> Often, they promise it only takes 15-30 minutes for an entire meal, but apparently I'm not a professional chef who can wash vegetables, dice them, prepare marinades, chop garlic, and do all of this in just a few minutes. I end up usually spending between 60-90 minutes just to cook a recipe, which is way too much labor for a meal that is already priced about the same as a restaurant meal.

I think this is one place where the focus in lifestyle magazines and meal startups on quick and easy meals has created unrealistic expectations. As you say, unless you have the skills of a professional chef, cooking pretty much anything in 15-30 minutes is unrealistic. More realistically, you would expect cooking from scratch to take 45-60 minutes.

To some extent I feel like people's frustration over the experience comes from under-appreciation of how much time cooking takes. Unless your ingredients come pre-chopped and pre-mixed, one hour from fresh ingredients is normal! Just like the adage "better, faster, cheaper, pick two," cooking has a corresponding dilemma: "quick, easy, delicious, pick two".

They used to take me longer, but I've figured out that almost all of the recipes are mostly parallelizable. I usually read through the recipe all the way at first, and then wash and chop only what's necessary for any marinade/boil/roast steps, then after that's started wash and chop any frying steps, and if there's a sauce or salsa to be made, get my wife to prep that while I'm frying the meat or veggies. It's important to keep an eye on your clock and gain confidence about how long things have been going so you don't have to keep checking on them, opening the pot/door and losing heat and time. I am able to prepare almost every recipe in less time than they say. It does take some confidence and time/temperature management to do multiple steps at the same time, though.

The trick all recipe writers use is the recipe time assumes you are mise-en-place, that all your ingredients are prepared for the recipe ahead of the recipe time. I'm fairly certain Blue Apron and such are no different.

> I'm fairly certain Blue Apron and such are no different.

You're half wrong. Blue Apron gives you two values, "prep time" and "recipe time". They don't include dicing and peeling, but they don't overlook it either.

Are we talking your time, or wall-clock time?

Melt butter, add lemon juice, salt and a dash of hot sauce to make a liquid. Rub liquid over chicken. Put chicken in oven at 400 until done. (How much you need and how long you take depends on whether you did this with a whole chicken or pieces of chicken. Let's call it an hour. Use an oven thermometer if you don't know how to tell.)

Put some water in the bottom of a pot, put one artichoke in the pot, cover, and put on low heat around 40 minutes before your meal.

Use a peeler to take the skin of a Daikon radish off. Peel the rest of it into a dish. Put sour cream + salt on, mix. Sprinkle chopped green onion on top.

Shortly before you're ready, melt butter, add salt. This is to dip the artichoke in.

Wall-clock over an hour because food spends time cooking. My time spent is perhaps 20 minutes. Most of which is spent peeling the radish. And now you've got a main dish with 2 side dishes and enough food to feed a family.

Now a lot of things take longer than that. For example making pancakes means spending a lot of time actually cooking the pancakes. When I make a soup from scratch I probably spend a couple of hours.

I meant wall-clock time. You have a point that there are lots of recipes that don't need much hands-on time - I personally do that a lot.

However, since wall-clock time often does need to go up to an hour, you have to schedule it into your day. You can't put the chicken into the oven if you're not home. I think the allure of 15-30 minute recipes is that 30 minutes is sort of the upper threshold for spontaneity: "I'll just cook whenever I get home." The problem is that if your filter is "recipes that take less than 30 minutes of wall-clock time," you end up with a very restricted book of recipes to work with.

I have a sousvide cooker and a slow cooker so that I can have the machines make food for me when I am not at home.

Throw some meat into the sousvide in the morning, come home to a really nice piece of meat that you can take right out of the machine. Save any excess and reheat out the next day.

You need a pretty good (tight) container though, or the water evaporates.

I intend to get one of those blowtorch attachments to sear afterwards, although I suspect griddle/thick base pan might do just as well.

