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Explore · Kitchen basics

Kitchen dos & don'ts

Every recipe on this site assumes a kitchen that works with you, not against you. None of this needs money spent this week; it's the direction of travel. Buy once, buy well, and let the plastic leave your kitchen the way it arrived: gradually.

Do

Chop on wood

One big, thick wooden board is the heart of a working kitchen. Buy it once, buy it heavy enough that it doesn't skate around the worktop, and it will outlive every knife you own. Wood is kind to blade edges, quiet under the knife, and it looks better at ten years old than it did new.

The case against plastic is no longer just aesthetic. Every stroke of a knife on a plastic board carves off fragments, and researchers measuring this in 2023 estimated a household plastic board can shed tens of millions of microplastic particles into food a year; the more scored the board, the faster it sheds, and those same score lines are where washing-up water can't reach. Wood behaves differently: food scientists have shown that bacteria left on a wooden board are drawn down into the grain, where they die off, rather than sitting in grooves waiting for the next chicken breast.

Care is a two-minute ritual: scrub with hot water and a little soap, stand it upright to dry so it can't warp, and rub in a food-safe board oil once a month or whenever it starts looking grey and thirsty. That's it. A board treated this way is effectively permanent.

Do

Stir with wood

Three tools cover almost everything: a big wooden spoon, a flat-edged wooden spatula for scraping the good brown bits off the base of a pan, and a slotted spoon. Together they cost less than one takeaway and they last decades. Wood doesn't melt, doesn't soften in hot fat, won't scratch any pan you own, and a well-used spoon slowly shapes itself to your favourite pot.

Plastic and nylon utensils fail at exactly the temperatures cooking happens at: they blister and soften in hot oil, and the material they lose goes straight into dinner. Black plastic utensils deserve a special mention; testing has repeatedly found them made from recycled electronic waste, carrying flame retardants no one would knowingly stir through a bolognese.

Wash wooden tools by hand, stand them to dry, and give them the same occasional oil as the chopping board. If one ever splits, it makes excellent kindling; the replacement costs three pounds.

Do

Cook on steel, cast iron & copper

Stainless steel, cast iron and copper do everything non-stick promises, once you learn the one skill non-stick was sold to replace: heat control. The sequence is always the same. Preheat the dry pan until a drop of water dances across it rather than fizzing flat. Then the fat. Then the food; and leave it alone. Food sticks while it's cooking and releases when it's ready, and once you trust that, you'll never chase an egg around a pan again.

Each metal earns its place. Steel gives you fond: the browned glaze a splash of wine or stock turns into a sauce, which is flavour non-stick physically cannot make. Cast iron, cooked in regularly, seasons itself into a natural non-stick that improves with use. Copper responds to the flame almost instantly, which is why it has lined professional kitchens for two centuries.

The economics are the quiet argument: a steel pan bought today will still be frying eggs in thirty years, while the non-stick cycle sells you the same pan every couple of years for the rest of your life.

Do

Cook on flame

Given the choice, we'd take gas. You can see the heat, which means you can teach it: a child learns "that's too high" from a visible flame in a way no glowing ring can match. It responds the instant you turn it, it works with every pan ever made (copper included, which induction refuses), and it does things electricity can't; peppers blistered directly over the burner, a chapati puffed on the open flame.

Whatever you cook on, ventilate: run the extractor or crack a window. That's good practice over any hob, and it's the honest answer to gas's main criticism.

And if you're on induction, cook on. The pan and the cook matter far more than the hob, and half the recipes on this site were tested on both. The point is not to modernise for its own sake: a working gas hob ripped out for fashion is waste dressed up as progress.

Do

Butter & eggs live on the counter

Butter belongs in a dish by the bread board: spreadable at breakfast, ready for the pan at dinner, and tasting of butter rather than of fridge. Keep out what you'll use in a week, keep the dish away from the hob and direct sun, and top it up from the fridge stash as you go.

Eggs are sold off the shelf in Britain for a reason: hens here are vaccinated against salmonella and the egg's natural protective coating is left intact, so a bowl on the counter is exactly where they're happiest. Room-temperature eggs also simply cook better; they whisk to more volume, they don't split a cake batter, and they fry without the whites going tough before the yolk warms through.

If you're ever unsure of an egg's age, float it in a bowl of water: flat on the bottom is fresh, standing upright is use-it-today, floating is goodbye.

Do

Buy out of plastic

Loose vegetables into a paper bag or straight into the basket. Meat and fish from the counter, wrapped in paper, or into a tub you brought with you (most counters are happy to; just ask). Bread from the bakery in its paper sleeve. Cheese cut from the wheel rather than sweating in film.

