I've had this conversation with people many times, a consequence is that some of them have no idea what caramelised onions actually are - they think it's the state you get to after 10 mins.
Thinly slice 10 onions, dump them in a big pot with some oil on a medium heat for 10-15 minutes stirring frequently. Then turn the heat down to low and cook for a further 45-60 mins, check on it and stir every 10 mins or so. When it gets dry, add water and use it to deglaze the bottom of the pan to prevent burning. It's finished when the onions are a deep brown colour and their volume has reduced to about 1/6th of what it was to begin with. Store in fridge, enjoy with every meal in the following few days.
The real issue is simply a vague use of the word "caramelize," not that they expect you to be at the stove a half-hour longer than they say.
The vast majority of recipes that say "caramelize" simply mean "cook until softened and sweet." No, technically the onions won't be caramelized after 15 minutes, but very few recipes actually want you to caramelize the onions.
Take an Italian pasta sauce. As an Italian who has cooked (and eaten) across Italy, I can say that there are nearly zero sauces where the onions are supposed to be caramelized. Yet people routinely use the word "caramelize" when describing cooking the onions for a pasta sauce.
The wrong reaction to reading that word would be to say "these damn recipe writers don't know how long that takes, dinner's going to be late kids, I guess it's going to be 45 minutes before I can add the next ingredient." The right reaction would be to cook the onions for the given time, until they are soft and translucent, and forget the word "caramelize."
The confusion comes in the color versus the process. I've seen some recipes call for "cook down onions until translucent and caramel in color". This is the most accurate definition of what most recipes want when asking for caramelized onions.
However the true use of the word "Caramelized Onions" are onions that have gone through the cooking process of caramelization. This process requires three things: sugar, heat, and time. Just like making candy caramels, you are performing the same process to onions. This makes true caramelized onions actually sweet, with savory notes throughout.
Most recipes bastardize the word "Caramelize". They tell you to caramelize onions, when in reality you don't actually want caramelized onions (which in many cases would actually ruin the recipe), instead they want softened onions with browned to a light caramel color, which is a completely different thing.
This is like a recipe needing turkey but asking for chicken. Like sure, it will probably work, but it is clearly different and not entirely substitute.
French Onion soup is the most common use of real caramelized onions, which is sweet and savory soup. It could not be made with browned onions, that would ruin it. Coq-a-vin is another popular recipe that uses caramelized onions, which complements the prominent wine flavors of the dish into a sweet, savory, gamey (usually made with game hens), and earthy delight of a meal. The caramelized onions are what pull that dish together and critical part of the recipe. This meal takes a long time to cook, similar to a gourmet version of American potroast.
Real French Onion dip, made with onions and not a prepared packet, is another nice dish with real carmelized onions. Alton Brown has a good recipe for the basic version: https://altonbrown.com/recipes/onion-dip-from-scratch/ Note he's honest about how long it takes ("Total Time: 2 hours", step 3 doesn't have a time estimate but it's about right overall).
It isn't haute cuisine, but for something you might serve for a Superbowl party it's at least pointing in that direction. It can stand up to taking a moment to savor and inhale it, moreso than most of the rest of what might be served up there. Pair with the bizarrely tasty Costco Kettle Krinkle Cut potato chips.
This sounds like the same problem as recipes that call for "browning the meat" which I tend to read as "sear the meat" because e.g. mince will brown up within seconds but the searing is what actually gives you the flavour.
I've found you really do need to use sweet Onions like Texas 1015s or Vidalias if you want good, quick(er) carmelized onions. Adding sugar is not the same thing at all as having the sugar grown into the onion itself!
Adding water early on in the cooking process to steam cook and soften the onions really speeds things up, too. (See Lan Lam's YouTube video on cooking carmelized onions. I use a slightly different method, but she got me on the track of adding water early, which really does help...)
They're not lying, they're just using the word in a more imprecise manner.
Recipe authors have probably been using the word "caramelize" to mean "soften and turn brown and sweet" for longer than food nerds have been nitpicking the exact definition of caramelize.
This irritates me (I know it's a silly thing to be irritated by). I'm far from a food nerd. I'm not a cook. I rely on following recipes to turn out decent dishes (I'm good at following recipes).
It would have been nice if someone had clued people like me in to their special definition of the word before now. I'd have saved a whole lot of time and frustration.
But now I'm presented with the other problem: when a recipe calls for caramelized onions, how am I supposed to know if they mean caramelized onions or "cook until translucent"?
If you followed the recipe as written without overthinking it, you would have had translucent onions after ten minutes and a complete and tasty dish.
You aren't supposed to interpret a recipe. You are supposed to follow it. If you have enough skill, practice, or ability to order pizza, THEN is the right time to make decisions about whether this recipe actually needs REAL caramelized onions.
Recipes have been vague and don't make sense out of context for millennia.
I do follow the recipes without overthinking them, because I don't have the skill required to make judgement calls. But also, I know that any time a recipe gives is highly suspect, so don't judge if something is done based on times in recipes.
So when a recipe says to "carmelize onions", that's what I do. To do anything else is to deviate from what the recipe is plainly telling me.
> Recipes have been vague and don't make sense out of context for millennia.
True. But the fact that this is true means it's essentially impossible to follow a recipe without some degree of interpretation.
I'm just irritated that there was a secret definition to "carmelize onions" that nobody clued me in to.
All of this is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. I'll get over this minor irritation. :)
Exactly. I'm no cook, I'm barely an amateur cook, and I have absolutely no idea what "caramelized onions" means. Turned into caramel? I'm pretty sure you can get onions brown in 10 minutes, though. It probably won't be caramelized, it might be burned, but it's brown. I remember brown, dry onions. I'm sure caramelized ones are better. In fact, I think my wife once did something with onions that made them very sweet. I guess that was caramelized? But that's not what most recipes need.
To be honest, there's a lot of these sort of words that are often used in recipes where I have no idea what they mean. A basic cook book to just explain these sort of things, would be fantastic. Just the different ways to properly cook onions, mushrooms, and other ingredients, and what those techniques are called. And warn for ways that those names might be misused: "If a recipe says to caramelize onions in 10 minutes, don't caramelize them, do this other thing instead." I think a book like that would be really helpful to a lot of people.
How to Cook Everything, I'm Just Here For the Food, and On Food and Cooking are my big three. The first one for the breadth of recipes, the second to learn a bit more about the physics and chemistry of cooking, and the third for the truly deep dive into everything we know about food.
Then Modernist Cuisine just for the pictures. Actually I learned a bunch when Mhyrvold spoke at my company- we talked about how to make BBQ ribs. His suggestion: sous vide, then immerse in liquid nitrogen, then deep fry.
Ruhlman's 20 was that book for me. From that one book I feel like I can dissect and understand so many core concepts that I very rarely follow recipes any longer, I just skim for the key aspects and wing it, substituting with what I have available, and a reasonable intuition for when I can't do so. Am grateful I made that investment (reading it, making most of the recipes).
You're probably right, but it still results in people not knowing what caramelised onions are - which is (or should be) a crime, because they're lovely.
I don't recall seeing instructions to caramelise in pasta sauce recipes, that's usually "until starting to brown", same with curries.. "Until translucent" for risotto.
What I'm really talking about is... Let's have a look... First result for "caramelised onion quiche" says cook onions for 15 mins. Doesn't work!
Luckily, in German, there are three completely different words for preparing onions in a pan:
1.) Anschwitzen, literally "sweating up", means putting them in a pan on low heat for around 10 minutes until they are translucent ("glasig", literally "glassy"). This is how to get a starter for many sauces, and is the standard way to prepare onions for many, many meals and sauces (e.g. a standard tomato sauce). They should not turn brown, as this would for example ruin the color and flavor of white or light sauces - caramelized onions have a kind of "heavy" flavor.
2.) Karamelisieren, "caramelize", which is the meaning described in this article.
3.) Rösten, "roast", which means frying the onions with a bit a flour until they are crispy.
I am sure that Germany has many more words on how to describe cooked onions. Likewise, we have at least a dozen words in the English language for how to cook onions, that also translate directly to the German oddly enough. Unfortunately people who write on-line recipes have latched on to the caramelized onion notation and are not particularly explicit in what they actually want. Having gone through four years of culinary training, I now look at recipes on-line with a very critical eye and much like how you can identify the copy & paste code and architecture of a junior developer, you can also identify the recipe borrowing and construction of people who are better at blogging than they are at cooking.
In English we call these "sweated", "caramelised", and "frenched", respectively. I'm not sure why the phrase "sweat" doesn't get much use outside of pro kitchens, it's a useful term.
>The real issue is simply a vague use of the word "caramelize,"
The linked article gives a few examples where there was no vagueness: The recipes described the visual state that the onion should be in when caramelized, and it corresponded to the ~45 minute process, not the ~10 minutes the recipe claimed it would take.
