One of the original Food Network chefs, Emeril Lagasse is a culinary great. To make your food taste as good as Emeril's, try finishing dishes with a squeeze of lemon juice (where appropriate). The celebrated chef says the acidity of citrus is a great way to lighten up the flavours and make your dish extra special.
Whether it's steak, roasted meat, potatoes or seafood, Emeril always sprinkles a little pinch of sea salt on top. This enhances all the other flavours on the plate and makes your food taste restaurant-quality. But don't overdo it and make it too salty. "A little bit goes a long way," as Emeril says.
Everyone’s favourite Food Network chef, Giada De Laurentiis is an expert in Italian cooking. When the Giada at Home star makes classic lasagne, she takes it to the next level by adding a layer of chopped frozen spinach and ricotta. But she squeezes all the excess moisture out of the spinach first so it doesn’t dilute the flavour. The same applies when using frozen spinach in tortellini or cannelloni.
When making chicken tetrazzini, a delicious pasta dish of diced chicken and peas in a creamy white wine sauce, Giada says it’s fine to substitute heavy cream for flour, butter and broth, or milk. This is a good trick to know next time you’re halfway through preparing a savoury dish like chicken pie or pasta and realise you’ve run out of cream.
Whether it's a soup, stew or even braised meat, Giada's top tip is to add a Parmesan rind into the pot and let it simmer. It brings a salty, umami-rich depth of flavour to any dish and you'll get the most out of the cheese too instead of throwing it out.
Sometimes there isn't time to make fresh marinara sauce so reaching for that shop-bought jar is inevitable. Thankfully, Giada has some great advice to make it more homemade. Start by tasting the sauce and note whether it's acidic, too sweet or salty. Then, build flavour with onion and garlic as well as a few sprigs of basil and other seasoning. If you like a little heat, chilli paste will also help boost flavours and add interest. Finally, finish it with a tablespoon of butter for luscious creaminess.
Life’s too short to stand over a pan stirring stock into rice for half an hour. Or at least, it feels like that sometimes. For those evenings, try Ina’s genius hack: throw the rice in a Dutch oven or casserole dish, pour over the stock and pop in the oven. Then it just needs stirring with a little more stock, wine and cheese for a mere couple of minutes when you take it out – and the final result is as gorgeously creamy as if you’d been at it for hours.
According to Ina, there’s one key thing you need to know when making scrambled eggs: cook over a low heat. The reason is that protein gets tough on a high heat, so keeping the temperature low will make sure they stay tender. Also remove the scrambled egg from the heat just before it's done as it will keep cooking in the pan.
Leftovers don’t have to be an afterthought. Sometimes it pays to plan two meals at once and cook a meal than can easily be transformed into something else the following day. As Ina puts it in an Instagram post, “a nice two-fer” can be game-changing. Here the Barefoot Contessa suggests cooking tomato and aubergine soup that can be used as the base for a baked pasta dish the next day.
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He’s eaten a lot of good meat on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives so it’s safe to say Guy Fieri knows how to cook steak. When frying filet of beef, he suggests using olive oil and butter. You get the lovely, rich flavour from butter, but the oil stops it from burning.
The Food Network chef is known for his love of Tex-Mex cooking and has some great advice for slow-cooked chilli. Before piling all the ingredients into the pot, brown off the meat in batches. This way it'll have space in the pan to get a nice char. When the pan is overcrowded, meat steams instead.
The mayor of Flavortown has a top tip for mellowing out the strong flavour of raw shallots and garlic. First, slow-roast them in the oven so they caramelise and become sweet. He then chops the alliums and stirs into a roux for mac 'n' cheese, but you could also use for any sauce base.
Having racked up a total of 29 seasons of 30 Minute Meals on Food Network, Rachael Ray knows what she’s doing. Her trick for using up garlic and onions is to roast chopped garlic and caramelise chopped onion, then pack into ice cube trays and freeze. Whenever you have a sauce or soup that needs a little something extra, add one of these flavour bombs.
When Rachael Ray fancies cannelloni but hasn’t got any tubes, she makes her own out of lasagne sheets. Cook the flat pasta until flexible, spoon the filling on one end, roll them up and place in a baking dish seam-side-down. Cover in sauce and cheese, then bake until golden.
The trick to crispy potatoes is to increase the spuds’ surface area. When you make the surface area larger, more of it is exposed to the heat. To do this, Rachael lightly squashes potatoes when they're frying in a pan. This technique also works when baking them.
