A woman who has taken professional cookery lessons is encouraging people to change one thing when they cook vegetables to make them taste like they could be from a restaurant.

Laila, who lives in London, often shares her own recipes on her social media channels, where she is known as Laila's Pantry. But she recently shared an easy way people can add more depth to the flavours of home cooked food when cooking vegetables in a pan.

She confirmed that the method is used by chefs when they have ten or 15 minutes of extra time to cook their vegetables in a specific way so they are deeper and more mellow in flavour.

The method works when sweating vegetables such as onion, carrot, garlic and celery in a frying pan.

She said: "Have you ever wondered how restaurants get their soups and sauces to have such a complex depth of flavour? I break down professional chef lessons to make you a more comfortable and confident cook.

"Today's topic is all about sweating aromatics and vegetables to create complex flavours. Usually when recipes tell you how to cook your onions and garlic at the beginning of a recipe, they tell you to saute them over a medium-high heat until lightly golden brown.

"Nothing is wrong with this. In fact, most of my recipes have these exact instructions. It allows for a pretty good flavour and gets colour and caramelisation which is a process called the Maillard reaction.

"But when you have a little more time to spare and want a deeper flavour, the technique of sweating your aromatics and vegetables is so important to developing the flavour. Now what is sweating? Sweating is when you cook aromatics such as onion or garlic or vegetables such as carrot or celery over low slow heat.

"You cook them in some oil and some butter, a pinch of salt and they're most commonly covered with a cartouche, which is a circle of damp parchment paper. This environment is conducive to a gentler type of cook because it traps steam and moisture and consequently it allows the harsh flavours to mellow out and become way more complex in depth.

"Because you're not caramelising the ingredients, you're allowing the natural sugars to release and so you get a really subtle mellow sort of flavour. This in turn adds a really nice depth of flavour.

"This is a process that takes about 10 to 15 minutes and the vegetables should be nice and soft and translucent by the end. They should not have any caramelisation or colour on them."

After sharing the method on TikTok, people commented on the video to explian how they used the method to make various recipies and were stunned by the results.

One person said: "Nice! I've done this method before in an onion soup recipe (Jamie Oliver), the soup was awesome. Now I'm going to this more often! Thanks."

A second person asked Laila to explain the method: "Why use the parchment paper if you cover the pot with the lid? Aren't they doing the same thing?"

She replied: "The parchment paper regulates the temp better and traps moisture more than a lid, but if you're on top of it, a lid works too!"