KITCHEN HACKS

Kitchen or food hacks are techniques used by home cooks and culinary professionals to make food preparation tasks easier, faster, or more efficient. The idea of a kitchen hack is not new. Kitchen hacks have been used throughout history to adapt to lack of equipment by those living in prisons, dorms, and under conditions of poverty or scarcity. NPR called Robinson Crusoe the “patron saint of the kitchen hack”, because he managed to produce bread with none of the normally required tools, such as a plow, scythe, mill, or oven. Gourds were used by enslaved people in the American South to replace dippers and other cooking utensils. During World War I, Salvation Army cooks in France used shell casings as rolling pins and helmets as deep fryers. Edna Lewis recalled her family used coins to measure baking powder. Mahatma Gandhi used a glass bottle to roll out rotis while imprisoned in the 1930s. Ruth Reichl jokingly claims she invented the microplane when, as a young impoverished new cook, she used a rasp to grate Parmesan.
The term kitchen hack is an offshoot of life hacks, a term coined in 2003 by technology journalist Danny O’Brien. Like life hacks, which O’Brien characterizes as “a way of cutting through an apparently complex system with a really simple, non-obvious fix”, kitchen hacks solve a commonly encountered kitchen problem.

Eater said kitchen hacks represent “our hope that, one day, we won’t have to put in the work” in the kitchen and promote the idea that anyone can become an expert at a kitchen task immediately. Food52 said kitchen hacks “should solve (or purport to solve) a tangible problem, to make the task at hand either possible or easier” and “are creative for the purpose of utility and resourcefulness.” They noted that Google searches for food and drink hacks increased 300% between 2011 and 2016.