For perfect cuts in the kitchen, dental floss is your new best friend. Easily cut these difficult-to-slice-foods.
It’s Healthy Kitchen Hacks Wednesday – the day we share our favorite time-saving kitchen tricks and cooking shortcuts to help you make healthy and delicious meals.
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Now…onto today’s featured Healthy Kitchen Hack:
VIDEO: Use Dental Floss for Perfect Cuts in the Kitchen
There are some foods which are difficult to slice – without a super special, one-use kitchen tool. I don’t know about you, but I have very few single-use kitchen gadgets. (OK, there is that canned beans strainer!) Do you have any? Maybe a mango pitter? Or a pineapple corer?
Anyways, for each of the following, and other, hard-to-slice foods, dental floss is your new best friend. Make sure it’s unflavored dental floss, and get ready to make perfect cuts in the kitchen.
1. Slice soft cheeses
Once, I had a special cheese knife with big open holes in the blade – so soft cheeses didn’t stick to it. (Thanks to my neighbors’ son who was beginning his Cutco Knives career.) It didn’t work great. A fancy cheese wire probably would work. But who has the storage space?
And dental floss is actually easier to maneuver around a soft, organically shaped round of cheese, than a cheese wire. Use dental floss to slice:
- Goat cheese logs
- Any bloomy rind cheese, like Brie or Camembert. Even when these cheeses are perfectly ripe and runny, dental floss slips right through.
- Softer washed rind cheeses
- Even harder cheeses like Cheddar or Swiss, as long as it’s not too aged and hard
2. Mini-Layer Cakes (or Full-Sized Layer Cakes)
Not the healthiest thing you cut in your kitchen. But after spending a day perfecting a strawberry vanilla layer cake with my kids, the last thing I want to do is ‘smush’ down all those layers by slicing through it with a regular knife.
Use dental floss to slice nice even pieces that are as pretty on the inside as on the outside. And you don’t have to buy a fancy (giant) cake wire! For hard-to-slice foods: Use Dental Floss for Perfect Cuts in the Kitchen #HealthyKitchenHacks via @TspCurry Click To Tweet
3. Cinnamon Rolls
The strongest memory I have on baking with my mother is slicing through a rolled-up log of cinnamon roll dough using dental floss. Here’s how:
- Using a ruler and a regular knife, make hash marks along the log of cinnamon roll dough so you have evenly-sized cinnamon rolls. Then they will bake evenly.
- Slide a long piece of dental floss under the log of dough. Hold one end between your thumb and forefinger of each hand. Cross ends slicing through the dough.
- Now you have round cinnamon rolls, not squished ones, as you’d have using a knife.
4. Hard Boiled Eggs
An hardboiled egg slicer only costs $1 at the dollar store. (I know, I give them away to kids when I do kids’ cooking classes.) But not everyone can justify the 2-inch square space requirement!
You do not have to justify the space requirement of dental floss.
I’ll be honest, slippery eggs are not as easy to slice as cinnamon rolls. But should you need egg slices for pretty salad or egg gratin, floss will do in a pinch.
So, do you have any one-use kitchen gadgets? Please share!