The steely-eyed Great British Bake Off judge and Food Network UK chef Paul Hollywood knows everything there is to know about baking bread, so when he suggests cleaning your oven regularly, we all better listen. You might be wondering what cleanliness has to do with your baking, but it turns out, quite a lot. Carbon build-up around the inside means that heat doesn't circulate properly and you get an uneven rise on your bakes.
Unless the recipe states otherwise, Paul says to always use warm milk, especially when baking with yeast. The fat in the milk can halt the action of the yeast if cold, so bring it to room temperature or warm in the microwave before adding to your dough. It's also worth noting you should keep salt and yeast apart when adding to the dough, as the salt can kill the yeast.
If you want your loaves to come out perfectly crispy with thin, light crusts and a soft inside, then follow Paul's advice and bake them in a steam bath. Leave a roasting tray at the bottom of your oven while it heats up, then when you're ready to bake the loaf, pour cold water into the warmed tray. This will create a steam bath in the oven that'll also prevent the dough from tearing.
To make perfect burgers, do as Bobby Flay of Boy Meets Grill, Throwdown with Bobby Flay and Beat Bobby Flay does. Use a meat mixture that's 80% beef, 20% fat, then give patties a generous coating of salt and pepper, create a small dent in the middle and fry in a cast-iron pan. But the most important thing of all: only flip the burger once. This will help the patty get that perfect char on the outside.
The Iron Chef has a nifty trick to nail perfect steak – remove the guesswork by checking the temperature with a meat thermometer. He says medium-rare is 51°C (125°F) and medium is 60°C (140°F). Take the steak out from under the grill or pan before it reaches this as the meat continues to cook. Bobby also allows steak to rest before serving.
One of the biggest downfalls of home cooks, according to Bobby, is never letting the pan get hot enough. He insists that unless there is smoke coming from your pan, it's not hot enough to properly sear steak or get a crispy skin on fish. A cast-iron skillet should be pre-heated for at least 3–4 minutes before adding oil.
When it comes to melting cheese onto burgers, Bobby has a clever method. While the patty is still in the pan, he adds two slices of American cheese on top and a dash of water to the pan, then covers it with a metal burger lid. The trapped steam melts the cheese onto the burger perfectly.
The Naked Chef has a brilliant hack to cook perfectly fluffy rice. Take a mug or a clean tin can and fill with rice, then pour into a pan, followed by two tins (or mugs) of water and a pinch of salt. Bring to the boil then simmer until the rice has absorbed the water, around 8–10 minutes. This way you shouldn’t have to drain off any liquid and you can add aromatics to flavour your rice too.
Peeling ginger is one of the most annoying tasks in the kitchen, unless you know how to do it right. Jamie Oliver demonstrates how easy it is to scrape off the ginger peel with a teaspoon, without any of the precious root going to waste.
Food waste is a serious problem so think twice before you put anything in the bin. When it comes to bread, there's a lot you can do with a few stale slices. If you have a food processor, do like Jamie and blitz the bread into breadcrumbs. Ideally, do them in two batches – some finer, some coarser – and save to use in meatloaf, stuffing or to sprinkle on pasta. You can also tear bread into chunks and bake in the oven to make your own croutons for soups and salads.
Known as The Pioneer Woman on Food Network, Ree Drummond didn’t turn her passion for blogging and baking into a successful career knowing nothing. And if soft and gooey chocolate cookies make you melt, listen up. Drummond removes them from the oven just short of them being done so they don't overbake. Residual heat will continue to bake them for some time after you've taken them out of the oven.
When it comes to making picture-perfect cinnamon rolls, Ree says that if you can wait for the dough to chill, you will be rewarded. Chilling makes the dough firmer and easier to roll into tight coils, which results in a more even bake and visually more beautiful rolls.
No time to make your own bread rolls? Buy frozen unbaked ones and add your own twist for extra flavour. Drummond recommends placing the rolls in a lightly-buttered skillet and covering for a few hours, allowing them to rise, before brushing with melted butter, chopped rosemary and sea salt. Then they're ready to bake.
For ribs that fall off the bone in a sticky sweet sauce, Drummond warns against a common mistake. Slow-cook ribs first, then smother them in glaze, not the other way around. This way the sauce will stick to the meat and won't be diluted by the cooking juices.