I've had this issue myself with a meal kit service that said caramelized and showed a picture of the ~45 minute result but the overall prep & cook time for the entire meal, as stated in the recipe, was only 30 minutes. (In general meal prep kits seem to drastically understate the amount of prep time. At best, it might correspond to the amount of time it would take a skilled chef to chop and slice and peel everything, not the average consumer who subscribed on the basis of easy 15-30-45 minute meals)
The article confused things by talking about "caramelizing" but as you say that's a rare instruction in recipes. However, the point remains: what recipes much more frequently call for is to cook until "translucent" or "golden brown" and those times are wildly underestimated in published recipes.
I was hoping that someone would post this! Lan Lam's recent youtube posts have radically improved my cooking (results or ease of execution) and I'd recommend that anyone who cooks frequently check them out.
Yeah that works on my Viking stove with my competent pans, and is basically how I do it, but people with shitty stoves, i.e. the majority, have burners with hot spots and/or mismatched pan widths or even too thin pan bottoms. I suspect that's where the constant stirring/too short time business might originate.
I never realized how widespread this was until I brought dishes to group meals (as in Slow Food) and people complimented me for my caramelized onions.
Oh please, just stop! This elitism around caramelized onions is just absurd. I've caramelized onions on the shittiest of shitty electric stoves using the cheapest of cheap pans Walmart sells. It's not difficult and doesn't take any special equipment or skills - just time.
Most people don't want that though most of the time. In 99.9% of applications fully caramelized onions simply aren't nearly as pleasant as onions that have been cooked until soft and very slightly caramelized.
Yeah, same here - I've used the cheapest pans it was possible to buy when I was a student, on the worst ceramic stove it was viable for my university accommodation to provide. For something like this where precise responsive heat control is unnecessary anything is OK.
(Making actual caramel, OTOH, that's far easier on gas or induction.)
Let me tell you a story. If you go off road just about anywhere in Mexico that's dry enough and interesting enough, and it's possible to go slow enough to have enough clearance, you will find cheap 2WD rear drive cars that are already there. I have seen some amazing accomplishments from these vehicles that almost no US driver would dream of taking off road. Still, I wouldn't trade my 23 yo lifted 4wd truck for them at all. Over time, I'm going to come out ahead, there's simple no dispute.
I don't doubt that you could caramelize onions on the shittiest stoves possible, probably you could do it, with enough patience and care, with a magnifying glass on a hot summer day. But the OP was emphasizing that it's really no big deal, you don't even have to pay attention. I at least have great equipment, but I've stayed in dozens of AirBnBs that didn't have great equipment, same with friends and family. Got to pay attention then.
The idea that there is no difference is completely ridiculous.
Now I can cook some range of dishes reasonably well, but when I was a student long ago I was very much a beginner - and it still worked out alright.
If you happen to already have a big 4WD truck which you need for other things then obviously it makes sense to use that anywhere it might give you an advantage. Sometimes that advantage turns out to be pretty marginal in practical terms but for you, because you're used to to handling the terrain with ease, switching to a crappy 2WD car would feel like a massive downgrade.
Another kitchen analogy, some people spend their whole lives chopping things with a blunt knife. When I offer to help out and realise this state of affairs my first reaction is "how the hell can anyone chop tomatoes with this?!" ... but of course they can, it's just slower and more annoying.
I disagree completely! There are preferences of course but for instance US Southwestern cuisine with the burnt flavors ("charred") appeal to a wide swath of people and the French AFAICT from a lot of visits can't stand it.
If you read Julia Child she is emphatic that onions should almost never be browned.
Guess what? I brown onions in my French recipes (rustic, eh?), and I char my peppers. I would submit that la comida de la gente is likely more plebian than fucking elitist French cuisine, no?
Really? Our induction stove very clearly has two concentric circles of different radii that get hot, and nothing else. If you use cast iron and vary the power slowly you won't notice, but it's very obvious with thinner pots and when you control heat quickly (which is a delight to be able to do in the first place -- yay induction.)
It's induction, not electric. This happens with all my cast iron pans. Easiest way to see it is to boil a thin layer of water mixed with a little hand dishwashing liquid in it. There are clearly two rings where cavities are formed more easily, thus there are two circles of peaking foam.
Oh neat. I have a thermador star burner gas range that makes a wonderful five point star shape oil pattern on a cast iron using a similar technique. I can produce this effect by applying a very thin sheen of high smoke oil point at high heat.
No idea if that’s better for cooking than concentric rings, but it looks really cool.
Are you sure that's an induction element? Induction elements don't get hot, only the pan does. Easy way to tell is - does the element switch only turn on when a pan is on top of it?
One minor clarification because it is important: the elements do get hot, but that isn't the mechanism which they use to transfer heat. The element gets hot because it is touching a super hot pan which will transfer some of its heat.
If you want to know how I found this out: I wasn't using my brain and touched the element after spilling something on it. I received a fairly bad burn as a result. I am saying this because saying "the element doesn't get hot" can put the wrong idea in someone's head.
Yup! I recently made some, and it had been a while since I had made them, and I had forgotten just how long it takes.
Also - if you like oninos, make sure to try 'creamed onions' (carmelized oninos in a creme sauce.
Also, if you like french onion soup - use a french onion soup mix packet as a rub on chicken and pork.
Finally, if youre anything like me - I typically never have to wear deoderant, unless I eat RED/PURPLE onions. If I eat these Ill have BO the following day.
Its also a good indicator when I eat something, if I have BO the next day its a signal that what I ate the previous day was made with red onions, even if it doesnt look like it. (Tikka masala is an example) -- I think its the sulfites in the red onions that cause this.
Well, I followed this method and the onions took 3 hours to get to deep brown. This leads me to “Hofstader’s Law of Caramelized Onions:” Onions always take 3 times as long to caramelize as you think they’re going to take, even when you take Hostader’s Law into account.
After looking at the recipes in question, I suspect that some of these writers are merely using the term Caramelized in a loose, informal (or, if you prefer, "technically-incorrect") sense.
When what they more-precisely meant is lightly softened, translucent - a state of onionhood used in no shortage of recipes as an intermediary step during the cooking process.
The writers are therefore perhaps guilty of casual syntax misuse, as opposed to deliberate or wilful mistruth.
I find softened onions preferably for a number of uses. Caramelized onions can be too sweet, and soggy/limp. I've even found that leaving a trace of crunch is better in many cases (eg beef bolognese).
But don't listen to me, I've never really figured out the difference between cooked yellow, white, and sweet onions, and just buy whatever is available and has the least mold and soft spots. Even red onions, once cooked, are pretty much the same to me.
I've very often made it with red onions (or half and half red vs white/yellow). It's delicious and always been a success.
I've used a version of this recipe [0] which explicitly says "red or yellow onions". It's also honest on the cooking time. I'd agree with its main warning, that making your own nice stock from bones really improves the flavour. Doesn't have to be beef stock. But I've also used stock cubes in the past.
Not even close - sweet onions (like Texas 1015s, Vidalias, or Mauis) may be whitish, but they have noticeably more sugar embedded into the structure/tissues of the onion itself. Sweet onions are not white (or yellow) onions, or vice versa. FWIW, Vidalias are a bit less crisp than the others, which helps if you're really after carmelizing, but I find 1015s are the "sweet spot", so to speak, of softenability and enough fiber to hold up so they don't turn to mush.
Red onions are a different flavor profile altogether, and best for some (not all!) Mediterranean or Mexican dishes, or smoked salmon (NOT lox - yuck!) on a bagel with cream cheese and capers.
they taste differently from each other. some are sweeter and some are less sweet, due to having less sugar. Some are sharper or more bitter than others.
This is so clearly true I wonder if the author intentionally “misunderstood” the situation so they could rant. Bonus points for commenters years later making the same “mistake”.
No, they don’t really mean caramelization. No, no one else cares.
It's not clear to everyone. Until I read that comment, I had exactly zero idea of that. When a recipe says "carmelized", I foolishly thought it meant "carmelized".
This is exactly it. We don't have a short snappy term for onion where you have fried it just enough to burn off the harsh chemicals, so recipe writers went for "caramelize" instead of a clunky construction like "lightly softened, translucent".
There is a term for cooking onions like that: it is "sautee". That specifies the method cooking bbut the "lightly softened, translucent" level is what everybody assumes.
The solution to confusion might be contact everyone using "caramelize" to verify they mean that or sauteing.
I'm just sad that they spoil perfectly good fresh, juicy, crunchy onions.
They call it 'caramelized' but don't even put any caramel in. Which is probably good because actual caramelized onions would be gross too. But why not just be honest and call them burnt onions? Or "onions with all the flavor and texture removed"?