Not terribly, rough fit (like, my tub has a half inch gap around the hole where the circulator goes in) will be negligible water loss unless you start talking multi-day cook times. I just cooked some meat for 24 hours and lost about 2~4% of the original water level

I think what we actually need is a recipe site that sticks to just a few curated recipes like this:

- low downtime, meaning personal time prep/etc were you are unable to do anything else.

- healthy, obv. (I note the above recipes seem to have quite a bit of salt and fat..)

- easily obtained ingredients. special consideration for those that need to be fresh, or go off quickly (vs pantry), and those that are hard to obtain in meal-size quantities. (as a side-note, Asian markets are treasure troves, if you can figure out what things are, and if they're healthy).

- Not too difficult to wash up after. If it uses 5 different pans, 10 different utensils etc, and I have to spend 30 minutes washing up, then that needs to be considered as part of the "downtime".

- Another possible consideration, other than ingredient price: energy price. Ovens can use a fair bit of electricity. If you use it for 45 min every day for your evening meal, could the costs add up? I say this because I'm currently trying to reduce my monthly energy bill (my last one was 50 EUR), and the immersion heater is the first suspect. Generating heat tends to use a lot of electricity, although the high heat capacity of water probably means water heating is more costly, consider that one you are finished with the oven, all that excess heat is just wasted (unless it happens to be winter).

Plus, it might seem basic, but an app or something that can A) produce possible meals-to-make based on what you have, and present a choice (or even choose at random) B) produce a shopping list in advance for future meals. An "Who's turn is it to cook" tracker would be nice too.

Which diet is more healthy? Low carb and high fat? Or high carb and low fat?

And when you add salt yourself without sugar, you generally don't get to the salt content of most of what you see from packaged foods or a restaurant.

I'm actually on a keto diet now, as it happens.

I guess, if you're fat, low-carb is healthier? If you work out a lot, high-protein/high energy etc.

It depends on aim/requirements, but I mean matched to personal metabolic health.

There's another thing too: digestive health - requiring plenty fiber, not too much sugar, and not too much fat either..

There is so much BS out there that I wouldn't take anyone's pronouncements as definitive. However the recipes that I offered are not a priori unhealthy.

But as a person whose family is prone to diabetes, I'm going to go light on sugar.

Hah, this made me think of cooking Hamburger Helper - 20 minutes cook time with 3 minutes of my time spent in preparation.

I guess the majority of HN readers don't eat Hamburger Helper...

People looking for quicker cook time: GoodEggs new kit offering cuts down on time. Ingredients are extremely fresh and you get 3x3 portions for $70. Might be SF-only now.

I wish there was one for slow/pressure cookers that I could make stuff in bulk with that froze nicely.

+1 I would buy this!

Maybe these services should add an extra box of about to go bad vegetables, with a card that teaches you knife skills?

At least where I live, you're not going to be able to find a restaurant with food of anywhere near the quality of what you get from Blue Apron for less than $10/person ($60/week for 3 meals, 2 servings each—often generous servings). And I don't live anywhere at all expensive.

In fact, I live in a small town in the rural Northeast, and if I want to go to a restaurant and not spend over an hour in the car, let alone the time spent sitting at the table, my choices are nowhere near as interesting and varied as what Blue Apron provides.

Maybe you live in a place where you can get to dozens of different restaurants in a very short time that have a variety of locally-sourced meals changing on a regular basis for less than $10/person, but even if so, I doubt that's the norm in American cities.

Blue Apron certainly isn't for everyone. I love cooking, so I find it a very worthwhile service, but you do need to actually enjoy doing it, because indeed, it invariably takes between 50 and 75 minutes from getting out the ingredients to putting the food on the table, and almost all of that time is active time for the one making the food.

Yours is a pretty common complaint though some of the services seem to focus more on reducing prep time than others. I imagine there's some tradeoff between freshness and the amount of pre-processing.

The cynic in me also wonders if the nature of the product doesn't create incentives for fussy recipes with a lot of ingredients, including uncommon ones. If your recipe is just a filet of trout sauteed in butter with some sliced almonds and a simple vegetable side, your customers may start wondering what they're paying you for exactly.

