Best Of 2012: Food

Eat, drink and be merry — and efficient. Our Best Of 2012 series continues with our most popular food and kitchen posts for the past year. One clear lesson: we like burgers and coffee.

Top 10 Kitchen Tricks That Speed Up Cooking

So you’ve started beefing up your cooking skills, but the process is still a little tedious. Here are 10 surprising kitchen techniques that will save you a bunch of time — not to mention wow your friends.
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Lifehacker Tests The Aldi Expressi

Coffee is one of the staples of my diet, but on a journalist’s salary, the costs of café coffee quickly becomes prohibitive. Instant coffee will do when I just need a caffeine fix, but it’s never very good. Aldi’s Expressi line of pod-based coffees is meant to solve that issue affordably, providing good quality coffee at a cheap price. But does it?
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McDonald’s Serious Lamb Burger Will Fatten You Even Faster Than A Big Mac

Today McDonald’s starts selling its first ever lamb burger, the creatively-titled Serious Lamb Burger. I’m as keen on the notion of tomato, beetroot, aioli, ketchup, egg and onion as the next burger addict, but be warned: this is quite the kilojoule-packed meal.
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Lifehacker Tests The SodaStream Genesis

In prehistoric times when I was a teenager, the SodaStream was an object of aspiration for many families, while the Kidman boys sobbed into their No Frills cordial. It eventually disappeared into the same retail vacuum as Amstrad 3-inch floppy discs, but since 2010 Sodastream has returned to the market. Does it still do the biz when it comes to the fizz?
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Cook The Perfect Steak On Steak And BJ Day

This may well be news to you, but March 14 has been deemed Steak & BJ Day. The idea is that one month on from Valentine’s Day, there needs to be a less frilly, more masculine event. If you like the sound of that idea, we’ve collected together some of our best steak-cooking hints.
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How Do You Store Your Nespresso Capsules?

We know lots of Lifehacker readers use the Nespresso pod coffee maker (or the cheaper options like the ALDI clone). If you’re a coffee capsule user, you’ll soon run into the question: how are you going to store your pods?
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Make Your Own In-N-Out Burger At Home

Iconic US burger chain In-N-Out Burger has opened a temporary pop-up restaurant in Sydney, but that’s not much help to the rest of the country. Get the same experience by making your own Double-Double burger at home.
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McDonald’s Doesn’t Use ‘Pink Slime’ In Australia

The news that McDonald’s will be stopping the use of ‘pink slime’ — essentially random beef offcuts mixed with ammonium hydroxide — in its burgers has been the subject of fervent online coverage. But local Maccas fiends shouldn’t panic: the additive isn’t (and hasn’t ever been) used in the Australian product.
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48 Cooking Mistakes To Avoid

You can read all the cooking tips in the world, but if you’re getting the basics wrong, chances are you’ll never whip up dishes quite like those in the recipe books. There’s no shame in taking a look at the fundamentals and making sure you’re getting the little things right.
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Why You Shouldn’t Store Open Tins In The Fridge

I saw this open tin of stuffed vine leaves in our office fridge and immediately freaked out. I’d always been told that leaving food in an opened tin risked food poisoning, and I believed that. But then I realised I’d never bothered to question why this rule applied. Time to investigate.
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