Personally, I find those recipes quick enough because I simply opt not to ruin the onions. They don't need any cooking. Just chop 'em and drop 'em on the finished product for a zesty flavorful crunch that you'd be missing out on if you actually followed the recipe directions.
This is different. If you learn enough about Linux, you can install Arch in 15-20minutes no problem. Especially since learning about Linux means reinstalling your OS many times until you finally learn how to keep it clean and rescue it from any situation.
You are not going to be able to cook chicken in 3-4minutes per side like so many recipes claim. It's just not possible to have a good outside temperature and a good inside temperature no matter how you cook it if you only have that amount of time. They're lying to make it seem easier and to get more clicks on their recipes.
You simply aren't going to speed up the chemical reactions that happen during cooking. Even if you do find a way, your result will often be different or the result of using ready-made ingredients at the store. (I can buy frozen caramelized onions, for example).
it also depends on the cut and what you cook too. If you only stir-fry chickens that has been diced small with high heat, (I think?) you can achieve it 3-4 minutes, however that requires extreme precision and I think also require good utensils with precise heating. Cooking it longer, ex 7-8 minutes with lower heat usually bring better result and far easier.
Deep-fry or boiling? I'm unsure. Steaming one? Surely you can't
> You are not going to be able to cook chicken in 3-4minutes per side like so many recipes claim. It's just not possible to have a good outside temperature and a good inside temperature no matter how you cook it if you only have that amount of time. They're lying to make it seem easier and to get more clicks on their recipes.
Some of this is probably a difference between home and commercial kitchen equipment.
I know my stove doesn't have the same kind of heat output that a commercial stove would, let alone specialty equipment like pizza ovens or wok burners. And lots of home range hoods are awful for ventilation, which makes it even more impractical to cook at a high heat.
It's not just about the heat output, although that does make a difference (cooking edit: thin* steak on a weak electric stove is hell). There is no amount of heat that will penetrate the inner part of the chicken while not burning the outside cooking only 3-4 minutes per side (unless you reduce the thickness of the chicken via butterflying, as another commenter pointed out, but you don't want to always to do that).
I'm mostly thinking outside the scope of just this one example. Even good recipes have a lot of variability in cooking time. The differences between how hot people cook at home and how hot they cook in commercial spaces is one of the ones that's hardest to control for (unless you want to remodel your kitchen...)
OK, I'll admit butterflied chicken can be cooked that quickly. But basically all other forms of chicken take longer. For curry for example, even though I cut it into small pieces and it could be cooked only 8 minutes since you're going to cook it in the paste later, it's just not going to brown properly and the flavour is not going to be as good. Normal breasts or thighs take longer as well.
It's been a while since I made a meat-based curry (vegetarian now), but from when I was cooking with meat regularly there were a few things that helped hugely with that - hot pan (common theme, heh), and cooking in batches/not overcrowding the pan. You _definitely_ can't brown chicken for 6 portions of curry in one pan in 6-8 minutes, but you _can_ brown it in 2 (maybe 3) batches in 6 minutes per-batch.
Honestly though, by the time you're accurately gauging browning vs cooking meat, and eyeballing batch size vs pan size, you've moved well past the point of relying on cooking times from recipes.
Preheating the pan is part of the cooking time, IMO. In your recipe I would heat my pan for a good 3-4 mins to be sure the temp stays high after the chicken goes in.
I don't agree, in the same way that preheating an oven isn't considered part of the cooking time, or vegetable prep isn't considered part of the cooking time.
Fair enough. We have our opinions. For me the cooking time starts when I enter the kitchen and finishes when I serve the meal. It's the time I spent cooking the meal.
Your thinking is what enabled a generation of '20 minute meal' recipe books that actually take closer to 40 mins.
It's impossible to give an accurate estimate unless you're starting from the same place (and even then it's hard to give an accurate estimate when you're starting from the same place - how long does it take a pot of water to boil?)
My parents are an absoulte disaster for organising their kitchen, they have a fridge that is absolutely _rammed_ full with no order whatsoever, and a single pantry cupboard that contains cereals, vinegars, and everything else in one. On the contrary, my kitchen is organised very loosely by meal, while still structured and categorised. I can dice/slice veg for a full meal in the length of time it takes my partner to get the ingredients out of the fridge.
> Your thinking is what enabled a generation of '20 minute meal' recipe books that actually take closer to 40 mins.
Nah, that's just people lying about cooking times, like "caramelize the onions" in 3 minutes, and not measuring how long it actually took them to do the recipe.
I don’t think any chef (or recipe author) would agree with you. If only because they have preheating pans all the time.
Also the actual pan matters, if you have a thick-bottomed cast iron pan that’s been fully preheated it might not even notice that you dropped produce on, whereas a thin teflon-coated aluminium pan will drop through the floor.
An other huge factor is overcrowding, especially pans.
Just FYI you can easily cook a room temp chicken breast or thigh (or lots of them) 4 minutes a side directly below a broiler on a broiler pan, letting them rest covered for 5 afterwards.
Add a minute for the genetic freak 2+ inch thick ones.
You will need to pat the moisture off them first and brush with oil.
You may have changed the color of the meat and killed off the bacteria to make it safe to eat, but you didn't make good chicken. It takes time and lower heat to cook through, create good flavor, and get good texture. Sure you can put any food in an incinerator for 2 minutes and it's "cooked", but not really.
> It takes time and lower heat to cook through, create good flavor, and get good texture.
This is true of dark meat like chicken thighs, but chicken breast is the exact opposite. Cooking at slowly at low (but still conventional stove or oven temperatures) will give you either juicy chicken with little to no browning or dried out chicken with sufficient browning. A chicken breast is like a single-serving steak - it requires fast cooking (although not as fast as a thin steak) to achieve proper browning without overcooking the interior.
The exception is non-conventional very slow methods like sous vide where the the meat is cooked for over an hour in a medium that is more or less the target temperature of the interior of the meat. Although this provides no browning so you'll still want to sear it very quickly over high heat.
By butchering the breast so that it's very thin and cooking it 90% on one side you can get delicious browning and juicy meat genuinely in under 5 minutes. It's a pretty great hack.
How do your want to define cooked then? cooked != tasty
it just means it's no longer pink and will kill you with salmonella inside. Doesn't mean it's not dry or bland or any other implications
Well, if we're getting into semantics we could maybe say cooked vs prepared, I'm not sure. There's obvious physical differences between burnt onions and caramelized onions. Similarly, there's obvious physical differences between scorched, dry, but safe to eat chicken, and chicken that has been prepared properly and is tender and juicy. In the context of this thread, we've been talking about cooking things as part of recipes, so the end result and quality is obviously important.
> They're lying to make it seem easier and to get more clicks on their recipes.
Doesn't make sense to me. I certainly don't choose a recipe based on the estimated time-to-complete.
In fact I generally click through a bunch of recipes, and pick and choose the ideas that sound as if they'll work. Felicity Cloake does this, in her "How to cook the perfect..." series. She consults a bunch of top cookbooks, tries several mash-ups, and feeds the results to a tasting panel. At least, that's what she says she does; I'm inclined to believe her.
Does make sense to me. I don’t want to combine recipes rely on my creative cooking skills, because I don’t have those skills.
If I want to make a certain dish I look for recipes, pick one and follow that. If a recipe takes 2 hours to prepare and I don’t want to spend 2 hours in the kitchen, I pick something that doesn’t take as much time.
I would be surprised if that isn’t the way most people use recipes.
But I usually pick a recipe from a cook book I own. Searching for recipes online is a shitty experience.
Not familiar with Felicity Cloake, but as a non-professional home-cooking enthusiast, mash-ups are my go-to when I'm trying new recipes that I'm pulling from online. Results are usually pretty good! Did a Greek pasta salad a couple nights ago that turned out really nicely.
Have been thinking about signing up for, or self-hosting some kind of recipe app to make managing it easier... as-is, I have a "recipes" bookmark folder, where each recipe gets a sub-folder with a bookmark for each referenced recipe. However, this approach suffers from linkrot, recipes are often poorly formatted, and it doesn't have anywhere for my notes to go.
True, in this extreme version that goes clearly against the laws of physics.
But without going there, I can clearly hear my mother answering me that once again "it's very simple honey, 20 minutes top", when asked how she did the lunch.
She consistently does this, yet when I copy everything she does, I'm lucky to get 40 minutes.
> Especially since learning about Linux means reinstalling your OS many times until you finally learn how to keep it clean and rescue it from any situation.
Surely, you are dramatizing a bit here. Or are you assuming that everyone shares the same need to fiddle with everything?