  I wonder if the nature of the product creates incentives for fussy recipes with a lot of ingredients

You make a good point, and I wonder whether this could be mitigated by balancing some simple recipes (which lets the cook deliver with minimum effort - including the work of shopping/planning) with some deliberately complex recipes (pushing the cook to learn, experiment with new techniques, and push their comfort-zone).

Personally, that approach would resound well for me, but I'm conscious that I might not be the ideal viable demographic.

Gobble addresses the prep time. From their FAQ: "You can cook Gobble meals faster than you can order takeout. Your meal will go from kit to table in under 10 minutes."

In my experience with around 10 different (vegetarian) dishes from them, I've found that to be somewhat true. Most dishes only required some combination of: an oven (oven heating time not included in the "10 minutes"); a sauce pot for pasta/noodles; a 12-inch or larger saute pan; a mixing bowl.

The instructions use pipelining to achieve the advertised 10 minutes, and if you read the instructions in their entirety and execute accordingly, 10 minutes is very doable.

All ingredients except for salt, pepper and cooking oil are provided (this is probably obvious, but perhaps worth stating for people new to meal kits). The ingredients seemed to be fresh and of good quality.

The meals are reasonably tasty, except for the Indian ones, which I felt were not as good as something you could make from scratch at home or get in a restaurant.

A side-effect is that for lazy people like me, it may reduce the inertia to separate prep from cooking. Although I'd often thought about pre-cutting and freezing ingredients to cook later in the week, I found myself actually doing it after experiencing the 10-minute cook time, because my mind kept getting reminded that it's very doable.

An advantage of meal kits for a non-cook like me, is that certain condiments and sauces that I may not wish to stock, are provided in the required quantities with the meal kit. So I don't have to worry about buying a whole bottle of some sauce just for that one meal that requires it.

We used Blue Apron fairly regularly for almost a year, then stopped. Then my wife signed us up for Gobble which we used fairly regularly for at least 6mo until I took a business trip and then an injury caused us to stop altogether for awhile.

I was MUCH happier with Gobble precisely for the prep reason. Blue Apron meals ALWAYS took easily double the time they listed, and that's with two of us working. I often felt that Blue Apron made the meals needlessly complex and dirtied a needless number of pans just to seem "special" or to be harder for someone to try to replicate on their own.

In both cases, though, I found meats cooked in a pan took at LEAST twice as long cook time as they were supposed to -- and it was always oil splatter up front and on the very of splatter the entire cooking time, and it STILL took way too long --- so its not like my pan wasn't hot enough.

Also, at $60/week for a couple, these are vastly cheaper for us than eating out, and frankly I hate eating out by necessity. As a treat, I love it. But when I just want a meal, it pisses me off to have to choose a restaurant, get there, go through the whole ordering process, wait, go through the whole bill pay process, go home, etc.

Data point for a Gobble consumer with around 60 dishes (3 per week) and very little prior cooking experience: they usually take me 15 - 20 minutes (which i'm perfectly happy with).

FWIW, after > 2 years on plans like this, either my wife or I can usually cook in the amount of time specified, and together we consistently hit the low-end.

I'm not sure at what point we got this efficient, and our kitchen is also easy-to-work in. [I don't imagine that's the case for lots of apt-dwellers]

I think you're definitely right that there will be a significant amount of automation that will be able to make many cooking chores trivial, though.

> together we consistently hit the low-end.

But that's two people, so really you just hit double the low end?

Amdahl's law applies, what fraction of cooking these recipes is purely serial? What does the critical path look like? How much inter-kitchen communication is there to get tools and ingredients to/from your wife?

Cooking tends to be serial per-dish, with substantial amounts of mandatory waiting. A lot of cooking speed comes from experience and being able to intuitively schedule work for maximum throughput. After years of cooking, I can now interleave execution on 2-3 dishes of moderate complexity at a time, but that's only after years of practice.

Same for me. Scheduling is crucial and takes practice to get to the "intuitive" level. But, once you've got scheduling, right there are almost no wait time (except for long cooking dishes, says 3 hours or so).

