When you need to measure peanut butter, molasses or honey—or any sticky ingredient—don’t settle for losing half of the volume to the measuring cup, and half of your cooking time to attempting to scrape it out.
Instead, coat the measuring cup with nonstick spray first. The ingredient will slide out of the cup easily.
With this trick, cleanup becomes a breeze, and you lose no time swiping your spatula around the measuring cup to save any drops of your honey, maple syrup or what have you.
If you’re already familiar with this handy trick, what you might not know is that it also works when you want to grate, say, mozzarella. The soft cheese tends to get stuck in the grater, but no longer if you follow this advice. Spray the cheese grater first and you won’t lose precious mozzarella. Homemade pizza (see this recipe for Three-Cheese Pizza and this article on perfecting pizza dough at home), here you come.
You can also use an Adjust-A-Cup measuring device that includes a plunger mounted inside of a clear plastic cylinder. Pull the plunger down to the correct amount indicated on the side of the cylinder, fill, and then simply push the ingredient out. But the nonstick spray trick works no matter what kind of measuring cup you use.
Use this clever trick next time you’re making recipes with a sticky ingredient like this Honey-Chili Sauce, this Miso-Glazed Broiled Salmon, these Charred Brussels Sprouts, these Peanut-Sesame Noodles with Scallions, or these Maple-Whisky Pudding Cakes.
See here for more advice on measuring ingredients. (Hint: This one kitchen tool is the key to becoming a better baker.)
