Cut Sticky Foods Easily With This Butter Hack

Sticky, chewy foods can be some of the most satisfying to eat and the most difficult to work with when making a culinary creation. This is why when it comes to measuring ingredients like honey and molasses, we love the trick of spraying the measuring cup with nonstick spray or coating it with oil to ensure these ingredients make it into your batter and mix in their entirety without leaving a sticky layer behind. Similarly, when it comes to the kitchen basics of chopping, slicing, mincing, and dicing, both cooks and bakers can encounter difficulties when working with sticky foods.

Prepping your candied fruits and marshmallows for baked goods can be quite the task when they get stuck on your knife as you slice through them. And then there are those lovely figs that taste so delicious in that fall salad that all too frequently seem to get stuck on the blade of your cutlery as if someone put super glue on it. The inefficiency of it all can be so frustrating. But luckily there is a butter hack that will leave you and your beautiful edible creations stuck in your mouth and not on your knife.

If you are tired of your sticky ingredients clinging to and clumping on your knife, then you may want to try slathering up your blade with a little butter. That's right, butter can be your bestie when you need foods to glide off the blade. How does it work? By greasing your knife, you create a barrier between the metal of the knife and the sticky food, ensuring it doesn't get stuck. And as a bonus, it also adds a savory buttery flavor to the ingredients you are working with. However, if you tend to favor going dairy-free when you are working with sticky foods, you can also try something sweet to stop the stick: sugar.

Sugar is a not-so-secret method to keep sticky foods off of your knife and instead, leave them chopped up on the cutting board where they belong. This technique works best when a recipe calls for sugar as a sweetener. You can simply sprinkle a bit of it over your ginger, marshmallows, or whatever sticky ingredient you are working with and sugar's gritty texture will keep these foods from taking up residency on the blade of your knife. You can use both this sugar trick and the butter hack with a knife or on the blades of a food processor if you want to kiss the sticky woes goodbye.