What bothers me a lot down in this whole thread, is that many people seem to forget that spending time feeding oneself is actually spending time taking care of oneself (and one's family if any). And that seems to me a very important part of life.

> Amdahl's law applies, what fraction of cooking these recipes is purely serial?

The prep is usually highly parallelize; the cooking is usually pretty serial if you follow the instructions, but often parallelize with only mild invention (they often specify reusing the same pan, without any real need other than reducing cleanup and equipment requirements.)

Good point, I hadn't thought about that. But my point is that obviously cooking will happen faster you throw double the manpower at it, even if it not in a linear fashion. :P

I can usually get it done in about half an hour and it's not much faster, if at all if I get the SO to zest and juice the lime since I would always plan to do stuff like that while waiting for something else to finish.

> Granted, the food is much healthier than restaurant food

I wouldn't automatically grant that.

I cook Blue Apron with my teen-aged kids and it's fantastic. I've become a much better cook while helping them learn how to cook. The recipe cards are a big part of what makes it work for us. I don't always know what medium dice or chop means, but I can pretty much always match what's in the picture.

> I wouldn't automatically grant that.

While this deserves qualifications, most of the time restaurant food is simply not as hygienic as meals prepared at home. And its not some deliberate plan to make it so. Despite their best efforts, a somewhat large scale food establishment just allows a lot more opportunities for food contamination. And I say this as a person who eats out everyday (Lunch out, dinner and supper at home).

The only place I can see that really escapes from this is the high end restaurants. Usually they don't have to rely on cost saving measures, and have well developed supply chains for obtaining fresh ingredients and keeping them from contamination. But I don't think most of the people here could afford or want to eat at such a place regularly.

I think your key concern with restaurant food should be nutrition, not hygiene. Hygiene in restaurants is typically good enough to not be much of a problem (and the human body is resilient enough to take a bit of occasional rough treatment).

But you don't know how much sugar, fat, or just empty calories are being put in your food to make it just a little more presentable or appetizing. That is what you have better control over when you cook yourself.

There's nothing wrong with sugar when eaten as part of a meal, it's when people down Coca Cola on an empty stomach that there's a problem. And fat is actually essential to life.

At the risk of stating the obvious, when you eat a meal, all of it goes to the same place. So as long as the meal as a whole provides sufficient nutrition (and if you are eating a varied diet then it absolutely will do), no part of it can be described as "empty calories".

Continuing the trend of stating the obvious, it is absolutely possible to load food with too much sugar or fat that offers practically no marginal nutritional value. I say marginal because of course to a starving person the calories brought in by sugar are valuable, but probably not to a person who is generally able to get their calories from a wide range of sources and in general wants to control their caloric intake.

Empty calories is not a moral judgment. It is a statement of fact.

Bingo... I can't count how many restaurant meals I've eaten that could have been 500 calories, but have been unnecessarily inflated to 1500-2000 calories by adding butter/sugar/fat to improve the taste. I'm not saying fat is bad for you - far from it - good fats like avocado and olive oil are essential, but you can definitely tell that some restaurants (especially chains) have perfected the unhealthy sugar/fat/salt triad in order to maximize taste - this can't be good for you to eat every meal... (occasionally, go for it)

It is actually amazing that we have not yet freak outs in the media from cases of food poisoning of the meal at home services. Someone touched every single thing in every single unit that a customer receives. If you got five twigs of cilantro, then someone touched each one of those five twigs. If you have received six pepper corns of some fancy pepper, someone making minimum wage touched every single one of them.

This is a massive contamination incident waiting to happen.

Right. If the definition of "healthy" is "unlikely to be contaminated with food poisoning agents[0]," then meal prep services would seem as bad or worse than restaurant meals. They are "prepared at home" only for the last few steps, the food has been handled extensively by meal prep service employees, and has been shipped and possibly left at a delivery location for an unknown period of time in warm weather (I understand it is shipped in an insulated container, but the temperature control still must be less reliable than an actual refrigerator).

