Cook Smarter and Faster with these No-Shame Shortcuts

Feeling guilty about cooking shortcuts? There’s no need — and I say that with every atom of my peeled-garlic, pre-shredded cheese, rotisserie-chicken-loving soul. When time gets tight, plenty of food-prep steps can be skipped without upsetting the balance between quality and convenience. That’s especially true this time of year, when school is starting and fall calendars are filling.

A secret: Some of the best chefs, cookbook authors and cooking experts I know use no-shame shortcuts at home. “I use potato chips for tortilla espanola,” Seattle star chef Mutsuko Soma wrote when I asked for favorites. Ferran Adria, who some call the world’s greatest chef, does the same. Fellow superstar Rachel Yang, whose restaurant kimchis were featured in Food and Wine magazine and in her cookbook, once shared that she eats a favorite store-bought kimchi at home.

The key is knowing the tradeoffs and which ones are worth it to you.

Tradeoffs for cooking shortcuts

Price is one consideration: Sometimes with shortcut ingredients you’re literally buying time.

Control is another: With some shortcut foods, you don’t know every ingredient unless you check labels. Some ingredients, like “natural flavorings,” leave question marks even then. (Which natural flavorings, exactly?) The compromise solution: Read labels and find brands you can trust — or stores you can trust, PCC’s quality standards specify which ingredients are not allowed in co-op products.

The other main issues are quality and flavor. For those, choose your battles and check assumptions. For instance, frozen vegetables are typically as nutritious as fresh, and sometimes they’re even better, as they’re processed immediately after harvest rather than losing nutrients during transport and storage.

No matter which shortcuts you choose, you can get a good meal on the table with ingredients and philosophies like these:

Freezer friends

As mentioned above, unseasoned frozen vegetables are a convenient and generally nutritious choice. Frozen chopped spinach is my super-quick favorite for frittatas, and it shaves enough time off my favorite saag paneer recipe to make it on a weeknight (it’s Jill Lightner’s recipe, email me at editor@pccmarkets.com and I’ll send a copy). Plus, I always have frozen spinach in the freezer, while fresh spinach in the fridge isn’t a given.

While frozen pie crusts often don’t match homemade crusts, they do the job and some are quite good. One of the top gluten-free baking authors around, Jeanne Sauvage, recommends frozen Wholly Gluten-Free crusts. Go a step further (or, technically, a shelf away) in the freezer case to phyllo dough and puff pastry for a shortcut to top-notch savory and sweet recipes. Most professionals recommend using frozen puff pastry and phyllo over attempting your own, and it’s amazing how easy they make a fancy, fantastic-tasting dish.

Philosophically, you can be your own best shortcut helper. Accomplished food writer Amy Sherman makes big batches of rice and freezes individual portions to make her future meals easier. (All sorts of commercial options exist too for frozen cooked rice or parbaked rice.) I make double batches of stews and soups and freeze the extra for my future self.

“Jarlic” and associates

I once shocked a foodie acquaintance by confessing I sometimes used jarred garlic. “It only takes a minute to peel and chop it yourself!” she exclaimed. But I had three young kids and I had a full-time job and what I did not have was that minute. Either “Jarlic” or frozen cubes of minced garlic work fine for most purposes, and prepared garlic was the ingredient serious food-lovers relied on the most in my informal survey. Seattle architect Henry H. Lo specified that you get best results using jarred garlic “only for intensely flavored dishes where the garlic is not the main character.”

Jarred or frozen cubed ginger is another solid shortcut, sparing you the time spent peeling and mincing or microplaning. For fresh ginger root, I did learn a fascinating shortcut recently from the crew at Firefly Kitchens: You don’t need to peel ginger. Seriously. If you don’t believe me, listen to Molly Baz.

Jarred spaghetti sauce is a classic shortcut, and I noticed a common thread among expert cooks who listed it: Most doctor it up, adding seasonings, tempering acidity and making it “taste less like a jarred sauce,” as one put it.  Rao’s was a particularly popular brand. One cookbook author uses Rao’s as a base for cream of tomato soup and as pizza sauce.

Broth: Don’t have time to make meat or vegetable stock? Noted cookbook author Michael Ruhlman says to just substitute water for boxed stock — he says your food will taste better anyway, given the amount of salt and additives in a lot of boxed broth. I go that route sometimes, but often I’ll use Better than Bouillion, a jarred bouillon base whose vegetable version is “made from, well, vegetables,” as Epicurious put it in one rave. A jar goes a long way.

Stay-cool shortcuts

The refrigerator case offers many solid cooking shortcuts.

Pre-shredded cheese turbo-charges many already-quick home meals like quesadillas and burritos. I rely on pre-shredded Cheddar and Jack or mixtures of both for omelets and even basic grilled cheese sandwiches when I’m looking for speed.  (I don’t use pre-grated Parmesan cheese because I don’t think it tastes as good or works as well for the recipes where I use Parmesan, but YMMV.) Yes, there are anti-caking agents in pre-shredded cheese, including eyebrow-raising cellulose derived from wood pulp, but look at the ingredients list to choose brands that use potato starch or cornstarch instead.

Rotisserie chickens are the trusty Swiss army knife of shortcut dinners, a lean protein that can center a meal on its own or star in stir-fries, wraps, rice bowls, soups, or any number of flexible choices. For vegetarians (or those looking for fridge staples with a longer shelf life), slices of packaged flavored baked tofu or tempeh are good too. And I would call packaged peeled, hard-boiled eggs the guilty pleasure of the shortcut cook — so versatile, so easy! — except that we’re avoiding guilt here as well as shame. (Except the plastic packaging. I do feel guilt about that.) When I don’t have 7 minutes to spare plus peeling time I use these eggs for a quick breakfast when sprinkled with salt, cut in half to add protein to a fast bowl of ramen, roughly chopped and mixed with a little mayo and pickle relish for egg salad.

The salad bar can serve as your personal prep cook, offering the exact amount of cleaned and cut vegetables you need rather than DIY-ing whole onions and carrots and such. While the price per pound is more for the salad bar than whole vegetables, this route sometimes pencils out. If your leftover veggies often go bad, buying just what you need (especially if it’s measured in tablespoons), plus skipping inedible cores and woody stems, lowers the price per usable pound.

Produce shortcuts exist in other areas as well. Bagged pre-cut broccoli is a staple in our house, and many people rely on bagged “baby” carrots. Pre-cut vegetables won’t last as long as whole ones, but the nutritional difference isn’t always significant. Pre-chopped butternut squash is a time-saving category all its own, since winter squash can be difficult to peel and cut.

Peeled and steamed beets have become popular in the produce section in recent years and make a much faster — and less messy — base for a beet salad than starting from fresh.

And, as with the rice discussion above, you can make your own shortcuts for your future self: Sauvage told me she sometimes chops up a bunch of onions and freezes them for future recipes where she can take out just the amount she needs.

Good Enough

One essential shortcut, I’ve found, is more about mindset than shopping lists. It’s what cookbook author Leanne Brown calls “Good Enough,” the idea that meals can be simpler than we sometimes think they need to be. As I told her once, the revelation that “cheese and crackers can be dinner” changed my life. (Ideally you’d add some cut-up vegetables and fruit, but we do what we can.) Pita and hummus (hummus is easy to make but also easy to buy) and carrot sticks, canned dolmades, sliced tomatoes over pre-sliced mozzarella, pre-cut vegetables and bottled ranch dressing, and don’t forget that rotisserie chicken or teriyaki tofu — it’s all OK, much better than OK. It’s something to be proud of.