Treat recipe prep times the same way you'd treat a managers estimate how long it should take you fix a bug. Truth is most recipe book writers haven't actually done the prep work from zero from their recipes and are basically just guessing.
It's the same with the these TV shows where they cook a meal in 20 minutes. If you walk into a kitchen where an assistant has line up all the ingredients pre measured and prepped in separate bowels, pre-heated two ovens and all the pans they know you'll need, and made sure there are two large pots of boiling water already on the stoves then prehaps you can make the meal in 20 minutes on your 3rd or 4th try. Otherwise there is no chance.
I can understand why cooking can be slow and painful for people new to the activity. However, if you want to get fast at cooking, it is not that hard to get fast. Knife skills, multitasking, and planning will make everything go much faster. If your knife skills are not great (say, takes you longer than about a minute to dice an onion) or you are tired from a long day of work and aren’t in the mood to move fast, prep will take a lot longer.
Just observing people do prep I think it’s fairly plain to see that tons of people are just damn slow at it, either because they don’t enjoy going fast or because their skills aren’t up to par. And there are plenty of cooking shows where the contestants are under strict time limits but must still do all their prep within the time limit. Cutthroat Kitchen usually has a 30 minute limit, including prep, and including acts of sabotage that increase the difficulty.
I don't see, why cooking should be a competition for speed in the first place.
I like to cook, but I don't have tons of time to cook as a hobby. New recipes are worked into our regular meal times. If it takes me an hour longer than the estimated time to prep and cook, I've made everyone wait an extra hour, throwing off any other plans for the evening. That can be discouraging and lead to wondering "why did they say it only takes 20 minutes? Are they just guessing, or am I just a slow cook?" Hence this thread. :)
Cooking for the moment aside, consider lunch. I'm German (sadly, the country became closer to the US in this respect). But if you ever worked in France or Switzerland for example (not to talk about countries even further into the South), you will spot much a difference here - yet in time spent, but also in the opinion what is important at all. Cooking is the same - it is not all "hungry family" (I certainly agree, at times it is), these are more often than not rationalizations. When I am cooking, the kitchen full of people is the most satisfying situation. It doesn't matter really, how long it lasts. This is not lost time, on the contrary! Also not in the context of work, because it eventually produces energy (I don't mean the calories) also for this.
A final small example: I have an Italian espresso machine here in my offices kitchen. Producing an espresso or cappuccino requires to do all steps manually: grinding beans, evaluating the pressure on the analog gauge, provisioning the milk, making foam from it, etc. - time-consuming! But it is a micro ritual, making my head free enough for handling some of the kinds of small problems, appearing during work. I could also buy something 'modern' using pads, maybe some sort of remote control, even a robot serving the final result to me (are there such things?). I certainly will never do this.
My wife and I both do a lot of cooking and it is a fun, shared activity where we can move fast or slow, and talk about things. We also spent some time learning—learning knife skills, learning new techniques for cooking, trying new cuisines or new recipes.
However, if you are chopping an onion and hold the knife wrong, hold the onion wrong, or make the wrong cuts, it is not only slower but it is also more dangerous. If your knife is dull, you push the knife harder, and that is more dangerous. If chopping an onion is safe, you can move faster. It is a simple skill to learn and everyone who cooks should learn it.
Missing the related point from the comment is... what? Deliberate?
(E.g 99.9 being 40 min would mean that 999 out of 1 000 people got it done faster than 40 min)
A recipe is not a black box. Most recipes are short and can be written on a half page of paper. If it calls for two chopped onions and you know that it takes you an “eternity” to chop onions, then add two eternities to the cooking time.
And as long as you are spending two eternities chopping onions, why not spend 90 seconds watching a video on YouTube that explains how to do it correctly? For most people—if you are cooking regularly, and practicing good technique, you will naturally get faster over time. If, like many people, you are cooking for decades, then you will be slow for only a short time.
I forgot an /s. 99.9 percentile would require doing each meal in the cooking book ... 1000 or 10 000 times by different people to get an accurate timing :)
> chopping onions, why not spend 90 seconds watching a video on YouTube that explains how to do it correctly?