[0]Though I think GP and most others in this thread are defining "healthy" as matching their preferred fat/carb/salt/weight-control etc. parameters, and aren't even thinking about food poisoning.

[edit: formatting]

> The only place I can see that really escapes from this is the high end restaurants.

Actually, fast food restaurants have some of the best food practices. I'd feel much safer eating at some random McDonald's than some Mom-n-Pop diner.

It's well-known among low budget international travelers (and those that go well off the beaten path) that when s--t gets sketchy you just eat what's deep-fried. Hot enough to fry is hot enough to sterilize. Mickey D is not high culture but it's probably safe wherever you find it.

Right - McDonalds has very specific corporate policies relating to food safety as well as a cleaning schedules, holding times, and the like. At least that's how it was when I worked at Popeyes, I assume that most fast food chains will be similar.

I think I'd trust the random restaurant over the random person that hasn't cooked a whole lot.

I mean, even some little diner sort of has a huge incentive not to make people sick, even if they don't have a health inspector watching over them.

> most of the time restaurant food is simply not as hygienic as meals prepared at home

I've become much more conscious of this lately. I called the health inspector to report a restaurant for the first time this month, and did it again just a week ago.

"I'm cautiously optimistic about Tovala. They are the first one of these that has a fairly unique system where the food just needs to be popped into their combi-oven (bake, broil, and steam) and you just wait until it cooks."

Isn't that just the old TV dinner promise dating back to the 1950s and the invention of the microwave?

And they say this as something so wild and wacky it's worth an exclamation point :-/ "The Tovala doesn't just cook Tovala meals - you can program it to cook your own food too!"

So it's some sort of programmable combi oven. They're apparently (sorry) hot in modernist etc. cooking circles. I've read that keeping them free from mold etc. can be a problem but I haven't looked into them in any great detail.

I have to say that the example meal shown on their site is really not something most people would find at all challenging or time-consuming to prepare using supermarket ingredients.

Sure, but because a combi-oven can steam as well as bake and broil, you can cook things like vegetables, which would normally be dried out husks in a standard oven. Also, you can broil and get a nice crisp finish.

It's just like a TV dinner or a microwaveable dinner, but hopefully better because you have more cooking capabilities.

I have a super fancy combi-oven. It cooks some things nicely, but it doesn't speed up dinner overall. I enjoy cooking and spend a lot of time doing it. The benefit of this expensive oven is better baking, but it is definitely overkill.

You might want to try Gobble. Their "10 minute" claim is, uh, marketing, but I find most of them are in the 20 - 30 minute range for me (not an experienced chef). They're pretty good about doing most of the prep work for you, and the food has generally been delicious. (Indeed, I'm about to cut back on it, because I've gained too much weight!)

It's like when Jamie Oliver cooks lunch. Of course it takes 15 minutes cooking only with nicely laid out and prepared ingredients.

But let's get straight. I can whip a steak from zero to hero in 15 minutes. Throw some Broccoli in and you have a nice tasty lunch in real 15 minutes ready to eat.

We are two working full time although my wife is currently at home with a newborn. We always prepared a meal one day before and took it to work. There is always time to cook yourself. You just decided to spend it for something else...

Like any other beef rancher, I completely support the steak-for-lunch habit. It may not be an option for everyone, however. b^)

Weird; the thing I liked best about whichever service I used was that the meal prep and cook times were pretty snappy - definitely faster than doing it myself from scratch.

You might want to try Gobble. We tried Blue Apron followed by Sun Basket, and in both cases the prep time was too long for us. Gobble has consistently been much better in terms of both flavor and prep time.

Terra's Kitchen also claims to have pre-chopped etc. ingredients though I have no personal experience with them.

As I've said elsewhere, I'm not really the customer for these services. But I have to believe that, if I were to use them regularly, it would be because I wanted to put a meal on the table quickly on a weekday without a lot of effort or thought. Which implies eliminating as much prep time as possible.

