Kitchen Reference

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

Yes, stock and broth freeze about as well as anything in the kitchen, and I would go as far as to say the freezer is the whole point of making stock in the first place. A chicken carcass and a few tired vegetables become litres of the stuff, far more than any one meal needs, and frozen in sensible portions it turns into the base of risottos, soups, gravies and sauces for weeks afterwards. Homemade stock keeps for three to four days in the fridge and around three to four months in the freezer at its best. The one part worth getting right is cooling it down quickly and safely before it goes in, so let me start there and then get to the portioning tricks that save the most bother. ...

Yes, you can freeze hummus, and it comes out far better than most people expect. I buy the big tubs when they are on offer, and I make my own in batches that are always too big for one sitting, so the freezer is the only reason either of those habits makes sense. Hummus keeps for around three months in the freezer and stays safe well beyond that. The only thing to know in advance is that it separates a little as it thaws, which looks worse than it is and takes about thirty seconds to put right. Here is exactly how I do it. ...

You decided to bake, opened the recipe, and the very first line says “softened butter” while yours is a cold brick straight from the fridge. I have been there more times than I will admit. The good news is you can soften butter properly in anywhere from two to fifteen minutes depending on the method, and none of them involves the microwave melting one corner into a greasy puddle while the middle stays solid. ...

Yes, you can freeze peppers, and here is the bit that saves you a job: sweet peppers are one of the few vegetables you do not need to blanch first. No pan of boiling water, no ice bath, no timing it to the second. You deseed them, slice or dice them, freeze them in a single layer, then tip them into a bag. That is the whole method. I do it every time peppers are three for a pound and I have bought with my eyes rather than my meal plan. ...

The straight answer is no, you should not eat ordinary raw cookie dough, the kind you make to bake. I know that is not what anyone licking the spoon wants to hear, and I will be honest that I have swiped raw dough plenty of times in my life without incident. But “I got away with it” is not the same as “it is safe,” and there are two separate reasons the dough in your bowl carries a genuine risk. Most people only know about one of them. ...