That sounds like a good idea, could get back 1 000 x those two minutes, in a lifetime, and more yummy food and can impress others with the onion skills. (No /s here. I'll try to remember tomorrow, youtube.)
Tangent: In the UK, I boil any water I need in a 240 V kettle. It dramatically reduces the waiting time.
Maybe that explains why the Americans are so attached to their boiling pots?
Always make me think of my Grans council house in Birmingham (UK) and her kettle.
If you take a 230 V kettle and connect it to 110 V, then yes it will be less powerful. Perhaps about 1/4 of the power.
With power (watts) being volts * amps that gives the power of 3120 Vs 1320 watts for UK Vs USA respectively.
This means a UK kettle can dump heat into the water up to 2.4 times faster so should boil in less than half the time.
Kettles are at the high end of power consumption as generally people want a fast boil. Lights are towards the low end as its rare for someone to want even 1000 watts of incandescent brightness.
Sure, you could use powerful kettles in the US on a 20W outlet, or on a 230V circuit, but nobody is going to do that. A typical kettle that you can just buy and plug in wherever is less powerful in the US just because you use halve the voltage but don't wire for double the current.
It didn't occur to me that Americans would settle for having less power than the rest of the world, it seems uncharacteristic somehow :)
Speaking of which, I don't understand why we've settled on a gas stove design that's so terribly inefficient, with most[0] of the heat leaking around the pan. Why no design with a combustion chamber of some sorts?
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[0] - Well, at least a lot. I didn't do the math here yet, but it's hard to imagine otherwise with unrestricted airflow around the pan.
Thermal capacity. Gas stoves are great because they have none, so any temperature changes are immediate. Anything between the pot and the flame will destroy that advantage.
Also, the combustion chamber will have a vent for the exhaust. So I would suspect that it won't be any more efficient, except for very small pot sizes.
When I got my first, I've been curious and experimented with water. Depending on the model they have sensor buttons where you can raise/lower the temperature in 10 to 20°C steps.
Mine have 10°C steps, where with water in a pot at 90°C the first few small bubbles start to rise, like in soda/mineral water. When at 100°C the big boiling bubbles start after about 2 to 3 seconds.
Mine are rated at 2500 Watts each, have segmented induction coils where the outer segments switch off with smaller pots, are plan like a mirror and thus very easy and fast to clean.
I'm such a fan! :-)
The airflow needs to be there, but I imagine it could be slowed down, so that the hot air spends more time transferring energy to the pot. That would retain the fast reaction time, and let one burn less gas for the same amount of cooking output.
Be that as it may, it's most likely more expensive. This is purely my personal guesstimate, but gas tends to be much cheaper in Poland than electricity. More efficient, maybe, but I'd be very surprised if it was cheaper given the prices.
On a related note, I was surprised when I did calculations on how much it actually costs us to bake our own bread. We started doing that a lot during this pandemic. It turns out, the cost of ingredients + electricity adds to slightly less than what it would cost to buy the same products from a bakery. This doesn't price in time spent on preparing and baking, but it's not like we could actually use that time to make money, we're having fun, and going to a store also takes time (and/or fuel). Electricity is cheap.
It's worth understanding though - at least in the UK the received wisdom is that "kettle is fastest" - but that's not always true any more.
And yes an onion can be chopped in seconds. There are youtube videos on it. Worth learning.
You’re probably not as slow as you think.
How long does it take you to chop an onion? Well, let me put it this way—an instructional video of someone demonstrating how to chop an onion, moving slowly and pausing to explain the technique, will run about 90 seconds, possibly less. If it takes you more than about a minute to cut an onion, you are slow.
Most people have dull knives, hold the knife incorrectly so it is unstable, make the wrong cuts in the onion so it falls apart, hold the onion incorrectly and move slowly because they are worried about cutting their fingers. If you sharpen your knife, hold it correctly, make the correct cuts, and hold the onion correctly, you’ll find that it’s very fast to cut an onion.
Fact is—the difference between someone who is skilled and someone who is unskilled is big enough that they teach entire classes on knife technique. This is not about some esoteric subject like teaching you how to butcher small game in your kitchen—in a knife skills class, they’ll teach you basic stuff like how to cut onions. And I’ll say that being good at cutting onions does require a decent amount of skill—onions are round and slippery, after all.
