Whether you’re having people over for the festivities or cooking up your daily family meal, we all slip up in the culinary department now and then. Curry too spicy because you got too liberal with the chilli powder? Rice a soggy mess because you over-estimated the water?
Don’t worry. You don’t have to throw out the food and waste the ingredients and all your hard work. Here are 5 quick fixes to some of the most common cooking errors we tend to make.
Cooking Disaster 1: Curry Too Spicy
[dropcap letter=”M”]alaysian cooking is known for its oomph ─ it’s often full bodied and packs a whallop, both in the use of strong garlic, ginger, onions and belacan, and of course, spice and chillies, or specifically ─ chilli boh, which essentially is a thick, red paste made up of ground dried chillies. Sometimes, we overdo the ladling in of chilli boh and chilli powder or put in chillies and their seeds and the dish becomes too hot to eat.
If that happens, and the chicken curry is meant to be served in 10 minutes, what can we do to salvage the situation?
A. You can add more vegetables. Potatoes and sweet potatoes are very effective in absorbing capsaicin, the chemical in chilli that gives it its “fire”.
B. Add coconut milk cream. This works for curries that are coconut-based. Add santan (coconut milk) or cream and stir in.
C. Grate a cube of milk chocolate and stir into the dish. This is great for non-coconut-based curries.
D. Add a squeeze of lime, a peel of lemon or a splash of vinegar or some salt 15 minutes before it has finished cooking. This will work for both coconut-based and other curries.
E. Add a bit of sugar, honey or a spoonful of tomato sauce for tomato-based dishes. However, make sure you don’t overdo it as you don’t want the dish to become too sweet.
Cooking Disaster 2: Dish too Salty
[dropcap letter=”S”]alt is actually what makes or breaks a dish. Too little and it comes out bland and tasteless. Too much and that’s the end of your dinner presentation. When preparing any meal, always remember to taste your own cooking and add salt little by little.
So what are you going to do if you have oversalted your braised beef dish, for example?
A. Add uncooked pasta or a raw, peeled potato. After 15 minutes on low heat, discard the pasta or potato before serving.
B. Add white rice. Yes. Puree cooked white rice and a bit of water in a blender and add it to the pot. The starchiness will absorb the salt and thicken the stew, gravy or soup.
C. You can also add vinegar or sugar to cancel out the saltiness.
D. Add water to dilute the dish.
Cooking Disaster 3: Food too Oily
[dropcap letter=”W”]ho doesn’t love the convenience of cooking in a crock pot? Just throw everything into the pot in the morning, put the heat to low and by the evening, your dinner is served. But here’s the thing. When cooking meats in a slow cooker, your meal usually gets drowned out under its own pool of oil and that can make eating it pretty yucky.
Oily food doesn’t only result when cooking on the slow cooker, it can happen any time, whether you are braising, broiling or even stir-frying. The meat may be too fat or you may have been too liberal with the cooking oil.
How do you fix that?
A. Reduce the amount of fat going into the pot in the first place. Choose lean meats and trim off visible fat from the meat before putting them in the slow cooker or wok.
B. Periodically, spoon or ladle off the fat and discard it. You can always use a fine mesh sieve ladle to do this. It is effective and works especially well on soups.
C. Freeze metal ladles in the freezer, put a couple of ice cubes into the ladle to retain its coldness, then run the bottom of the ladle over the fat. The grease will stick to the ladle and you can then lift it off the food piece by piece from the pot as it is cooking.
D. Use the bread trick. Briefly lay a piece of bread on top of the cooking meats and let it soak up the oil. Then discard the bread.
E. Cool the dish, then put it in the fridge. The oil will float to the top and harden. Then all you will have to do is remove the whole piece of solidified fat from the food and discard it before reheating the dish to serve it – sans the layer of icky fat.
F. Use a piece of serviette or swirl the ladle to move the oil aside as demonstrated by the two videos below.
Cooking Disaster 4: Soggy Rice
[dropcap letter=”W”]e’re a rice-eating nation, all our lauk goes with rice. Therefore, cooking that perfect pot of white, fluffy rice is important for our every meal.
But then we all make mistakes, even when we’ve got the best rice cooker to do the job for us. Apart from over-gauging the water content for your rice grains, our choice of rice brands and their level of starchiness determines the kind of rice that will turn out in the end.
If your pot of rice turns out to be a gooey mess, there’s a quick fix that can save the day! Actually, there are two quick fixes you can pull off in no time ─ one with bread and the other with a kitchen towel.
A. Place a piece of bread on top of your cooked pot of rice and put the lid back on and allow it to sit for 5 to 10 minutes. Do not stir anything. The piece of bread will pull or absorb the extra water making your rice just the right consistency. After those 5 to 10 minutes, remove that piece of bread and discard it.
B. If your rice is still cooking and you’ve noticed how mushy it looks even before it has finished cooking, you can try to get rid of the extra water by opening the lid to let the steam escape, or place a clean kitchen towel on top of the pot over the rice, then put the lid back on the pot to seal it up.
The towel will absorb the steam rising from the rice, remove the excess water and stop the condensation on the lid from raining back onto the rice to make it soggy.
Cooking Disaster 5: Burnt Food
[dropcap letter=”W”]e mums are always multi-tasking. We’ve got a pot on the stove and baby starts crying or the delivery guy with your orders rings the doorbell and it’s too late. We’re distracted long enough to forget that the pot of stew or soup spaghetti sauce we’ve been cooking is now burnt to a crisp.
Don’t despair.
A. Remove pot from the fire, then pour unburnt stew into a new pot, taking care not to scrape any of the burnt parts into the unburnt food pot.
B. To remove the burnt taste from salvaged food in new pot, add in a raw potato and simmer for 15 minutes before discarding the potato.
C. Secret Tip: Alternatively, stir in a spoonful of peanut butter into the dish until it dissolves into the food. This will effectively remove the burnt smell from the food and don’t worry, you won’t be able to taste the peanut butter in the dish.
Bonus Tip: How to Prevent Fish from Sticking to the Wok
1. Use medium-high heat. Heat the oil until it is shimmering.
2. Pat the fish dry before putting it into the hot oil.
3. Make sure the fish is seasoned with salt and black pepper or salt and turmeric as these act as a barrier between the wok and the fish.
4. Don’t prod, push or turn the fish as it is cooking. Let the fish sit in the simmering oil untouched in the wok until the wok releases it. And then you can turn it over.
Hope this has helped to turn your cooking disaster into a palatable dinner. For more tips and tricks on the kitchen and how to turn around a meal, tune in to Motherhood Story..