Are you trying to actually learn Linux or just how to use Linux to get other work done. Learning how to use Linux to get work done doesn't require a 'need to fiddle' as you put it, but you're not going to really learn actual Linux (as in how the kernel and core operating system works and hangs together) without getting your hands dirty and breaking a lot of things along the way.
Yes, but do you actually need to know that? I know that, I've been using Linux since the whole thing fitted on four 1.44MB floppies. I don't *care* though, and if my machine is fatally screwed up I just bust out the latest Ubuntu LTS, flatten, and reinstall.
I haven't got time to muck about with rescuing a broken system. I've got stuff to do.
Do you actually need to know JavaScript? Or C? Or Japanese?
As I said, if Linux is just the OS you use to do something else, then no. If your job/hobby is to actually develop Linux or tools that tie very tightly to Linux and how Linux operates, then yes.
No, just personal experience. I started learning Linux as a young teenager and have broken dozens of installations (breaking system python, deleting /usr/ via rsync, doing an incomplete system update, writing a love letter to my boot sector, etc. etc.)
Eventually I have failed in so many ways that there are not a lot of ways I can fail now that I don't know how to rescue myself from. Also I've learned what not do to keep things saveable.
> Or are you assuming that everyone shares the same need to fiddle with everything?
Why else would you use Linux? This fiddling is literally necessary to learn it. Otherwise you have to ask somebody else for help, who has done the fiddling.
Because you just want to get work done, or play your game or browse the web etc?
Yes, learning Linux is fun (for the kind of people who find this fun). But we don't expect people who just want to get on with their lives to eg break Windows or MacOS a lot, either.
I'm pretty close to this at work since about 1/3rd of my job is helping the non-Linux people deal with Linux. Programming is their 2nd language so to speak, and the use of Linux is incidental, it's just what's easiest to give them to keep everything in our company compatible.
They require a person who knows Linux in order to keep working. It's not optional -- they just wouldn't be able to get everything running otherwise without it breaking every couple of days. The fixes they find without us usually end up masking the problem and causing a truly unfixable problem later.
This is one of the biggest flaws of Linux IMO -- you have to dedicate yourself to learning it to be able to use it as a daily driver effectively.
So: if you don't have to, and you don't know how, you shouldn't use Linux at all. There's no point, just use macOS. The macOS people eventually fix their problem on their own anyway since it's so standardized.
I once logged into a ONE HOUR OLD ubuntu install for it to randomly decide that my system font should be 6pt, but not everywhere, and there was no way to change it through any settings panel. Not knowing in what magical text file that setting, if it even had one, was hidden, my only choice was to reinstall.
I guess Arch Linux is a lot saner, they just have one place to change things: the configuration files; and that one place is well documented and there's no magic going on. No weird settings panels that try to be smart.
That's interesting. Did either Ubuntu or Arch Linux patch GNOME to read configuration at different places? Doesn't Ubuntu also have configuration files that actually store the configuration (while the settings panel would be just the UI to the config files)?
At any rate, how are you sure that this bug only affects Ubuntu but not Arch?
I don't use GNOME, so I can't comment. I just use XMonad as a light weight window manager, and don't bother with any 'desktop environment'.
I don't know how Ubuntu nor GNOME store their configuration. I suspect they have lots of plain text config files, but they might also have other formats like databases etc? I think the more important part is that they try to 'magically' do much of the config for you, and sometimes that magic breaks.
I found 'etckeeper' quite useful, it sticks your /etc in a git repository and makes commits when something changes. So you can at least review what just changed that must have broken your config. (I use etckeeper on Arch, but it seems to be also available on Ubuntu.)
> Especially since learning about Linux means reinstalling your OS many times until you finally learn how to keep it clean and rescue it from any situation.
People bother to do that?
Just wipe, reinstall, and run your postinst scripts to restore everything you need.
Python packaging is a special kind of dependency hell, you get the feeling that forward compatibility is an unknown idea and everything depends on the precise version of anything else. Last time I checked, some of the most popular packages hadn’t even been ported yet to a stable Python release that was six months old at the time, forcing me to downgrade. It’s essentially the most unpythonic aspect of working in Python: a zillion incompatible ways to do things, and nothing works out of the box.
They might differ on what's a problem, too. I've installed arch a few times, and there were some things I had to do, but I wouldn't say I had problems. It was generally a pretty enjoyable experience.
The best way to carmelize onions is in a slow cooker. I used a cheapie one for years that I bought at a goodwill for $5.
Chop up enough onions to fill the vessel 1/2 to 2/3, leave it running overnight (8-10h), wake up next morning to perfectly carmelized onions.
Now drain the juice, portion them out and store them in the freezer (store the juice too for onion soup). Now any time you need carmelized onions, take a portion out of the freezer and thaw. Depending on the recipe you can use them as-is (soggy) or crisp them up in a pan.
Can you share the make and model of your slow cooker? It might generate some interesting discussions. If anyone else uses this "one trick" (joke), please post your make and model here.
I've used this in the past with my instant pot, though it's been a while and I don't recall the exact recipe. I've actually taken to par-cooking my onions sous vide, draining them, and then caramelizing them on high heat on the stove.
I have used 4 different makes and models, from a really old one on my grandma’s kitchen that only had a on/off switch, to my newest one, a programable hamilton beach. I would say everyone worked the same, at least for beans, rice and some stews.
I only did caramelized onions twice with the same one, but based on my experience, any brand/model should work. And I agree, crockpot is the best way to cook caramelized onions.
I bought it over a decade ago, and have since left it behind when I moved to Europe. It was a Hamilton Beach brand but don't ask me what model. It had a shutoff timer, which was nice because I could set it to cook a roast while I was at work, and not have to worry about what time I got home (it would stay on "keep warm" after cooking).
For the home cook, its usually a better strategy to spend money up front on quality, but ignore specialized tools, than try to cheap out. Alton Brown's advice about unitaskers is terrible, except for the first time you start cooking at home and don't know what you need.
Someone could spend days looking for the specific slow cooker you found and maybe your onions from it are good. The idea of saving 50 dollars by buying an unglazed piece of quarry from Lowe's for 5 bucks instead of a proper pizza stone is a popular myth. Anyone who has actually tried it, has probably wasted hours on the internet looking for it and when the idea came out was most likely wasting tons of gas going to multiple Lowe's.
Maybe you got lucky and your 5 dollar slow cooker really makes good caramelized onions. But my experience trying recipes over the years, there are a few good sources of free recipes from a few places on the internet, and nearly everyone, without a team of testers backing them, is at best mediocre and usually sucks. Published recipes in a proper cookbook tend to be of higher quality, but its not always a guarantee. You get lucky every once in a while and find a hidden gem, but its almost never worth the effort to try non-established recipes as a beginner cook that can't read a recipe and immediately find red flags.
I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better. I don't think you're lying for clicks like many recipe blogs out there, but you might just not realize what you could be eating.
Folks, just ignore this rude fellow. A slow cooker is essentially a low temperature heating element and a ceramic cooking vessel. The ceramic dissipates the low heat evenly even on the cheaper ones, and you get a result within tolerance so long as the regulator isn't crap. Just don't scratch up the glaze.
Your optimal slow cooker will have decent insulation (saves on energy) and if you crave luxury, a timer so that you can set it to automatically turn off or switch to "keep warm" after x hours.
You're also in luck because most people never use their slow cookers and eventually donate them to the local thrift shop, so you can pick them up super cheap to try out and decide if a slow cooker is for you. Once you've gotten a taste for slow cooked foods, you can start looking around for what tools will best serve your future culinary ambitions.
And no, you don't need a Le Creuset; that's just for snobs who like to tell everyone that they have Le Creuset. It won't make better carmelized onions.
Name the brand and model of your amazing 5 dollar slow cooker and give us some recipes to use in it.
Or people could just read dozens of reviews of a hundred year cooking vessel where they always complain about the price but reluctantly admit its better. Spending lots of money on cooking supplies as a novice is fraught with landmines of people wasting money, but out right dismissals of spending any money is also usually a red flag of someone just discovering cooking. A college sophomore in their first apartment probably doesn't need a $300 dollar knife, but an adult with a job that spends the money on something nice will get years if not decades on a much safer and more efficient knife they will get used to with occasional whetstone sharpening.
That's not consistent with my experience. Some knives will never take a good edge. But not all knives actually need a good edge. There are evidently different kinds of "stainless steel"; some kinds are immune to sharpening, some are quite good. But if I want a really sharp kitchen knife, it has to be carbon steel.
Carbon steel knives rust/pit easily - you have to clean them and dry them, you can't just leave them to dry in the sun.
Never a need for the home cook. Professional chefs pay for quality much like we do in tech. Ergonomics, edge retention, sharpness, and dozens of other factors can influence that $300 knife and whether its useful for a professional who chops food 8-10hrs a day, 5 days a week.