Don't feel bad, most people are not actually good at cooking. But if you care, being good is pretty simple. It just takes actual training, which most people are surprisingly resistant to.
Of course, this is usually true for publications which have an editorial processes (eg - Cook's Illustrated), and not more casual blogs/YT videos
It isn’t really a shady practice, but for whatever reason over several years I had never known it.
Take mise en place seriously. If the recipe calls for chopped onions, chop them before you turn on the burner. Later you can work on parallelizing the process (eg, chopping the onions while the bacon is rendering) but to start with, just work on getting all the pieces on the table before you start the chess clock. Delegate to sous-spouses or sous-children.
Rarely do you need to be a perfectionist. If you are sautéing or stewing or braising or souping, the onions cook down. Ceviche is a different matter. Baking may be more specific, but that kind of witchcraft is forbidden around here.
> If the recipe calls for chopped onions, chop them before you turn on the burner. Later you can work on parallelizing the process
For most meals I start the slowing-cooking item first and then start on the others once it is in the over / pot or similar. E.g. a roast joint. I'll get it in the oven and then prep the roasting veggies (e.g. potatoes and parsnips), get them in the oven and then start peeling the green veg (which only need cooking for a few minutes). Over the years I've learned how long things need and how long I take to prep them, so my timings usually work out.
Chinese cooking (or at least my take on it) is my main exception: given the short cooking times of some things, and the large number of ingredients / dishes, I tend to prep everything first, and then start cooling simultaneously.
The other obvious exception is using my smoker, where a meal might stay in it for more than 5 hours. I say 'meal' rather than 'meat' because I also use the smoker to cook chilli and tagine.
Overcooking meats to be on the safe side, and overcooking the veggies, because they are in with the meat for the same amount of time, but they should be in for less, etc..
I guess I'm missing out on taste and nutrients aswell due to this?
While I was unemployed for 9 months I got a brilliant idea to learn cooking outside of sandwiches and very basic meals. One of the main dishes I'd wanted to learn was boiled rice which everyone around me always fail to do properly except SEA expats. I was surprised that for each shape and size of rice I could buy there are 2 or 3 different sources and/or cultivars which behave differently but people tend to cook them the same way.
offtopic: where you got Space Rangers from?
Totally unrelated, but I have a dvorak keyboard layout, and navigation using HJKL is one of the things I hate most about vi. Sure, I could rebind it locally, but that doesn't help me when I use a remote machine. Perhaps this is what being left handed feels like.
Actually, you can be four! Send me your address and i’ll send it to you, email the gmail domain with the handle plusjade
it’s really that good ^_^
This is actually a problem with most current "food TV". None of them seem to actually want to teach people how to cook. They'll spend 90 seconds showing the host throw together a dish while glossing over most of the details and techniques, when they should be spending the full 30 minutes.
Samin Nosrat is a fantastic teacher. She shares cooking through the lens of “why”. It’s the opposite of say, rote learning which, as a beginner, i’d always assumed “follow this recipe” was and so suffered indifference toward the world of cooking. I’ve never been good at following directions.
She’s the teacher that guides you to what you could not see because of false assumptions.
Cooking is now an endless exploration. There are foundational answers to “why” and though I’d call it an anti-recipe book, the second half is all recipes heh, but they are like seed ideas. You can practice one seed and explore yourself how to build upon it.
I made an herb salsa: citrus juice, herbs (i use cilantro), onion, salt, and oil. This is the ACID. You can then incorporate the other 3 however you wish. It makes me feel like a chef! I put it in eggs. and chicken. i’m still exploring. It takes time and care, but not “to get the right answer”, rather to develop your point of view. I look forward to it now. each meal is an opportunity to practice and explore. its my own creativity and art. i love it.
Similarly good (and maybe a good companion) is J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s YouTube channel. He basically wears a GoPro and cooks full meals with a very minimum number of cuts. You can see him make mistakes and adapt recipes to what he has on hand in real time. Watching a pro do that really made a lot of things click for me. His book (The Food Lab) and his articles on Serious Eats are also good, but his videos have really been extraordinary.
