Man Food Kitchen

5 Food Hacks Everyone Should Know

(But Most Don’t)

Ashburn, VA: Here are 5 food hacks restaurant and bakery owners don’t want you to know. This is because if enough people find out, bakeries and restaurants could lose millions.

1. Bakeries & Box Mix

Here is a tip you can use to impress your wife on her birthday, anniversary, Valentine, etc. One of my best friends works for a company that provides food supplies to local restaurants and bakeries in Virginia. Generic box cookie, cake, and brownie mix are a few of her best sellers. I know for a fact that some of the most popular bakeries in Virginia use box mix. They just spice it up a bit and sell millions of dollars worth of baked goods. Women go nuts when a man bakes something tasty for them. Especially if she thinks it’s from “scratch”. Here are a couple of easy-to-do baking recipes my buddy, discovered and passed on to me. You can use these easy recipes to impress your wife for her birthday, an anniversary, Valentine’s day, date night at the house, etc. TRUST ME…….Do this and she will likely reward you : )

How to Easily Make “Upscale” Brownies?

Buy Duncan Hines Chewy Fudge brownie mix. Follow the directions on the back of the box but substitute the water with milk and the vegetable oil with coconut oil. You now have the recipe for one of the best-selling, most expensive fudge brownies in Virginia.

How to Effortlessly Make Award-Winning Chocolate Chip Cookies

Follow the recipe on the back of the Tollhouse chocolate chip bag to the T. However, use Kerrygold salted butter and add some Heath Bits O’ Brickel Toffee Bits to taste. The nutty toffee adds an amazing flavor, and nobody will be able to figure it out. You now have the recipe for one of the most award-winning chocolate chip cookies in Virginia.

2. Simple Trick for Restaurant Quality Vegetables

This tip is so easy, it’s criminal. There is a high-end restaurant in one of our big cities that makes mouth-watering vegetables. I am not a fan of veggies but… 

This Restaurant Had Me Asking For 
Second & Third Helpings of Brussel Sprouts.

Long story short, my wife and I learned the key to making great vegetables is easy. You need to roast them. You can season them up a bit if you want; however, all you need is salt, pepper, and olive oil. If you are cooking more than one veggie at the same time, the key is to make sure you use vegetables that have similar cooking times. Otherwise, you will end up with unevenly cooked vegetables. Here is a general guide:

Cooking Times for Roasting Vegetables at 425°F

  • Root vegetables (beets, potatoes, carrots): 30 to 45 minutes, depending on how small you cut them.
  • Winter squash (butternut squash, acorn squash): 20 to 60 minutes, depending on how small you cut them.
  • Crucifers (broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts): 15 to 25 minutes.
  • Soft vegetables (zucchini, summer squash, bell peppers): 10 to 20 minutes.
  • Thin vegetables (asparagus, green beans): 10 to 20 minutes.
  • Onions: 30 to 45 minutes, depending on how crispy you like them.
  • Tomatoes: 15 to 20 minutes.

3. How To Seal a Bag of Chips Without a Clip

When we run out of chip clips, my wife folds the bag half a**  and puts it in the pantry. When I have a taste for the chips, I find the bag with no clip just open enough for the chips to get stale. This pisses me off. I recently learned how to fold a bag of chips when we are out of clips and I taught her what I learned. Hopefully, this helps you. See the video below.

4. Easy-To-Eat S’mores

 We take our grandkids camping often. One night, in a desperate attempt to get them off their tablets & phones, we did this. You take ice cream cones and stuff them with chocolate chips, graham crackers, and marshmallows. Wrap them in foil, put a camping grill grate over your fire, then place the foil-wrapped cones on the grill grate. After a few minutes, you will have easy-to-eat smores! You can get creative with this. We’ve tried butterscotch chips, chocolate mint, fruit, nuts, coconut flakes, etc. Here are some additional tips:

  • Sometimes the marshmallows just melt into liquid sugar. To stop this, stick a skewer through the bottom of the cone, fill your cone with whatever you want, wrap the cone in foil (leaving some skewer exposed at the top), then put the marshmallow on the skewer. This way you can roast the marshmallow while everything else melts together inside of the cone. When it’s all done, pull the skewer out and the roasted marshmallow will sit nicely on whatever is in your cone. 
  • Be sure you let your cone all cool down. Biting into a cone fresh from the fire may be like eating lava.
  • After your cone cools down, add a scoop of ice cream on top of it if you want. It’s delicious. 
  • You can do this in an oven as well. Cook it all at 375 for about 10 min.

5. The Best Seasoned Salt 99.7% People Don’t
Know About

My sister was hosting a brunch for her in-laws. However, in the middle of making the brunch, she ran out of salt and did not have time to go to the store. Her husband is a successful BBQ competitor. Prior to his recent competition, he tested a little-known BBQ rub called Bald Buck for smoked chicken. When he first tested the rub, he used too much and it made the chicken salty. However,  the flavor was promising. On his second test, he used the right amount and she said….

The Flavor of That Chicken Was Orgasmic….

…and since then, her husband won two competitions using this little-known BBQ rub. Since she did not have salt and did not have time to go to the store, her husband suggested she use the Bald Buck rub as a make-shift seasoned salt for her food. She did not want to do it but she had no choice. She used the rub as the salt for her eggs and her hashbrowns. Things could not have gone any better. She said her in-laws went nuts over the eggs and hashbrowns. “I made this huge brunch with a couple of fancy dishes and who would have thought eggs and hashbrowns would be the stars of the show,” she said. Her in-laws said it was the best they’d ever had and kept trying to figure out why it tasted so good

After she finally told me the secret, I did some research on Bald Buck rub. I found a few youtube videos on it; however, this one seemed to be the most popular.

I bought some Bald Buck to see what the fuss was about and damn, it’s delicious. I put it on everything like roasted vegetables, eggs, meat, potatoes, in my bloody mary, etc. It’s my go-to seasoned salt. I always get compliments when I put it on my food, and nobody knows about my secret. I don’t think the makers of this rub intended it to be used this way, but oh well, the stuff is delicious, and they should consider making it a seasoned salt, in my opinion. 

Learn More About Bald Buck Here