This isn't just packaging virtue. Food that can breathe keeps better: mushrooms in paper don't slime, bread in paper keeps a crust, and greens that aren't condensating in a bag last days longer. Shopping this way also quietly changes what you buy; counters and loose shelves stock what's in season, which is the cheaper, better-tasting end of the shop anyway.

You won't get to zero, and tins, frozen veg and dried goods in sensible packaging are pillars of how we cook. The target is the pointless plastic: the shrink-wrapped swede, the triple-bagged pepper multipack.

Do

Glass jars for staples & snacks

Flour, sugar, oats, rice, lentils, pasta, nuts, seeds and the snack shelf, all decanted into glass the day they come home. A shelf of jars shows you your stock at a glance, so you stop buying fourth bags of red lentils and start cooking from what you can see. Airtight glass also keeps everything genuinely fresher: flour doesn't stale, nuts don't turn, and pantry moths never get a foothold.

You don't need to buy a matching set. Passata jars, big pickle jars and honesty-box jam jars build a collection for free; a paper label with the contents and date finishes the job. Keep a couple of smaller jars for the snack shelf: trail mix, banana chips, roasted chickpeas, the things you want visible when the 4pm drift to the cupboard happens.

Jars also make refill shopping practical; take them to the farm shop or refill store, weigh, fill, done. The packaging problem disappears because there is no packaging.

Do

Buy local where you can

Milk in glass bottles, direct from the farm vending machine or the doorstep round; it tastes like a different product because it is one, days fresher than anything that's been through a distribution centre. Farm-shop refills for trail mix, banana chips, oats and the graze shelf. Eggs from the honesty box if your road has one. A veg box that decides half the week's menu for you.

Fresher food isn't just nicer; vegetables start spending their vitamins the moment they're picked, so shorter chains genuinely deliver more of what you're paying for. The money staying in your own postcode is the quiet bonus, and the packaging problem largely solves itself: glass gets returned, refills go into your own jars, and the veg box arrives in a box that goes back.

None of this requires living next to a farm. One glass-bottle milk round, or one monthly farm-shop trip for the dry goods, is a real shift on its own.

The topper shelf

Bulk it out!

Five things to keep in jars within arm's reach of the hob. Each one upgrades the protein, fibre or minerals of almost any meal on this site in about four seconds, which is roughly the effort level a hard week has spare. A spoonful over porridge, soup, salad, dal, yogurt or traybake; no recipe required.

Topper

Chia seeds

Small, flavourless and absurdly well equipped: two tablespoons bring around 10g of fibre, plant omega-3 (ALA), calcium, magnesium and a little complete protein. The soluble fibre forms a gel that slows digestion, which is exactly what a steady glucose curve wants. Stir into porridge, overnight oats, yogurt or a smoothie; whisk into soups to thicken them without cream.

Topper

Ground flaxseed

The most peri-relevant jar on the shelf. Flax is the richest common source of lignans, the phytoestrogens most studied around menopause, alongside omega-3 ALA and both kinds of fibre. Buy whole seeds and grind them (a coffee grinder does it in seconds); whole seeds mostly pass straight through. Keep ground flax in a jar in the fridge and spoon it over porridge, into smoothies, bakes and yogurt: a tablespoon a day is the habit.

Topper

Toasted seed mix

Pumpkin, sunflower and sesame, dry-toasted in a pan until they pop, salted lightly and jarred while warm. Between them: the magnesium that sleep and muscles lean on, zinc, vitamin E and (from sesame) calcium. Toast a jarful on Sunday and it scatters over soups, salads, eggs, dal, avocado toast and traybakes all week. Crunch is the reason it actually gets eaten.

Topper

Hemp hearts

Shelled hemp seeds; soft, faintly nutty and needing zero preparation. Three tablespoons carry roughly 10g of complete protein (all nine essential amino acids, rare in a plant), plus omega-3 and a serious magnesium contribution. The easiest protein upgrade on the shelf: over yogurt, porridge, salads and soups, or blitzed into smoothies where they vanish entirely.

Topper

Nutritional yeast

Savoury golden flakes that taste somewhere between Parmesan and roasted nuts. Naturally rich in B vitamins, and most brands are fortified with B12, which matters if your week runs plant-heavy. It dissolves into anything hot: pasta, scrambled eggs, soups, mashed potato and popcorn all take it gratefully. Where a dish needs a cheesy depth without cheese, this is the jar.

Progress, not purity

Nobody needs to bin a kitchen in a weekend, and replacing working things with new things is its own kind of waste. Swap each item as it wears out, and in a couple of years the kitchen has quietly changed underneath you. For what to cook in it, start with the recipes; for why we cook the way we do, start with the science we build on.