Straight answers for a busy kitchen. How long food really keeps, what to use when you have run out, and the conversions that actually matter. Written by Nora Quinn, who cooks for a family and cannot stand wasting food.
Can You Freeze Strawberries? (The Open-Freeze Trick)
Yes, you can freeze strawberries, and it is one of the best ways to save a punnet that is about to turn. The trick is to open-freeze them, spread out on a tray, before you bag them up, so they freeze as loose individual berries instead of one solid lump. The one thing to be honest about: they do not come back the same. Freezing bursts the cells, so thawed strawberries are soft and a bit weepy rather than firm. That makes them brilliant for smoothies, jam, crumbles, sauces and baking, and poor for topping a pavlova. Here is exactly how I do it. ...
Brown Sugar Substitute: What to Use, and How to Make Your Own
If you have run out of brown sugar, the best substitute is brown sugar you make yourself: stir 1 tablespoon of black treacle or molasses into 200g of white sugar and you have light brown sugar, or 2 tablespoons for dark. It takes about a minute, it costs nothing extra if you keep a tin of treacle in the cupboard, and it behaves in a bake exactly like the shop-bought stuff, because it is the same thing. Brown sugar is simply white sugar with some of the molasses added back. Below is the ratio in full, the times you can get away with plain white sugar, and the couple of swaps I would not bother with. ...
Caster Sugar Substitute: What to Use When You Run Out
If you are mid-recipe and out of caster sugar, use granulated instead, measured one for one. It works in most bakes. The only catch is that granulated crystals are bigger and dissolve more slowly, so in the few recipes where that matters, mainly sponges and meringues, give the granulated a quick blitz in a blender first and you have caster sugar in about ten seconds. Here is when you can swap straight across, when to blitz, and the one swap to avoid. ...
Golden Syrup Substitutes, and How to Make Your Own
If you have run out of golden syrup and the recipe wants a few tablespoons, honey or maple syrup will stand in measure for measure and you can carry on. If you need a proper match in both flavour and that thick, pourable stretch, the best stand-in is one you make yourself from sugar, water and a squeeze of lemon. Which you reach for depends on what the syrup is doing in the bake, so here is the honest version of each, the ratios, and the homemade one I keep in a jar at the back of the cupboard. ...
Can You Freeze Lemons and Limes? (The Way That Actually Works)
Yes, you can freeze lemons and limes, and if you are the sort of household that buys a bag of lemons for one recipe and finds four of them gone soft a fortnight later, freezing is the fix. The trick is not to freeze them whole and hope. Freeze them in the form you will actually reach for: juice in ice cube trays, zest in a little tub, slices on a tray for drinks. Do that and a citrus glut stops being a guilt trip. ...
Can You Eat Runny Eggs? (The British Lion Rule)
For most people, yes, runny eggs are fine and always have been. The bigger news is that since 2017 the advice has also changed for the people who used to be told off for a dippy egg: if your eggs carry the red British Lion mark, pregnant women, babies on solids, young children and the over-65s can now eat them runny or even raw. That is the headline, and it genuinely surprised me when I first read it, because “no soft eggs when you’re expecting” had been drummed into everyone for decades. ...
Can You Eat Cold Cooked Chicken? Yes, With One Condition
Yes, you can eat cold cooked chicken, and I do it most weeks. Cold roast chicken in a sandwich, leftover chicken straight from the fridge into a salad, a drumstick eaten standing at the counter: all fine, as long as one condition is met. The chicken has to have been cooked thoroughly the first time, cooled quickly and kept properly cold ever since. Get that right and the fact that you are eating it cold changes nothing about its safety. ...
What Temperature Should Your Fridge Be? (And How to Check It)
Your fridge should sit between 0 and 5C. That is the number the Food Standards Agency gives, and it is the single most useful fact on this whole site, because every storage time I have ever written assumes your fridge is actually that cold. If it is running warm, the “three days” on a tub of leftovers quietly becomes a much shorter and far less safe window, and nothing on the label will warn you. So before you worry about any use-by date, it is worth knowing what your fridge is really doing. ...
How to Ripen an Avocado Quickly
The fastest honest way to ripen an avocado is to put it in a paper bag with a ripe banana, leave it somewhere warm, and give it a day or two. That is as quick as real ripening gets. The one thing I want to be straight about from the start is that you cannot take a bullet-hard avocado and make it ready to eat in ten minutes, no matter what a video promises. The heat tricks you have seen do something, but it is not the same thing, and I will come to why. First, the method that genuinely works. ...
How Long Does Opened Pasta Sauce Last?
An opened jar of pasta sauce keeps for about three days in the fridge. That is shorter than most of us assume, and it is the figure the jar itself gives you if you read the small print. Cream-based sauces are at the shorter end of that, fresh chilled sauces shorter still, and homemade sauce follows the leftovers rule rather than anything printed on a jar. I go through a lot of pasta sauce in this house, half a jar here, a batch of homemade there, so here is how I actually keep track of it without either poisoning anyone or chucking out good food. ...