Your favorite meal prep tricks

Hi everybody, 

as I think that there are definitely some good chefs around in this forum with many years of experience I thought that it might be a good idea if one could benefit of this knowledge. 

So go ahead and post something that works really well in your kitchen, either because it safes time, is convenient, fun or simply tastes f***ing awesome. 

 

So I make a start by giving you my routine for making chicken in larger quantities. I probably do this at least ones a week and if done correctly you will be amazed how tender your chicken breast will get. 

So first of all you need some chicken breast (of course this also works with a whole chicken), some container, salt and water. Place the meat insinde the container and cover it completely with salty brine. For this dissolute 60g of salt into one liter of water (so this is really salty). Let it rest in a cool place for one day, much shorter and the salt might not merge into the meat and too long it might loose too much consistency, but of course you can experiment a little bit here, especially if you do a complete chicken. 

After that drain the brine and wash the chicken with water. Season with spices if you like (paprika, garlic powder, herbs, etc., but NO salt!)

and place in the oven at about 120 degrees Celsius, but as every oven is different you have to see what works well. The idea is to bring the core of the meat to 60 degree Celsius and not above, for this purpose I use a thermometer and I recommend buying one if you don't have it already. Otherwise you can cut the meat after 25 minutes and see whether it is COMPLETELY done if so, take it out, otherwise it probably needs 5 more minutes. Enjoy hopefully very delicious and tender chicken!

Like mentioned before I do this on a very regular basis, store the done meat in my fridge and take it out as my portion protein for lunch or dinner as I cook mainly vegetarian for my girlfriend and then simply add the meat as it tastes really good even on its own. 

Brining the meat also works remarkably well when placing it on a barbecue, you will never get a wobbly shoe sole disguised as meat again!

Hope this is a valuable trick for some of you and many other will follow! 

Cheers, Adrian 

Thanks for starting this thread. Interested to see other ideas.

I got a little bored with just eating spinach for lunch, so recently started playing around with mason jar salads. A 500ml/pint jar is a good veggie portion for me when stuffed to the max. Others might want a 1L/Qt jar if the salad is your whole lunch. You can make 5 days worth of salad at once and the airtight container should keep it fresh for the week. The book has tips on how to layer your salad and dressing so that leafy greens don't get soggy.