For the home cook, who chops maybe for 1/10th that weekly, not much reason beyond placebo.
Mind you, going mid-range with something like a Victorinox can be a good bet for home cooking. $50-ish chef's knife that holds its edge well enough that a honing steel will keep it sharp for a couple of months of once-or-twice-a-day use.
Nothing more annoying than squishing your tomatoes as you try to cut (except having to take time out to sharpen your knives all the time).
Money does not necessarily buy you quality, or if it does, a worthwhile amount of it. I have some nice knives that cost a decent amount, but guess what, my day to day knives are from a $15 ikea knife set that I bought half a decade ago. Are these knives going to last me decades? No, but with relatively minimal upkeep over the years, they're just as sharp as my nice knives. I will probably eventually throw them out when their handles start breaking, but at that point I will have gotten way more than my $15 of value out of them.
You named no brands for comparison and ignored a specific call out for comparison. Wanting something to be true doesn't make it true and as a novice cook this was the most obvious time I learned it.
Have you ever used a slow cooker? You seemed obsessed with naming brands and call it a specialized tools makes me think you have never used them.
It’s just the simplest tool which actually shines best to be used for everyday general cooking. You know when you don’t have the time to do fancy cooking and just need a tasty home made meal with minimal effort.
Yeah, you could probably get better caramelized onions if you know how to cook them, if you have time to prepare them, and if you give them your full attention, but I would bet for the regular person cooking for himself, they are likely to get better results with 1/10 of effort just doing what OP mentioned, with ANY slow cooker.
Theres a specific call out, with an admission of possibly being wrong when presented with evidence. Nobody has presented an amazing recipe or a specifically good device that makes good food.
I own a slow cooker, and it was given to me for free from a friend that had to quickly get rid of all of her personal belongings before being deported. The recipes in it are fine, often times actually very good, but theres also nothing about it that can't just be made better in a dutch oven with an extra hour or so on the stove. But the biggest proponents are the exact people I would not want cooking advice from.
Brands of what? Comparison of what? What specifically would you hope to be able to compare between either slow cookers or knives that would have any serious effect on how good the food you can use them to make is?
The most popular pots and pans for cooking do actually have a brand associated with them, even if its as big as Teflon. Not being able to name any, with a good or bad opinion, is comparable to not having a good or bad opinion about a novel. An old medium where its possible they have a valid new opinion, but usually a good indicator of the level of their opinion.
I think most cookware purchases are just what happened to be in the store at the time. Brands aren't considered much. Even for things like large appliances and cars this applies for a lot of people - and they're not necessarily wrong either.
My point was
>Maybe you got lucky and your 5 dollar slow cooker really makes good caramelized onions. But my experience trying recipes over the years, there are a few good sources of free recipes from a few places on the internet, and nearly everyone, without a team of testers backing them, is at best mediocre and usually sucks.
The 15 minute caramelized onions, the cheap slow cooker onions, and other such things are nearly always lies, despite how much I wish them to be true.
I have used a number of different slow cooker brands over the years. Most were Crock-pot brand, but I've used others. I've never been able to tell the difference.
Sure there are tools where brand matters, but in the case of a slow cooker I'm putting the burden back on you: find me any brand that is actually inferior or better than the others. I don't think you can.
Non-slow-cooker things like a pressure cooker (ie instant-pot) with a slow cooker function are inferior to a real slower cooker, but they don't claim to be a slow cooker either.
> I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better.
I can guarantee you that I can make caramelized onions that are better than pretty much anything you have ever had in your life, but it won't be because I have fancier tools. It will be because I'm using delicious homegrown onions that you can eat raw like apples, that you would be hard pressed to replicate.
What's my point with that anecdote? Don't really have one, much like yours.
> I guess this is just a long winded way of saying that maybe your cheaply made onions are good, but after being a home cook for so long I think it is more likely the caramelized onions in my Le Creuset are going to be better. I don't think you're lying for clicks like many recipe blogs out there, but you might just not realize what you could be eating.
From what you've said, I think you don't know the subject matter[1] well enough to talk authoritatively about it.
Recipe writers in my experience lie about the duration it takes to accomplish anything. I have yet to follow a recipe and finish it in the prescribed amount of time. It’s very frustrating because it can ruin planning entirely. For example, in Stella Parks’ Bravetart, she says her cherry pie can be made in “45 minutes active time, 45 minute roast, 2 hour rest”. The instructions mention a two-hour refrigeration period, another 30 minute refrigeration period, a 75 minute bake, and a 4 hour rest. A 3.5 hour recipe, in no less than 8.5 hours, assuming the active time is correct.
For this exact reason I lost much of my interest in cooking. I know I am not a professional chef and I can't do things as efficiently as possible, but I almost always spend more than twice the amount of time finishing those recipes. Right, excluding the time for preparation or cleaning, just the cooking part. So a "20 minute quick meal" becomes one hour, and by the time I finish cooking I am already very hungry.
Another bad thing is that sometimes pictures that come with a recipe don't even use the same ingredients. You wonder why your dish appears different until you take a close look at the picture and realize that that's not even the same dish using the same ingredients or steps. That's just a scam.
No, that is not the prep step. The prep step starts with all of these done and is mixing all of these together in a zip lock bag and putting it in the fridge. So 5 minutes seems even a bit high.
The time for recipes is always "with all ingredients washed, peeled, chopped and set ready to go in a bowl. Start!". Also note that step 2 is to put the onions into the pan (but no step says to cut onions) and that the ingredient list says "garlic, peeled, finely grated" and not "garlic" and "onions, sliced thinly".
You might not like that convention of "time" or would like "actual time" in addition, but it is a pretty universal convention. And it makes sense: the prep time can vary wildly (e.g. peeling and chopping veggies) making the "actual time" quite useless and in professional kitchens other people do this prep work.
So hard disagree from me. The time seems pretty spot on.
The "prep time" is _not_ the time for the "prep step"? Internet seems to agree with you, it's wild. Why is it not called "assembly time" or something?
Plus, it's not like that recipes on the internet (or books) are usually targeted at professional kitchens. Or like professional kitchens will take times at face value (and won't test it).
It is a bit weird but not moreso than, say, the word "butterfly". People agreed on one convention and one phrasing and stuck with it and it would be confusing to have wildly different time^pro and time^home scales. Just like pasta tells you the time starting with boiling water, so "5 minute pasta" does not mean "5 minutes from entering the kitchen".
> And it makes sense: the prep time can vary wildly (e.g. peeling and chopping veggies) making the "actual time" quite useless and in professional kitchens other people do this prep work.
This is a recipe for home cooks not professional kitchens. Both cook time and prep time are always going to be estimates. Labeling a step as "prep" and excluding all of the actual prep tasks isn't useful for someone trying to plan their day. This 5 min step ads nothing of value to the recipe as far as I can see.
This is a great post. Thank you to indulge us. I also like the domain name: SERIOUS Eats!
Real question: I wonder if these recipe websites have done A/B testing on total amount of time in the recipe. In 2023, I could believe it. If recipes with shorter durations are shown, you get more hits. Same with the ridiculous suggestion that all recipes need 1 tablespoon of oil (or less!). People will also return more frequently to your ad-tech empire that provides lousy recipes.
To me, free recipes are no better than free media (online newspapers, YouTube TV, etc.). If you aren't paying, then you are the product.
I use online free recipes to get an idea of the ingredients and proportions. Sometimes, an YouTube video can give you ideas about technique if you are new to an style of cooking. I need to cook something a few times to find the right balance.
My latest recipe is trying to replicate the black vinegar semi-sweet thickened sauce used in Chinese fried eggplant recipes. The premade stuff has a huge list of ingredients -- too many "extracts". I'm am trying to reduce to the fewest number possible, but still tastes close to restaurant style. Each time I make it, I look at my cooking notes, then make small adjustments.
I dunno about 10 minutes, but in my very limited experience it's easier to crank the heat up when you have several pounds of onions. Otherwise, if you're just carmelizing one onion, stirring doesn't really allow you to temporarily remove the onion from the heat, whereas if you have a large amount of onions you're basically turning over the whole lot.
I've only made French onion soup once or twice, but I make Italian sausage, peppers, and onions regularly. I'm not shy about cranking the heat up, but with just 1 onion and 2 bell peppers some of the onions invariably end up a little burnt even before they've begun to carmelize; but in that dish that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I use the microwave to make a dark Cajun gumbo roux. I'm curious if the microwave would work well for carmelizing a small amount of onion. Though, using the microwave for a roux isn't much faster than using a pan; it's just more difficult to fsck-up.
If you crank up the heat you're not caramelizing, you're browning (burning). Caramelizing is a chemical process which requires lower heat and longer time.
