5 Kitchen Mtyhs De-bunked
I found this article on the Everest Double Glazing blog (I have NO idea how I got there, but it’s pretty useful)…
Nearly every aspect of home life has generations of ‘handy tips’ or ‘old wives tales’ that have built up around it over the generations. These wise words usually take the form of a little piece of advice or common sense that we often just take for granted due to repetition, never having thought much about the truth behind them.
If something was good enough for our parents, it often gets handed down to us as a matter of course and we carry on doing things that might actually be counter-productive and, in the worst cases, possibly harmful as well.
The kitchen, being the heart of family life, has more than its fair share of such things. Here are five widely accepted myths that need to be exposed as such:
Cooking Pasta
The first one can actually save you money and time because the energy it takes to boil a pan full of water is far more than if you only half-fill it. Many people think that in order to cook pasta you must boil a huge amount of water, but in fact it only needs a small amount to do the job. A smaller pot also loses less energy to the outside environment because of its smaller surface area, so when you add the pasta it will return to the boil faster than if you use a large pot.
Odourless Fridge
Bicarbonate of soda has many uses and some think that placing it in the refrigerator will remove any bad smells. This isn’t true. The only way to keep your fridge smelling fresh is to remove any items past their sell by date, cover the food that is in there and keep the shelves and draws clean. Learning to stack items properly as explained in our Kitchen Cheat Sheet is a good place to start.
Nuking The Nutrients
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where this myth came from or even why it has gathered such momentum, but it seems that many people subscribe to the view that cooking in a microwave somehow destroys all the nutrients in the food. The reality is somewhat different, as the evidence suggests that due to the fact that it involves less heat than other methods of cooking, using a microwave to cook could actually help to preserve nutrients effectively.
Safety In Cleanliness
If you use a sponge or cloth too often, or with little thought, you can easily spread germs and bacteria around the kitchen from surface to surface. Keeping reusable cleaning items extra clean themselves, by washing in boiling water or popping them in the microwave, is the only way to ensure safety. Of course, using disposable paper kitchen towels is an easy answer as well.
Storing Tomatoes In The Fridge
It’s a natural thought that everything will last longer and therefore taste better if refrigerated, but this isn’t the case when it comes to tomatoes. Flavour development in tomatoes continues throughout the ripening process after picking due to enzyme activity. The colder it is, the less it works, and refrigerating tomatoes can also affect the texture. So, in fact they are better off being stored at room temperature.