools, nor actually any ability.

It’s a hack for eradicating errant items of eggshell after you have got cracked the egg, suggesting that quite than fishing round with one other piece of shell or a teaspoon or no matter, that you just moist one among your individual fingers below the faucet then dab the piece of shell along with your fingertip. It can take away the shell however received’t take away any egg. It’s value all of the hours I’ve spent scrolling on TikTok.