Master the best cooking method for potatoes, beans, bacon, and fish fingers every time.
Based on: Testing Basic Ingredients with Different Cooking Methods by Sorted Food
▶ Watch the source video on YouTube
Have you ever wondered if the way you've been cooking your everyday staples is actually the best way — or just the habit you never questioned? Most of us pick a method, stick to it, and never look back. But what if a small tweak to how you cook baked potatoes, beans, bacon, or fish fingers could make a genuinely noticeable difference to how they taste? That's the question the team at Sorted Food set out to answer, and the results were surprising enough to change their minds on the spot.
Here's the frustrating truth: the instructions on the back of a tin of baked beans tell you to microwave them for 2.5 minutes. That's what the manufacturer recommends for convenience — not for flavour. Meanwhile, food scientists at Heinz identified back in 2002 that heating beans slowly on the hob to exactly 67°C produces a dramatically better result: a richer, thicker, more rounded sauce. Nobody told you that. And that's just the beans.
Picture this instead: you open a jacket potato to a cloud of fluffy steam rather than a dense, gummy mass. You bite into bacon that's evenly crisped with deep flavour rather than patchy and rubbery. You serve fish fingers from the pan with a shatteringly crisp batter rather than a soft, doughy coating. These aren't chef secrets requiring fancy equipment or hours of extra effort. The difference between the microwave and the oven baked potato is about 50 extra minutes — but the gap in quality is enormous. The difference between microwaved beans and hob beans is literally 2 minutes 49 seconds.
Sorted Food's Ben and Jamie are trusted voices in the everyday cooking space — real people testing real food with genuine curiosity and zero pretension. They didn't just give opinions; they cooked every method side by side, tasted them blind, and reported honestly. When both of them said the microwave jacket potato was so bad they couldn't go back, that means something.
This checklist distils every finding, every technique, every temperature, and every timing from that video into a clean, step-by-step guide you can pin to your fridge or pull up on your phone. No more guessing, no more defaulting to whatever's fastest. You'll know exactly when to use the oven, the hob, the pan, or the air fryer — and why. Grab this checklist and start getting more out of the groceries you're already buying.
Every checklist item comes with actionable notes to guide you — things like "Don't forget to do this before you start," "Avoid this common mistake," or "Set a reminder for 30 days out." Nothing vague, just clear next steps.
+ 20 more action items inside...
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