It's hard to say for sure, but I find the difference between "cold" recall and latent recall of facts to be pretty large. Happens most frequently with stuff I learned on Wikipedia: I'll end up in a conversation, find myself knowing a fact that I shouldn't really have known given my background, and then realized that I must've gotten it from Wikipedia. Sometimes after that I can mentally recreate the browsing path I must've used to get to the fact, even though I wouldn't have been able to explicitly list the article in question as one I remembered reading.
I think there's a whole cult that promotes learning all kinds of things by remembering by association, can't remember what it was called. My father was introduced to it when he tried to learn a new language, but it failed miserably at that (not all tools are suitable for everything).
Anyway, another good technique to recall something is to think about something else for a moment and not concentrate on a particular thing you can't recall at that moment too much.
