Dishes cooked in clay pots are surprisingly juicy and fragrant. Unlike cooking or ordinary baking, with this kind of processing, the products retain much more vitamins, and the cooking process is extraordinarily simple: you just need to put all the ingredients in a container of clay, add water or sauce, cover and send to the oven.
To prepare really tasty dishes in a pot, you should follow a few simple rules. It is also important to look after them properly.
- Clay, from which the pots are made, does not tolerate sharp temperature changes and can crack if you put the container in a hot oven. Therefore, they must be placed in a warm oven, make sure that the walls do not come in contact with the heating elements, and remove from the oven very carefully and put exclusively on a wooden stand. Potty is strictly forbidden to put on a stove or on an open fire, otherwise they will crack. If you have prepared all the ingredients in advance and kept the pot for a while in the refrigerator, it should first be heated to room temperature and only then sent to the oven.
- Clay is prone to absorb the aromas of products, so it makes sense to use different sets of pots for cooking fish, meat and vegetables. If the recipe contains such strong-smelling ingredients as garlic, onions or fish, it is better to lay the walls of the pot with parchment for baking, otherwise the next dish will absorb the same flavors.
- Before the first preparation, the new pot must be poured with cold filtered water and left for 1 hour, so that during cooking it does not absorb moisture from the dish, and it could retain its juiciness. In the next times it will be enough to soak them for 15 minutes.
- Instead of conventional caps, you can prepare lids from yeast or puff pastry. The dish will turn out to be more juicy, and the lids will be saturated with aroma and they can be eaten instead of bread.
- Pots for baking should not be cleaned in a dishwasher, as temperature changes can damage the material, and aggressive detergents can soak into the clay and can spoil the taste of food. It is best to wash them by hand with a sponge and a mild detergent.
- After cooking, thoroughly wash the pot inside and out, completely dry it, and then cover with parchment and put the lid on the bottom to prevent it from blocking the air intake.
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