Of course, learning to cook also involves many other techniques and combining flavors in more complex ways, but if you're starting out and can't boil an egg, it's a great introduction to the basics of what makes food taste good.
Invest in good cookware.
Three high quality pots and two high quality pans will improve your cooking experience, learning, and results exponentially.
If the space is designed well with close attention to workflows and storage and even a gram of attention paid to the UI/UX of the kitchen, work would a LOT faster.
1) knife basics & skills. Not to nerd out too much here, but a good chefs knife is such an important tool (reply if you want any specific tips or have questions)
2) learn how to cut or prep the thing you are going to do on YouTube. Watch a couple of videos. Blue apron has good ones, but YouTube will also often jump to the good stuff if you are willing to use Google's search.
Most useful: basic knife skills should help you cut cucumbers and zucchini better. After that, broccoli can be really efficiently removed from the stem. Lemons can be fairly easily quartered and de seeded if quartered vertically. Literally anything else and whatever cut, just watch some videos. Onions - there are nice ways to dice them. Etc etc
3) be kind to yourself; prep the kitchen a bit ahead of time. Clean surfaces. Pre measure ingredients into bowls. Keep a trash bowl near your cutting board so you don't have to walk to the garbage bin. Start the timer after you've done a little work to get things ready, but before you've turned on any heat or sliced any vegetables (eventually, the prep step will be super fast or you can optimize your kitchen for your flows)
Do all your measuring of ingredients at once. Once all of the ingredients are measured, then combining them when needed becomes far more efficient, instead of context-switching.
Alternatively, use a scale. Keep your dish you're baking on the scale, and just keep adding stuff until the right amount of weight is added. IMO, the scale methodology is far easier.
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As far as "chopping an onion", there's a safe way to slice food. You want the knife to be very sharp, then when you do a slight "slicing" motion, you can feel the bite. When you feel the bite, that's when you can press down, knowing that the knife won't slip on the onion and slice off a chunk of your skin.
If you push down before you feel the bite, you may have the top of the knife slide off the top off the onion and onto your fingers. With a dull knife, that's not a big deal (but a dull knife means you're not really going to be cutting very quickly...)
A knife is not a saw. One should try to cut down and forward, away from you. And you should slightly protrude your knuckles out so that your knife is away from your fingers as it is against your knuckles.
IMO: If you're going that small, get a food processor.
Food processors are very useful in a number of recipes: homemade cuts of ground beef (ever try Rib-eye burgers?), breadcrumbs, casserole?
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Similarly, if you're julienne (aka: french cut) a lot, consider a mandoline slicer. A knife can be used, but dedicated tools are faster and more efficient.
The knife is the general purpose cutter. But there are many other cutting tools that are better at making certain shapes.
I would recommend a (curved) chef's knife for most people, though.
1. A sharp knife. This is a must for just about anything in the kitchen. While the price tag of a name brand German or Japanese knife might scare you off, a $5 Kiwi #171 knife from Amazon or eBay can serve you well, and will kick the pants of the knives found in a lot of home kitchens.
2. Don't cut the root off until the very end. If this were a decade ago, I'd write more about technique, but the reality is you're better served by watching a few someones do it on youtube than reading what I type.
3. Practice.
The edge of a knife is very fragile, because it is very very thin. As such, when you use the knife's edge, it will eventually "bend over".
A honing edge straightens the edge again. That's not "sharpening", its just pushing a stick against the knife edge to realign everything. It will cut better once you hone it.
https://www.globeequipment.com/learning-center/wp-content/up...
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"Sharpening" is when you remove metal from the edge of the knife.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0001/8425/4516/files/messe...
Honing should be done every time you use the knife. Sharpening should only be done every month (if you use the knife a lot) or once every year (if its a rarely used knife)
Special mention for the peculiarity that Kyocera makes amazing ceramic knives, and on the subject that Peugeot makes amazing salt and pepper grinders.