I think you can make it happen with a small amount of onions, but you have to watch it like a hawk, stir constantly, and add a small amount of water whenever it starts to go too far.
Recipe writers routinely lie about how long a recipe takes, too. Most reporting a time requirement much under 30 minutes get there by ignoring how long it takes to process & prep the various ingredients. "15-minute meals" often take 10-15 minutes of prep before you can start them.
Yes. My favorite is quickie salad recipes. Their times are correct, as long as you happen to have a refrigerator stuffed with containers of chopped vegetables for some reason.
I've seen youtube videos where they "make" such salads. It's really not far off from "cooking time: 10 minutes. 3 to pick from the menu, 2 to call for delivery, 5 for it to reach you."
That is exactly what "time" means for recipes and why ingredients list say things like "onions, finely chopped" and not just "onions".
Restaurants do have containers with chopped vegetables sitting around for this reason. You might not like this convention, but it is pretty universal.
So your complaint sounds like "3 minute angel hair pasta?!?! My water won't even have started boiling by then." Totally understandable misconception for someone who just started cooking, but you should learn pretty quickly what 3 minutes actually means.
Sure, but having wildly different conventions would be even more confusing.
In any case, I am very disappointed with HN for this thread. While I also think "actual time" would have been a more useful standard, words mean what they mean and the comment quality is ...
- "Hey, surely everyone is lying, instead of me misunderstanding a common convention."
- "That universal convention used since forever is dumb. Me complaining to you surely is going to retroactively change this in every publication ever."
- "How dare you tell me that I misunderstood something. I am sure you are personally responsible for that convention."
- "Of course a butterfly is made out of butter, it is right there in the name you moron!"
Electric kettles are certainly fast, but this feels like an exaggeration. Technology Connections[1] made a good video on this recently and even boiling roughly 1 quart of water (which is significantly less than you'd typically use for something like cooking pasta) required almost 5 minutes to come to boil in an electric kettle.
The entire recipe-industrial-complex is optimised primarily for convenience. Even a majority of the supposedly reputable cookbook authors are obsessed with “quick and easy” recipes. If you actually want to learn cooking a cuisine, most of the content you find via google or top selling cookbooks is going to be useless and filled with shortcuts and overly simplified ingredients lists. If you’re looking at a recipe that’s quick, easy, or simple, that’s a huge red flag that the recipe is BS. Another one is if it’s a foreign dish and you can somehow find all of the ingredients in your local supermarket.
> Another one is if it’s a foreign dish and you can somehow find all of the ingredients in your local supermarket.
Fun one I noticed: if you search for Hungarian (as in, written in Hungarian) recipes for paprikash, you'll get one dish[1]; if you search for it in English, practically every result would best be classified as some other dish—maybe also good, but not really the same thing.
The key difference seemed to be that the writers of the English recipes were terrified of the amount of sour cream you need to make the real thing. It's a lot. I mean, I'm not Hungarian, but judging from what ~every Hungarian recipe I found said, the correct amount is at least 4x the sour cream per serving of what the English-language recipes suggested. Depending on the recipes one paired up from each language, some were more like 20x.
[1] "What's 'paprikash' in Hungarian, though?" that's what the Wikipedia "other languages" links are for! Find your recipe or ingredient or whatever there, then hit the dish's native language in the language bar. It doesn't even need to be in a script you can read. Works for just about any dish popular enough to have an English-language Wikipedia entry. More reliable (for this specific thing) than Google Translate.
Using the original source language can certainly help. But even then most of the blog recipes you find are going to have the same problem with being very simplified.
A problem with Google Translate specifically is that it’s often not great at translating ingredients. For instance it will translate daun salam as bay leaf, but there’s something like 6 different types of bay leaf, and they’re not at all similar. If a recipe calls for daun salam it probably wants you to use Indonesian bay leaf, but if you didn’t already know that distinction you’d end up with something weird. Another example would be bawang putih, which translates literally to white onion, but means garlic. Google translate has learnt this meaning sometime recently, but it used to give the literal incorrect translation.
Hungarian here. Yes, it needs a lot of sour cream. Having said that now living in the UK I rather use crème fraîche, which I find closer to what you can buy in Hungary.
No. "Time" for recipes by convention starts with all of this done. This is always the case and allows for easy comparability of recipes.
You might not like this convention, but nobody is lying. It is somewhat surprising that you genuinely thought "writers routinely lie" and never thought to stop and think whether your understanding might be wrong.
The trick to caramelizing onions (without leaving them overnight in a slow cooker) is to add a bunch of water to the pan and steam them until they’re completely wilted, then boil off the water and add oil. This will cause most of the onion cells to burst, releasing their water, allowing that water to quickly evaporate so that the oil can do its job raising the temperature of all the onions to the point at which the sugars begin to caramelize.
I just add the some oil and a lot of salt (all the salt the dish will use) at the start and cook on high. Once they release their water lower to medium-low and let it cook.
My theory about cookbooks: They are not designed for cooking or even cooks.
Instead, the books are fantasy, to let the reader imagine that they could, will, might cook delicious meals and get praise, affection, love, and approval from their family, friends, and dinner guests. And for the onions, part of the fantasy is how easy the cooking will be -- brown the onions in at most 10 minutes.
It might be true of the more stylistic chefs out there for sure -- but I'll pull an America's Test Kitchen recipe rather than a random blog that shows up in google.
A good cookbook can be life changing, a bad cookbook can be near worthless (maybe this is true of any type of book). "12 Recipes" is a book a chef wrote for one of his kids to learn to cook and I loved it. Some soft cooking skills or other background information about what was actually important and what can be skipped really helped me learn to cook much better for myself.
I think the problem with some cookbooks is that cooking is a somewhat technical or scientific process. If the author is too technical, they can gloss over details that will trouble a home cook, like how tos for complex techniques that they are familiar with, how long things will take someone with less practice, how much prep / cleanup can add up at home compared with working at scale in a restaurant with dedicated prep cooks and dishwashers, etc. My partner was a professional chef for a catering company and the "recipes" they used internally had almost zero details besides ingredient ratios. I couldn't imagine trying to follow one without asking a ton of questions.
On the other hand, some people aren't technical enough and so they can't properly assess the details or break things down into a strong formula for someone else to replicate. They can be vague about measurements, timing, or technique, so even if you follow what's written your result is pretty far from whatever they had done in their own kitchen.
Then there are the "telephone" recipes that have been stolen back and forth from different blogs or articles without anyone making them and over time they've degraded into something just plain wrong.
I talk about cooking and food a lot with my Czech teacher (not just because I like to cook, but if I'm low-energy it's such an easy topic) and I brought this idea up - something along the lines of "What do you think about all the recipes that say 'fry onions until caramelised - about 5-10 minutes'?". Her reply floored me - "ha! yeah, 10 minutes? They'd be burned by then!". I spent the next few minutes trying to explain exactly what I meant, thinking that I'd said something wrong or been misunderstood. Nope, no misunderstanding. She swore blind that onions caramelise at 5 minutes and burn after 10. I suspect she's cooking them on a volcano or something.
Watch Tasting History with Max Miller (https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCsaGKqPZnGp_7N80hcHySGQ). Every old recipe used to leave out salt, not explain any technique, times, temps, types of ingredients, and barely had proportions. People who cooked recipes were usually professionals who just knew how to cook things. It was around the end of the 19th century that cookbooks for home cooks came out, and they too didn't explain much.
If you are really interested in cooking, either take a class, or buy a book that teaches you how to cook. La Technique and Mastering the Art of French Cooking are excellent instruction manuals. If you learn better from video, Jacques Pepín did a 3 hour video of cooking mostly everything in La Technique.
A lot of people in the comments saying that it comes down to an over generalization of the word "caramelize". I would argue that this is instead representative of the very low quality of the vast majority of most recipes which are produced by rank amateurs at best (not to say there are not some pretty impressive amateurs).
There are many higher quality sources of recipes out there today. Serious Eats being one site that rarely fails to get the details correct (though I managed to find a dough recipe that had 1% salt instead of 2% which seems like an error). ATK/Cooks Illustrated rarely has glaring errors on times or quantities. NYT is also pretty reliable. Also many current YouTube chefs are quite diligent. Joshua Weismann is a regular go-to for me.
The key to making a dark roux, as is used in Cajun cooking, is stirring, scraping, and homogeneity. You can crank the heat on high and stir for about 10-15 minutes, or you can keep it over medium and stir for an hour. If you stir like you're supposed to, you can get the same roux in less than half the time. A good wooden spoon (soft enough to scrape the bottom of the pot) that can get into the corners of a pot and a little elbow grease is all you need.
So why do they tell you that you need to stir for so long? Because if you screw it up, you've gotta start over.
