All the recipe books I own have accurate prep + cook times for an “ideal chef in ideal circumstances.” I don’t know why they wouldn’t. For any decent recipe book the recipes are made and tested many times in different variations. If you know that you are slower then just pad it out a bit. It shouldn’t be discouraging that professional & motivated amateur chefs are faster than you—just like it should not be discouraging that professional basketball players can score more points than you.

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.

> It shouldn’t be discouraging that professional & motivated amateur chefs are faster than you

I don't see, why cooking should be a competition for speed in the first place.

I don't think it's a competition mentality as much as a need to be able to plan the time it takes to prep and cook so that the food is ready when the family is hungry.

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. :)

I dont buy this, reading many of the comments here. I'm not a native speaker and not certain at this moment if the figure of "hamster wheel" exists in English. But "rat race" does, as well as "cog in the wheel". There is a certain underlying trait of self-optimizing anything, also visible in the HN articles title itself (fortunately not so much the content) as well as in many other articles of this kind, coming up here continously. And these optimization considerations are >95% limited to time, they are much closer to self-exploitation than anything else.

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.

I will interject here—I’m one of the people who says that cooks who take 1 hour to cook a 20 minute recipe are slow. However, I don’t think that this is a problem of over-optimizing or self exploitation.

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.

Lol, OK. I'm not worried about "wasted" time or "unproductive" time. I am sensitive to "young kids are hungry because dinner is an hour later than expected," or "we've got plans to visit grandparents and don't want to be out too late because they have school in the morning." Trying to pretend that there is never any time pressure in life is a bit naive, I think.

> never any time pressure in life is a bit naive

Missing the related point from the comment is... what? Deliberate?

Cooking / recipe books should have a professional time and an 'amateur time'. The latter exists more as a worst case estimate for how long the first try at a dish by someone generally less skilled might take. That would give someone trying the dish for the first time a good idea how much time it takes, which can be important.

If a recipe has 20 minutes of prep, then everyone who is fast can do the prep in 20 minutes. But everyone who is slow will take a different amount of time, because anyone who is slow is slow for different reasons.

The cooking book could show the 1, 90 and 99 and 99.9 percentile prep time?

(E.g 99.9 being 40 min would mean that 999 out of 1 000 people got it done faster than 40 min)

Eh. I did a bunch of statistical modeling for cloud service SLIs/SLOs/SLAs. This approach is good for letting people do black-box modeling. It sounds like complete overkill for recipes.

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.

> It sounds like complete overkill for recipes.

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.)

>here are two large pots of boiling water already on the stoves

Tangent: In the UK, I boil any water I need in a 240 V kettle. It dramatically reduces the waiting time.

My mate just moved from NZ (230 volts) to Canada (110 volts) and he reckons the electric kettle over there is basically impotent due to having less than half as much potential kicking about in the wires.

Maybe that explains why the Americans are so attached to their boiling pots?

Its also why in tv shows made in the USA/Canada they always show stove top kettles with the whistle one.

Always make me think of my Grans council house in Birmingham (UK) and her kettle.

There's no reason why a 110 V kettle couldn't be as powerful as a 230 V one, if it was designed for that voltage. Just like light bulbs in the US are not generally less bright than those in France.

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.

If volts were there only limitation on the design that would be correct, however amps are also important in this case. A 240V UK wall socket can be up to 13 amps whilst a US 110V line is 12 amps.

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.

In Europe kettles typically use around 2300W, since homes are typically wired with 16A breakers (and you don't want the kettle to pop the breaker as soon as you add another device). But US homes are wired similarly, typically with 15A breakers. So you get kettles that typically use 1500W, much less than the European equivalent.

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.

Ok, that makes sense! I guess I just assumed that US wiring would typically be rated for higher currents to compensate for the less efficient transmission.

It didn't occur to me that Americans would settle for having less power than the rest of the world, it seems uncharacteristic somehow :)

We choose wiring gauge mostly by the "how large can it be while still moving well inside a wall?" factor. So, it's not surprising different places use the same one.

On the face of it, it would be equally unsurprising if wiring was dimensioned to fit the needed power output. But you are right of course.

I'm sure 1% of Americans have 30 amp circuits in their kitchen and the help can boil water at twice the rate. Most Americans support this because they consider themselves just temporarily embarrassed by low-powered kettles.

Americans have 240v to the house. My dryer and oven are 240v. Just the general utility outlets are half that.

Same here (in Poland). Besides being faster, this is likely more energy-efficient, as the kettle isn't bleeding heat as much as a pot on the stove.

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?

--

[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.

> Why no design with a combustion chamber of some sorts?

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.

Induction cooking plates are the same (with magnetic pots, pans and so on, otherwise won't work(at all)), regarding the immediacy.

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! :-)

> 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.

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.

Specialized hiking gear typically come with integrated heat exchangers and insulation to be more efficient when used on gas-fired stoves. This makes them really good at boiling water, and terrible at anything else since it's impossible to control the heat in any meaningful way.

> this is likely more energy-efficient

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.

Yes, I assume it's more expensive. Gas is cheaper than electricity in Poland, but then again, electricity also isn't that expensive for preboiling in a kettle to make a big difference.

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.

Or use an induction stove, which is even quicker than a kettle

It's cheaper to buy a kettle, than a whole induction stove, and compatible pots.

Certainly that's true (although when I got an induction stove i only had to replace one pan - they've been widespread for long enough now that all the cookware I bought in the last decade is compatible, as are all my ancient cast iron pans).

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.

Is it, in the long run? Induction is much more efficient than gas.

I'm talking about an electric kettle, just like the parent comment.

Preparing the ingredients is good advice at home too. Otherwise you forget things or use the wrong amounts. Have everything in small bowls ready to go in, then start cooking proper.

And yes an onion can be chopped in seconds. There are youtube videos on it. Worth learning.