Context switching makes sense when the cost of the switch is less than the time saved by doing the switch. For a beginner cook or someone whose knife skills aren't that great, maybe the cost of the switch is very high or the benefit is relatively low. Or maybe the window of idle time is not sufficient to accomplish the critical work. In this case, you just have to move the critical work earlier into the process and accept some down time.
That being said, one thing I have found is that if I'm really FOCUSING on cooking, sometimes the idle moments are larger and the context switching costs are less than I had though, and maybe I can mix some prep in with cooking. The problem comes in when you're constantly checking your phone or chatting or whatever in between the cooking steps. That can really slow you down.
It sounds a bit dorky, but it really helps to look up on YouTube how a pro cuts an onion for example. You'll realise that most people are cutting them wrong, and that the "correct" way speeds up the cutting process massively.
Always when discussing recipes with friends (I realize now how curiously frequent that is) the stated time is almost always too low for most people. So you're far from alone there, even among people who "can cook".
I consider myself and my wife equals in cooking, but she is definitely much faster than me, and is of the rare kind who can complete most (new) recipes within the specified time, while I prepare slower and always go back many times to double check things. But she's the outlier, not me, at least from my anecdotes.
I could probably work on chopping faster and less "perfectionistic", but the recipe part after getting used to dishes is where I make up most time after a few times.
Once you get a hang of a region's cuisine, you get a feel for how measurements fit and what seasoning works, and that's how I like to cook.
Which is also why I don't like baking, since there's a lot less wiggle room for improv.
It's definitely partly practice, but make sure you have a decently sharp knife (you don't need to get anything ridiculously expensive but you should be paying ~£20 for one knife). The cheap "sharp knives" you get for £20-30 for a whole set tend to not actually be that sharp and make it really difficult to cut through things like onions because they slip all over the place.
I got my high quality but very old knives professionally sharpened a few months ago. It made a world of difference and cost something like £25 for 5 chef's knives, scissors and a serrated bread knife.
The guys I went to (in south London [1]) do most of their business renting knife sets to restaurants: each chef has two sets of knives; every few weeks they come by to drop of the newly sharpened set and take the other set away to sharpen back at their workshop.
Their tip is rather than paying full retail price for quality knives, buy knives through them. They'll recommend what's best for your needs and budget. You can save even more by buying from their restaurant rental stock, freshly resharpened, for something like 1/8th of what you'd pay new in a store.
[1] http://www.collini.co.uk/ in Balham (55 Fontenoy Road, SW12 9LX). If you take your knives to them for sharpening, you can watch them do it, on large, 1950s era motorised grindstones. Absolutely fascinating.
That said, for chopping it really helps to have a sharp knife. A dull knife takes longer to do the job and it's also more likely to cause an accident.
This is true, but sharp knives also require good handling skills. If someone has been using dull knives their whole life they will almost certainly cut themselves if given a sharp knife, unless they are also re-trained on how to use them.
Watch an episode of "Worst cooks in America" and count how many hands Ann has drawn on with a red Sharpie.
There's a huge difference between having to consciously cut vegetables, and being able to do it via muscle memory.
With a few basic skills you can whip up so many tasty dishes.
My little secret: a homemade white sauce seafood pasta. It's embarrassingly easy to make, and wows my guests every-time.
* Cut both of the heads off.
* Peeling. I don't try to remove the dry peel, instead I just remove the whole outmost layer, comes off with a shallow cut then removing it. Yeah it's a bit of a waste, but often that first layer isn't in a great shape and you'd toss it anyway.
* Cut in half, place the halfs flat side down. Much easier to do the rest when it doesn't try to roll away from under you.
* Cut to slices without breaking the pack (i.e. keep it half-onion shaped). This is probably easier to do with a small knife than a large one.
* Cut the sliced packs orthogonally to previous cuts. Done, except if you want a tiny mush (in that case, use a bigger rounded edge knife, cut with a rolling movement so that the tip end of the blade keeps in contact with the board; same technique also works great for garlic).
As others have pointed out, you'll want a sharp knife (a knife sharpener is a good investment). Cut with sideways motion with a hint of downward pressure, instead of just trying to press down through the onion.
Edit: Forgot the first step.