I was curious how fast I could do a dark roux (notably, after burning my first one and needing to restart), and I actually managed one in under 8 minutes, and even took a photo to document such:
And yeah, the key really is stirring constantly, and riding the stove knob to keep the heat right.
My stupid thing that I do that sometimes burns it is stopping stirring when I turn off the heat when I'm done. Pan is still hot enough to burn it, if you don't get it out of there, or add vegetables quickly.
The funny thing is that the jarred stuff is just as good as the roux you make on your stove. It's also perfectly fine to make a giant batch of the stuff and freeze it, and there are numerous recipes for doing it in your oven or even your microwave with great results.
One of the main points of the article that I totally agree with is that recipe authors fudge times by massive amounts to make the total time for a recipe "acceptable". A favorite recipe from years ago in Cuisine magazine for a way-better-than-ordinary Spankopita called for washing and chopping the spinach. In 1982, fresh spinach was almost always very sandy, and needed multiple washings. The recipe allocated less than 5 minutes for the task that probably took me 20 minutes the first time. (Yay for the advent of pre-washed spinach!). Similarly for doing phyllo (aka filo) dough the first time. Very fussy, very time-consuming. A more truthful phraseology might be "after you get good at this, it can be done in as little as x minutes". We do get faster at repeated tasks ... The cynic in me sees at as part of a pattern where we're constantly lied to in advertising blurbs, headlines and summaries, but that's another rant ... :-)
I have great respect for Mark Bittman and regularly turn to How to Cook Everything for its solid recipes, but sometimes he gets it spectacularly wrong. Case in point was his spatchcocked turkey recipe. Quoting the NYT Cooking App:
In 2002, Mark Bittman published this revolutionary approach to roasting the Thanksgiving turkey, which allows you to cut the cooking time of the average turkey by about 75 percent while still presenting an attractive bird. Simply cut out the backbone — or ask your butcher to do it for you — and spread the bird out flat before roasting, a technique known as spatchcocking that is commonly used with chickens. Roasted at 450 degrees, a 10-pound bird will be done in about 45 minutes.
I tried the recipe last Thanksgiving, following the video exactly and extending the time based on many reader comments, and it still came out underdone. It ended up taking 2 hours; we had Thanksgiving dinner at 9pm. A very experienced home cook and scientist I know believes that temperature and timing are thrown off by writers like Bittman who use professional ovens which have far better temperature regulation than the crappy decades-old ovens used by most home cooks.
As for unfailingly good and simple recipes, I can't recommend Jacques Pepin short "Cooking at Home" videos on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_PgxS3FkP7ATPveBQ1ya...) highly enough. He often takes whatever he has lying around to make some variation of a famous dish - canned tomatoes instead of fresh, a half-empty jar of olives, once even a hot dog to substitute for a sausage in his Sausage Cassoulet (https://youtu.be/Uuli3So6Oo4).
The recipe writing team at the times has recently made a note of how each recipe is independently tested by other, non professional cooks with normal kitchen equipment. I'm skeptical that the recipe was never tried with a conventional oven.
A vast majority of recipes are just inaccurate when it comes to timing.
My favorite technique to caramelize onion is to do it in a convection oven. Just take a batch, add a tiny bit of oil (not olive) to coat it without dripping too much excess oil on the pan. It will just dry out otherwise)... Season it with some salt & pepper and stick it in the oven cold and turn the heat on... ~170C (if your oven runs cooler, you can turn this up to ~180C). Toss every ~20-25 minutes, and it should be nicely caramelized in about an hour and half, or a little longer - just pull it out when you're satisfied with the level of browning.
Bonus: add a touch of brown sugar (1/2-1 tsp / 2-3 medium-large onions) for an extra kick of sweetness about halfway through the cooking time (sometimes, this is cheating).
I like it because there's no open flame or hot stove to deal with, and it leaves me free to do other things.
I think the simple answer is that there is a disconnect between what caramelizing onions means for serious applications (i.e. french onion soup) and not-so-serious applications (your average philly cheesesteak or omelette). Just cook 'em down a bit on higher heat if your application is not so serious.
In hot oil, small pieces of onion will turn into a crunch brown crisp in well under 5 minutes, and larger pieces can have the outside surfaces crisped.
I suspect the authors are not lying, but simply calling the above effects caramelization; not aware that what it means is for the onion to be evenly brown all the way through.
Recipe writers are still lying about cooking time in 2023.
I signed up for a Hello Fresh promo recently to get some new meal ideas, and it's making me feel like the slowest cook on the planet. I reliably exceed their stated prep and cooking times by 100-200%. Tonight's "40 minute" recipe took about 70 minutes, and that was with a family member helping out with some of the prep and cooking.
I wonder if they collect any data on how long it takes actual customers to cook them. I might be slower than many, but I'd be surprised if the median customer could complete the recipe in anywhere close to the listed time.
Don’t disagree that some of the recipe times are very optimistic, but watching friends cook gives me hives at how inefficient they are, handful of things to think about about that will massively speed up your cooking time:
1)read the recipe and spend a couple of min visualizing the steps, what you’ll need and writing out the timing and grouping chores.
2) do some mise en place[a] (buy $50 of small duralex glass bowls for this, they’re great). E.g. do all your dry good measuring, then wet measuring, vegetable chopping in groups.
3. Set up efficiently (mise en place above), watching someone go to the cupboard 15 times and then the fridge 8 times for things in their recipe is a huge waste. Use a trash bowl so you’re not running to the sink or garbage all the time.
4. Learn knife skills (a lot of cooking schools offer a stand alone class). The right way and the wrong way to dice an onion or Julianne a pepper are like 80%+ reductions in time spent on a task…
5. Clean while you cook.
You’ll be shocked at the time savings if you combine these elements.
Biggest thing for me is your #5. When I watch others cook I see a lot of downtime. 30 seconds here waiting for oil in pan to get hot, 30 seconds there chatting with me while their water boils, it adds up to minutes and minutes that could have been spent washing dishes and cleaning surfaces. For me the perfect cook is when the last thing comes off the heat it's the only dirty dish, I can plate it, wash the dish in the sink, then leave the kitchen with the food and the kitchen cleaner than when I went in.
1. There is no "mis" for hello fresh recipes, literally everything is presented in a bag to you. There's often no measuring or any dependencies other than oil, salt, and pepper.
2. cleaning while you cook is not a time saver for producing the food, only a time saver when considering overall time in the kitchen.
In my experience with meal kits over the last two years, the biggest time savers are nothing like what you said.
1. Meal kits try hard to not use multiple pans, as not all kitchens have that. Parallelize cooking where possible.
2. Parallelize chopping with cooking by getting some help.
3. Pre heat your oven before actively starting cooking in the kitchen, ie don't stand idle.
Even still the recipe times are incredibly optimistic.
Each one of these things is worth adopting by itself, if adopting all of them at the same time is intimidating.
Item 5 can be interpreted in more than one way, though, so I think it's worth digging into. At a fundamental level, with virtually no tradeoffs, it's important not to be crowded by dirty dishes while you cook. If you're worried about your elbow bumping a water glass while you chop onions, or if you have to reach around a dirty mixing bowl to find the garlic, it's going to slow you down, both physically and mentally. Keeping your workspace tidy pays back every second many times over.
Taking "clean while you cook" even further, you can try to save time by scrubbing pans and bowls as you are finished with them. This is extremely appealing for busy people, but how feasible it is depends on what you're making, how much work and attention it requires, and how fast you are. It's a rare triumph for me if I can put three dishes on the table with no dirty dishes in the kitchen. I've done this, but much more often, I've messed up dishes when my attention got hijacked by scrubbing a pan that I could have left for later. If you feel rushed or stressed while cooking, you can give yourself breathing room by getting the dirty stuff out of the way in the easiest possible manner, even if that means stacking it to clean it later.
Then you get people like me that fail at step one because we cannot "visualize" the steps. I logically understand what those words mean but I have no practical experience with actually doing anything approaching it.
The point is, don't think you are the baseline for everyone else. Nobody should give two shits about efficiency with cooking unless your job is to cook efficiently.
“Nobody should give two shits about efficiency with cooking unless your job is to cook efficiently.”
That’s like saying you shouldn’t care how long it takes to drive somewhere unless it’s your job to drive there quickly.
Cooking at home is one of the easiest ways to save money AND improve your health (if done conscientiously), but many people don’t do it because they are daunted by it, and they think it’s a ton of time and work. It’s so easy to lower that barrier, why wouldn’t you?
The ease of doing something and the efficiency at which you do that thing are entirely unrelated in terms of accomplishing the thing.