You'll get much faster with practice. I never take more than 45 minutes to prepare a BA meal now and generally do it in about 30. And I'm no professional cook or anything either. Just learned by doing (and watching an occasional YouTube video).

Doing large-scale prep work occasionally, combined with some smart tricks in the morning, really helps as well.

E.g. peel, cut and sautée 10 onions, let it cool, divide into 10 bags and freeze. 15 minutes time spent, 10x5 minutes saved on subsequent dinners. Peel, cut and freeze bags of carrot, celery, cabbage, chilies, etc. Another 5 minutes off.

Buy canned lentils, chickpeas and beans rather than dry, and you save 10-15 minutes cooking time on each meal. Always keep cans of peeled plum tomatoes at hand, never buy store-made pasta or pizza sauce - especially the latter, just blitz a can of tomatoes with salt and the herbs and spices of your choice, done!

Keep chicken, beef and fish stock in your pantry, preferrably the liquid stuff. Also keep soy sauce, fish sauce, sesame seed oil, all the vinegars you like (rice, balsamico, apple cider, sherry, etc.), some nice olive oil, green and red curry paste, coconut milk, teriyaki, hot sauce, all the flavors you like! Then you can improvise, which is the best part. Jars of tamarind paste keep well in the fridge, and can replace fresh lemon/lime in most Asian cuisine.

Buy big bags of proper basmati or jasmine rice at Asian stores, put in cold water to soak in the morning, boil for 10 minutes, perfect rice that mops the floor with Uncle Ben's.

Homemade pizza every Friday, just spend four minutes to make the dough before going to work, twenty minutes after we come home to shape and dress the pies while the oven heats up to 750 F (use Heston Blumenthal's cast-iron-plate-under-the-grill trick), perfect Neapolitan style pizzas for all the family that cook in 6-7 minutes.

Making your dinners from scratch in a family with small kids, both parents working full time, is far from impossible. We do it every day, plus bake all the bread we eat.

But no-one is going to sell you this as a solution in a box, it takes a little bit of effort and a little bit of passion for food. Just Say No to frozen pizza and ready-made lasagne, roll up your sleeves and start cooking.

> Buy big bags of proper basmati or jasmine rice at Asian stores, put in cold water to soak in the morning, boil for 10 minutes, perfect rice that mops the floor with Uncle Ben's.

This is like the best advice ever for rice lovers. I made the switch after being underwhelmed by small batch, Indian-named but made in US Basmati rice...it just had no flavor or taste. After using the rice from the bags.... HOLY COW, so much difference in flavor!

Great comment and 100% agree. I don't do all of this, but I've started doing a decent chunk. Aspire to do more.

The difference between your drone future and delivered takeaways is the time between the cooking and the serving. As long as takeaways are kept hot (and haven't tuned to a soggy mess) surely better takeaways are easier to engineer?

Take-out is definitely easier to engineer - we know that, but the food quality is never as good when food has been sitting for 30 minutes before you eat it. Hot food becomes lukewarm; cold food becomes warm. Leafy vegetables turn into mush.

I look forward to our robotic, food cooking overlords.

I have an automatic pressure cooker. It's awesome. I'd love a service that just delivered a package full of stuff to dump in a pressure cooker and nothing else.

The problem--and this is an issue with slow cookers as well--is that dump a bunch of stuff in and walk away doesn't work all that well for most recipes. Some browning etc. does a lot to develop flavors.

This seems kind of niche, but a service could do the browning in-house before they package and send the meal? I have to think a browned cut of meat would last just as long, if not longer, than a raw cut?

A company could do all the cooking in-house but these companies are all walking a line between "grocery delivery" and "freezer aisle food" and I'm sure they're all really hoping they don't accidentally step onto a slippery slope and wind up being "Hungry Man for rich people" (not that that isn't honestly a perfectly great company, it's just not sexy enough for VC money).

At some point, you're just a personal chef which is a perfectly fine but not a very scalable business.

I too want this. Let me make something in bulk that freezes well or feeds lots of people.

You should try out this book:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Cook-Everything-Fast-Better-ebook...