A few things:
* It will show you how to cut and the correct techniques to use. Have a look at the Amazon 'look inside' to see how to cut onions, carrots and asparagus
* When cutting things like carrots, are you cutting one carrot or multiple? (the next point is important for this)
* Are your knives sharp? There should be almost no effort cutting through a carrot, for example.
Background to Leiths:
* They're a real cooking school that teaches professional chefs assuming very little knowledge
* It was set up by Prue Leith and Caroline Waldegrave. Prue Leith is one of the judges on the Great British Bakeoff.
* Leiths is well known in London for both their professional courses and for amateur ones too (e.g. a day to de-bone a chicken)
Try doing a few meals in a row with similar ingredients and chop once for like the next 2-3 days (depending on what's being chopped).
Also you can try timing yourself. See how long it takes to chop an onion, record it. Now you know the REAL prep time for a recipe based on it's ingredients.
What really saves time is having an idea what order you're going to do things and how to parallelize tasks, but for that you need to have some intuition about time so you don't accidently burn something. There's a recipe I make that takes twice as long if strictly prepped first then cooked.
Also, just going to state the obvious, but if you're cooking for more than two people, it's just always much harder.
Basically everyone just stopped talking to them and chose the more convenient solution.
There was a nice article talking about how long it actually takes to caramelize onions. Everything says like 20 minutes when it actually takes almost an hour.
Cookbooks and recipes with rigor are few and far between.
The intent of the recipe is almost always to cook the onions for the time stated. Chefs were referring to softened, browned onions as "caramelized" for decades before the chemists started coming in and saying "well, actually that isn't technically caramelized..."
Except that this is wrong. It makes a world of difference in how the recipe tastes. And you have to be a relatively experienced cook to know to flag this.
"Cooked" onions are generally soft but still acrid.
"Caramelized" onions are starting to get hard again because of browning and are sweet with no acrid flavor at all.
Those are two VERY different flavor profiles.
And that's before we get to the point that we have to wait 40 extra minutes for the caramelized onions while everything else is waiting because you expected that it only took 20.
I gather you think very poorly of chefs and recipe writers, but, really, no recipe-writer tests a recipe by cooking the onions for an hour and then writes "20 minutes" to try and win some speed sweepstakes.
However, I also noticed in Montreal "caramelized onions" actually always meant caramelized onions.
So it's just really just poor terminology rather than a ploy to fool you.
Nobody in America is going to wait an hour for food outside of the high-end restaurants. So, anything with "caramelized onions" would need to prep and store that step with the associated degradation.
The exception was my favorite cheesesteak place (sadly now gone--the owners got old and retired). The owner literally had a row of chopped onions that stretched the length of the grill. As he cooked he would keep adding onions on the far right while moving the entire line of onions leftward--so the onions that got used actually had enough time to truly caramelize. Similarly for the steak, just much faster. When everything got to the far left (steak with cheese (people who want CheeseWhiz could go somewhere else thanks), onions, bun) his wife would assemble the full thing.
It was a thing of beauty to watch them work. And the cheesesteak was glorious.
And now I'm hungry and craving a cheesesteak that doesn't exist anymore. :(
these should be done in advance if not the day before.
Cooking is a nice break from screen-based activities. I put a podcast or some music on, and cook myself something nice. Since it's a hobby, I don't worry too much about efficiency.
That being said, after making a recipe once or twice, I always transcribe them, along with minor optimisations. Unlike some recipe creators, I don't have a dish washer, so these little optimisations matter.
Mise en place[1] is implicit in recipes, but as you say it does make the listed timings misleading.
For some reason those skills are not listed most cook books and I certainly didn't learn them in school.
Now, eh, no problem.
Go watch some online videos about knife skills. Just knowing how to properly hold a knife çan cut prep time down.
Edit: realize my comment sounds negative about that chopper. while I don't use it anymore, it's cheap enough and worth trying if you are on the fence or don't enjoy the prepwork.
Recipes that claim “5 minutes of prep” are more like 20 minutes for me. It can be very discouraging.
What you describe is definitely something that comes with experience. Like using vim effectively. I’m improving but it literally took a once in a century global pandemic to overcome the initial learning curve.