Kitchen Hacks: Restaurant Tips and Tricks to Lift Your Home-Cooking Game

The difference between good home cooking and great home cooking is sweating the details. Here are three suggestions on ways to bring restaurant-grade quality and flavour to your family’s dining table.

Kitchen Hack No 1.

Playing With Fire: An Introduction to Cooking with Charcoal

The smoky savour and juicy texture of meat cooked over charcoal is impossible to replicate using gas or electric grills, hence why chefs at Goji Kitchen use charcoal when preparing the restaurant’s signature carved meats. It’s also a cooking technique perfectly suited to the home environment.

The two most popular charcoals are briquettes and hardwood charcoal. Briquettes are inexpensive, light easily and burn long and steady while hardwood charcoal burns faster, but produces a more intense, smoky flavour.

The easiest way is to start your barbecue is by lighting your charcoal in a charcoal chimney, otherwise use lighter fluid. When lighting your grill, open its vents to ensure the fire has access to oxygen. Once your charcoal is in your barbecue, control the cooking temperature by opening (more oxygen) and closing (less oxygen) air vents. Be careful not to close the vent for too long or it will extinguish the charcoal.

The secret to successful charcoal cooking is to cook over coals rather than flames. Allow the charcoal to burn until it is covered in a white-grey ash: about five to 10 minutes for high heat, and 25-30 minutes for medium heat.

For greater grilling control, create high-temperature and low-temperature cooking zones by pushing most of the coals to one side of the grill and having a smaller amount of coals on the other. This allows you to sear food on the hot zone, move it to the cooler zone to gently cook through, then finish on the hot zone for a final blast of colour. Remember to rest your meat for at least five minutes before serving.

Taking stock of kitchen waste

A good stock is the basis of so many dishes. As part of Bangkok Marriott Marquis Queen’s Park’s aim to minimise waste and maximise flavour, trimmings, bones and vegetable and meat off-cuts are saved and used to make stock. It’s an approach that pays dividends at home too.

To make stock, you’ll need a stock pot and a stove that you can safely leave your pot to simmer undisturbed. As you cook, save your vegetable peels, onion skins, leftover meat, bones, and vegetable trimmings: a freezer-safe bag is a good way to collect your stock-making building blocks.

When making your stock, it is important the heat on your stove is set to a simmer rather than boil. Keep your stock at a steady simmer for between two and three hours. If you are using meaty, collagen-rich bones, the stock will need to simmer longer – at least four hours – but your prize will be a richer, healthier stock that’s higher in protein. Remove stock from heat and allow to cool slightly before straining through a coarse sieve. Keep stock in fridge till ready to use.

Meatball soup is a favourite home-style dish of our chefs. Season rough-ground pork shoulder with some sugar, salt, chopped garlic, spring onion and coriander, then gently combine and shape into meatballs. Bring cold stock to boil and then add meatballs and reduce heat to a simmer. Cook the meatballs for five minutes before adding vegetables. While the soup is cooking, regularly skim the top of the soup for impurities.

The cure for perfect fish and seafood

Dry-curing is a preserving technique that improves the texture, taste, and appearance of seafood. It also helps seafood to cook evenly, making it a technique that is equally suited to home cooks preparing dinner parties as it is the banqueting department of an international hotel.

To dry-cure seafood, you will need sugar and a non-iodised salt as well as your favourite fish or seafood. This technique works well on scallops, prawns and squid. The ratio for dry-curing is 1.5 percent salt per kilogram of the seafood’s weight, and 1 percent sugar. For example, to dry-cure a 500-gram fillet of salmon would require 7.5 grams of salt and 5 grams of sugar. Combine the salt and sugar together.

Dry your seafood and then cover it with your salt-sugar mix. Cure the seafood for 45 minutes and then rinse it in ice-cold water to remove the curing mix. Pat the seafood dry and then store in fridge. At Bangkok Marriott Marquis Queen’s Park, seafood is dry-cured two days ahead of preparation to allow flavour to evenly penetrate the seafood, but dry-cured seafood can be kept in the fridge for up to five days.