The moment I caught myself stirring tomato sauce wrong for 15 years

I was making my usual Sunday gravy last month when my neighbor Linda popped her head in to borrow an egg. She watched me stirring for maybe 10 seconds then goes "why are you doing circles?" I told her that's just how you stir. She laughed and showed me how you're supposed to cut through the sauce in a figure 8 pattern to keep it from scorching on the bottom. I've been making this sauce since I was 22 and I'm 37 now. Linda is 68 and she learned it from her Italian grandmother. I tried her way and that pot didn't have a single burnt spot on the bottom for the first time in over a decade. Has anyone else had a cooking habit that a random friend or neighbor just casually corrected?

2 comments

2 Comments

ray1891mo ago

Wait, have you ever thought about how many other little kitchen habits we probably have totally wrong? That figure 8 trick makes total sense since it scrapes the bottom more often than a circle does. I bet there's a hundred small things like that which get passed down wrong between generations.

terry_lewis2129d ago

Cutting onions under running water changed everything for me.