Now I can’t find pepper in my soup - I’ll tell you how I cook hot spices in a special bag
Black and allspice give dishes a rich taste and aroma. But if you don’t remove the pepper from the soup and accidentally bite into it during lunch, you can ruin your appetite and mood for a long time.
To prevent such annoying situations from happening, and to make eating a real pleasure, you can cook pepper and other spices in a special bag. You can do it yourself in just 10-15 minutes. Let’s look at how to properly sew such a useful item for the kitchen below.
Why do you need a pouch?
Place pepper, bay leaf and other spices inside such a bag, then lower it into the pan and continue cooking as usual. Afterwards, the spices are removed from the pan and thrown away, and an aromatic, fragrant dish without pepper or cloves is served to the table.
The process of preparation in this way is reminiscent of using disposable tea bags: when the tea leaves give up all its taste and aroma to the boiling water, throw it away and enjoy a hot drink without tea leaves floating in it.
Tip: The bag may be especially useful for families with small children. After all, if a child gets allspice or hot pepper on his teeth, you are unlikely to be able to persuade him to finish the remaining soup in the plate.
No adult will be delighted with the taste of a bitten peppercorn.And a child who has tasted pepper at least once may begin to cry only at the sight of a bowl of soup, even if the mother did not add spices to it at all.
What fabric to use to make a bag
Since the bag of spices will be cooked for a long time in soup or another dish, the fabric used to make it should not contain dyes or synthetics. Otherwise, the food will become colored and have an unpleasant odor.
It is best to use white cotton fabric or thin burlap. The material should not be fluffy - after cooking, all the fluff will settle at the bottom of the pan.
Some housewives use the same bag repeatedly. However, it is better to prepare a lot of bags in advance, and take a new one each time, and then throw it away.
After the first use, the material will turn an unattractive yellow-brown or red-brown color, depending on the ingredients from which the dish is prepared. The fabric absorbs not only the colors of the food, but also fat, and to wash it, you will have to use powder or other detergent.
If you decide to make one, reusable bag, then after each wash you need to rinse it thoroughly in plenty of water so that detergents do not get into your food.
Manufacturing technology
It is better to sew the product not with your hands, but with the help of a sewing machine, since several small peas can get into the broth through hand seams.
To work you will need to prepare:
- A piece of cotton fabric measuring 15:15 cm.
- Needle, thread.
- Scissors.
- Sewing machine.
- Thin cord or thick thread.
The sewing process is carried out in the following order:
- We bend one edge of the fabric to a width of 1.5-2 cm and secure the hem with a machine seam - this will be the top of the bag.
- Fold the flap in half with the seam facing out and sew down the side and bottom of the product. You can first make a basting stitch using a needle and thread, or you can start stitching with a staza machine without basting.
- We turn the product right side out, and our bag is ready!
Now all that remains is to thread a cord into the upper part of the product, which will close the bag so that the spices do not fall out. The cord needs to be made longer - this will make it more convenient to remove spices from the pan after cooking.
You can make a drawstring specifically for the lace - for this, two parallel seams are laid in the upper part of the product along the hem. A cord is pulled into the resulting drawstring. To bring its ends to the front side, two loops are cut into the fabric, which must be manually overcast with a slip stitch.
A simpler and more rational option is to thread the cord through a needle with a wide eye and stretch it along the top edge of the bag, retreating 1-1.5 cm.
Such a bag is very convenient to use when preparing jellied meat, soup and other liquid dishes, from which it is almost impossible to remove all the peas floating in the pan. If you don’t want to sew a bag, you can boil the spices in a fine strainer and then throw them away.