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Copyright © 2025 Foodies Only
Copyright © 2025 Foodies Only
5 min
15/12/2025
This guide contains quick tricks used by professionals to help you prepare delicious holiday food without additional effort. It focuses on achieving greater, richer flavours, better textures, and more appealing end products with little to no effort or additional time.
Holiday cooking shouldn't feel like you are running a restaurant kitchen, and there are ways that chefs get through the chaos of the holidays through the use of simple, strategic tips that can provide many delicious layers of flavour without having to put in hours of prep time to create them. This article discusses several techniques that utilise these tips, such as toasting spices ahead of time, using "compound" butters, and building flavour through the one-pan reduction method, as well as how small changes in how you prepare your meals can create remarkable holiday meals with very little effort.
Another way that chefs get deep flavours from spices is by always toasting the spices before adding them to their dishes. A neat trick is to toast the spices while something else is heating up, such as while butter is melting in a pan or an oven is warming up. Simply add the whole spices to a hot pan and toast for 30 seconds before adding them to the other food. The result is that, instead of a completed product that took hours to create, you now have a product that tastes like it took you hours to make. Toasting the spices wakes up the natural oils that were inside the spice and enhances the flavour of marinades, sauces, gravies, and roasting vegetables.
Chefs will make sauces by mixing together their ingredients (e.g. herbs, garlic, citrus zest, etc.) in softened butter before allowing the butter to do almost all the work for their sauces. You could make a batch of this type of sauce and use it 12 different ways - be it on turkey, chicken, potatoes, bread or vegetables. There is virtually no work involved in this, and all that occurs when you heat the butter is that it melts and has now become a flavour explosion. An example of the sort of sauces you can make very easily, that look and taste great, would be rosemary butter for your roast meats; chilli butter for vegetables; or even orange zest butter for your desserts.
Whenever you pan fry or roast something in a pan, you’re left with, because of this cooking process, what I like to call “liquid gold.” You can take those sticky bits that build up and stick to the bottom of the frying pan, and create a beautiful sauce, just by deglazing those bits with something that may be near to you, such as water, wine, stock or even orange juice. So it’s as simple as scraping those sticky bits from the bottom of the pan, swirling them together with your addition of choice to create a nice glaze that you pour over your cooked meat or vegetables, while allowing you to "fake it" by making it look like you actually planned for the sauce.
If you don't have time to marinate overnight, you can use a knife to cut shallow crosshatch lines on your chicken, paneer or vegetables to help provide them with more surface area for the marinades to penetrate, allowing the flavours to seep into the food more efficiently. Even a short period of 15 minutes is enough time to allow for the flavours of the marinade to penetrate deeply into the food. While this is the "lazy" chef hack, it works every time, especially during busy holiday seasons.
Instead of preparing many ingredients separately, chefs will often put various aromatics (such as herbs and spices) together into one pot and reduce them down together so that they concentrate their flavours into one base. Chefs then use this base to flavour gravies, biryanis, stuffings, or anything else that contains leftover vegetables. And while you are doing something else, the pot is doing all the cooking.
When something caramelises, it is not actually burning; rather, it is heating something for long enough to allow it to develop some colour. So, for instance, when you cook onions for gravy, or mushrooms for stuffing, or carrots for an accompaniment, it takes longer to cook than it does for the ingredient to turn brown. Chefs use this technique to produce food that has the same deep flavour as food cooked for a long time in much less time.
If a meal is bland, most people add salt; chefs will add zest instead (lemon, orange, lime). A sprinkle of zest will bring brightness and acidity to a fatty holiday meal, and will make the flavour of everything seem brighter and fresher. The labour needed is almost nothing, but the reward is enormous.
Tomato puree, fried onions, broth cubes, and pre-packaged broth, all ingredients that chefs use. The key is customising them. For example, adding toasted spices to broth cubes, mixing in compound butters to gravy, adding vinegar to tomato puree to create "slow-simmer" flavours, and so on. Using short-cuts doesn't mean that the food you make isn't "homemade"; it simply reflects the prioritisation of your own mental well-being.
