Alright comrades, buckle up

• Blanch your hard vegetables before stir frying. Broccoli, Chinese broccoli, pea pods, even mushrooms. Makes the colours more vibrant, and home stoves rarely reach the heat levels that Chinese professional stoves can reach so you can cook them through. Blanch for 15-60 seconds (depending on how hard/big the vegetable is), run it under cold water in a strainer of some description before throwing it into a stir fry.

• Specific to shiitake mushrooms, this may be more common knowledge in China, Japan, Korea, etc, but fresh Shiitake should be blanched for 30-60 seconds, cooled under running water then pressed against your strainer to get the excess water out. This gets the “grassy” flavour out. A lot of people who don’t like shiitake specifically aren’t prepping them correctly.

• Big chopping boards. Don’t cheap out, get a large wooden or plastic chopping board. Medium chopping boards are small, large chopping boards are mid.

• Have a scrap bin on your work surface. Even if you have a bin you can open with your foot next to you, it’ll save time. Just use a bowl or an empty container.

• Get a Chinese caidao. That’s it. You can use it as a bench scraper after cutting whatever you’re cutting, a shibazi works well and it’s cheap. I’m a cook irl, for a western cafe, and I own one (1) pairing knife and one (1) caidao. While other cooks/chefs own like a set of expensive European knives

• Don’t be afraid of MSG, tell your friends and family not to be afraid of MSG.

• If you think you’ve put in the correct amount of garlic, add another 15%

• Marinades that require over a couple hours are a scam, beyond that it’s not worth the effort 90% of the time. Overnight marinades are to food what top sheets are to beds. There’s a certain level of flavour penetration extra time can provide to a meat, but after a point it’s easier to simply cut it into smaller pieces to allow whatever marinade to coat more of the surface in less than half the time.

• Sharpen your knives, but don’t listen to r/knives or whatever when they tell you to use some expensive meteorite whetstone every other day. I sharpen via stone every… 6 months? And hone with a steel once or twice a day

• Google how to brunoise an onion. Dicing onions is common across many cuisines, and doing so efficiently will save you more time over the years than practically any other knife skill

• Pinch grip on your knives. Have the handle in your hand, and pinch the spine of the blade with your thumb and finger (or 2, for larger knives like the caidao)

• Making your own stock isn’t worth the effort most of the time, but when you do make stock, and it’s not intended to be a clear stock, add like a dash of soy sauce

• Steamed rice makes the best fried rice, day old rice makes the second best fried rice, cooked rice layed out in a thin layer over a sheet pan or plate makes the third best fried rice.

• If you don’t have a mortar and pestle, get a garlic crusher.

• If you do have a mortar and pestle, try crushing things with some coarse salt laid in. For example, if you’re crushing basil for a homemade pesto, huge salt flakes help break down the leaves. Doesn’t exactly hurt garlic, either.

• An air fryer is just a small oven, decide for yourself whether or not you eat enough baked goods to warrant purchasing one.

• Salting your pasta water is better than not salting it. That said, the difference is very minor so most people won’t be able to tell the difference. I can barely tell the difference.

• Asian noodles cook way faster than pasta, if you’re used to cooking pasta and you’re trying out a noodle recipe, be very careful not to overcook. The reverse is also true: if you’re more used to Asian noodles and you’re making pasta, start boiling water and cooking before you would normally.

• Learn to use spice. Straight up adding chili will probably not be a pleasant experience. Umami rounds out the heat (Loads of Chinese styles of chili use this, see: Laoganma chili crisp). Acid cuts through the heat (most American hot sauces I’ve encountered do this. Tabasco, Frank’s, Cholula, Tapatio). Garlic pairs well with heat (Sriracha). This knowledge is the difference between spicelords that eat carolina reapers as a flex and someone who actually enjoys spice.

• Temperature control is extremely important but is hard to do on electric stoves, so may not be possible to turn heat up or down rapidly. I’ve made do by having a burner on low and one on high if I have to go between starting the aromatics to cooking the main ingredients.

• Deep frying at home is only worth it if you do it often, don’t buy a deep fryer.

• Conversely, steaming at home is worth it regardless of if you do it once every 6 months or every day, buy a bamboo steamer that fits over one of your pots. Mainly due to how cheap bamboo is.

• Dark and light soy aren’t remotely the same thing

• Neutral oils can be seasoned ahead of time. For example, on the lowest setting your stove can go, heat up some neutral oil, roughly chop some scallions and a shallot, drop them into the oil, and fish them out after they darken (if they’re blackened, you’ve gone too far). Fish out the solids, pour into a bottle of some type, and you have a relatively stable onion oil that can be used for a lot of dishes that call for onions. See: Scallion pancakes, scallion oil noodles

• A small amount of vegemite/marmite will improve brown gravy in a way I have a hard time believing. Like 2 teaspoons is enough, I don’t know how it works.

• If, for some reason, you prefer your mashed potatoes slightly drier than usual home made stuff, you can sub out milk/cream with powdered milk, which is shelf stable and could be more useful than buying milk/cream just for one dish