Cooking eggs is easy. You can get more efficient by cracking eggs better for instance but is that going to save anything? Maybe a few seconds. Is that meaningful? No. Cooking tends more often to fall into that category than the other.
As you get better at cooking overall, you'll get more efficient. It's the same for nearly any other skill. So don't bother optimizing for efficiency unless it's your job - you'll get there eventually anyway.
Knife skills make such a difference. When my partner is helping me in the kitchen, I normally give him one vegetable to dice, and I dice everything else.
I can give him a bell pepper, and by the time he's finished with one bell pepper, I've diced two other bell peppers, the onions, the celery and the chicken.
Or if we're dicing and roasting potatoes, he'll dice one potato in the time it takes me to dice 3 or 4.
Most of the time he just cleans up after me or sets the table and we find that a better arrangement.
I found after starting to apply mise en place that when I wasn't doing it I was still quicker than before. I fetched more things from each cupboard or fridge when I opened them, even if I wasn't measuring out the item into a container beforehand.
Mise en place is trading a small amount of convenience now for a significantly higher load of dishes later. Notice how the pop culture chefs that push it hard always have staff that do their dishes.
Yeah definitely more dishes, but honestly I throw most of the little bowls into the dishwasher on the top rack, so the marginal time impact is just the 1 min extra unloading the dishwasher…
its very good for the first time you make something or if you arent used to the kitchen at a friends place, but efficient home cooking doesnt really resemble efficient restaurant cooking
I have the same experience with Marley Spoon. I always make sure I prepare everything in advance but the actual recipe wants you to do some of the cutting and dicing while stuff is already cooking and they often have impossible timing.
For example, they will have you fry the meat for 2-3 minutes, clean and chop a boatload of vegetables and add them after those 2-3 minutes pass. Sometimes they even do this during a step that requires constant attention, like browning minced meat.
I have no idea how they test these recipes. Maybe they are possible if you’re a professional chef in a fully equipped kitchen with plenty of space but they aren’t in my tiny kitchen where I have to spend half a minute digging the colander out from the back of the cupboard.
They also assume I have an infinite amount of cutting boards and knifes. For example, in step 1 they expect me to cut a chicken breast into bite size pieces, and then in step 2 or 3 I have to cut veggies for a salad. I can’t re-use the cutting board and knife I used for raw chicken for salad without giving it a thorough washing. So I cut everything in advance and do the chicken last.
> So I cut everything in advance and do the chicken last.
To be honest that's better anyway - unless you have some long cooking times with nothing to do but clean up & prepare the next thing, a bit of planning & preparation - mise en place - ends up saving time and giving better results IMO. (Better results because you're not accidentally cooking something longer than you wanted, say, because you were trying to finish chopping the onions to add, and the onions aren't uneven because you didn't rush.)
Cutting board covers, a rubber mat that lays on top of your cutting board, cut all your meats first, toss it in the sink, swap knives, cut all your veggies.
Saves 5 minutes or so of prep time, well worth it IMHO. Also you can just throw it in the dishwasher and not worry about scrubbing a wood cutting board and possibly damaging it with moisture.
Maybe a dumb question, but this sounds useful so I searched for "cutting board cover" and didn't get the expected 10 pages of results. Is this something you made for yourself? Does the knife cut it and little bits of cutting board cover end up in the food?
I despise plastic cutting boards, they slip around too much.
A plastic (or maybe it is some type of rubber, not sure) that goes on top of my wooden board works well, it stays in place and it also pops into the dish washer.
I feel that the time quoted to cook the recipes is always based on an experienced chef, which is likely often not the case for things like Hello Fresh.
An experienced chef will have be far more efficient at chopping/food preparation - I'm reasonable fast at chopping but still probably end up focusing over details an experienced chef would know aren't going to matter for the final recipe.
Also they're probably better at managing the parallel threads of execution most recipes need, hence they always talk about boiling water for pasta far more early then I ever end up needing it.
I'm not the person you asked but I also am a very fast home cook due to professional cooking background.
The job is the training in that kind of work. No one comes out of culinary school particularly fast and even most serious cooks don't go anyway. Cooks change restaurant often and every restaurant is a completely different set of foods and techniques.
Training may teach you how to do something but doing it for hours a day months straight is where you learn to do it fast. A skilled cook at the prep table is looking at it like an F1 pit crew basically. What physical motions am I about to perform, what can be set up in advance and where should it go to reduce extraneous movement, what are the intermediate steps that can be batched together etc. There's never enough time for all the work you need to get done in the kitchen, so every day is a challenge to optimize your efficiency more than the previous one.
Basically you can teach someone the right way to dice an onion but they won't be truly fast at it until they've diced a few thousand onions. Apply that to every task in the kitchen over a decade and you're pretty quick by the end of it.
Even just some deliberative practice for a home cook can make a big difference. I am absolutely, positively not in the professional league. I'd be drummed out of any professional kitchen in the first five minutes. But I'm also way faster, better, more able to recover and improvise than I was twenty years ago, because I deliberately tried to stretch my skills a bit. Not a lot. Just a bit every so often. Over 20+ years it adds up.
It's just like any other intricate physical skill that requires practice, like music or sports.
I've started seriously learning guitar / ukulele, and it's amazing what improvements you can get just spending a few minutes a day where you slow down, do drills (like practicing scales), and analyze what you're doing.
The first time I play a new, unfamiliar piece of music with any tricky bits it feels awful, and I hate it with every fiber of my being. I want to run away and give up on ever learning it. That's when I take a break and come back the next day - when it usually seems much more accessible after I've had time to process it.
The first time you practice cutting an onion the "right" way will feel really slow, annoying, and taxing to your brain. You'll want to do it the way you're used to, even if that's horrendously slow. Do this every day for a week or two and you'll be amazed that it just happens naturally without having to think about it.
Yes for sure. And professional cooks are focused on different things too, not all of their skills are normally applicable in home cooking. The two best cooks I know (both better than me in terms of consistently delicious food) are as you describe: older people who have just been paying attention and caring about it for a long time.
This is it. I've volunteered in a kitchen with professional chefs, even between them there was a big difference: the most experienced chefs were that much faster than even decent home cooks, at least 4x. It is amazing to watch.
I remember Rachel Ray's 30 minute meals usually featured her pulling some ingredients she'd already chopped up or soaked in something the night before out from the fridge. Apparently the time spend yesterday didn't count against the clock.
It's tough to parallelize a recipe the first time you're cooking it - unless you have a photographic memory you're gonna have to keep checking back between steps and it's easy to miss something. Ends in getting really stressed out when you have something on the stove and realize you need to chop veg in 30 seconds.
It's better the 2nd or 3rd time but I think with these meal plan services you're cooking something different every day, so it's hard to develop that familiarity. Ideally you'd follow their steps and take as long as you need the first time, and then go out and buy groceries and do it again, but that probably defeats the purpose of using such a service anyway
That's exactly how I'm using the service: get ideas for new meals during the promo, then cancel and make the ones I liked myself with ingredients from the store. So I do have some hope that I'll get faster. :)
Mirrors my experience. Prep work is the most underestimated part. I think they start with everything out on the counter and unpackaged and with necessary tooling lined up and ready. But those things take time. For me, something like mincing garlic cloves takes a solid 5-10 minutes alone and is one of the things that consistently stands out as they must have started with minced garlic to get to this time estimate.
I found that it really just comes down to how much experience you have. I started cooking a lot this year, mostly because it beats taking my girlfriend out to dinner every week. When I started I was very slow and dinners would take me in excess of an hour, mostly because I was just very unskilled in the basics of cooking.
As time has gone on I found that making dinners took me less and less time, part of it is knowing the right techniques for preparing certain foods, others are little ergonomic things like getting a knife magnet and ensuring all the tools you need are at your fingertips. It's also knowing how long food cooks for, what you have to keep an eye on and what you can just let cook. The first time I made smash burgers at home it took me in excess of an hour to prep and cook everything and yesterday I was able to do the same in about 20 minutes.
Nah that's a perfect example of how experience & technique can speed things up dramatically. Here watch ole JP do it in about 90 seconds even while slowing down to explain it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y5h1pDHhzs
That’s not what an average home cook can do regarding knife skills. These services and recipes should be written for their audiences which are likely typical home chefs that don’t handle knifes that well. I’ve been cooking 40 years and have certainly tried to use a knife that way and it always feels unsafe to me. Also, typically requires a very sharp set of knifes which I do keep but I don’t think the average house does.
It's not what an average professional cook can do either but it's still one useful reference on how long it takes to chop garlic. No one is going to follow a pasta recipe that says it takes three hours because they do shit like allocate 4 minutes per clove of garlic.
They should estimate based on a average user. Or at least give more context than a single X minutes. Three hours is a bit excessive as an example but the difference between 20 and 45 minutes is crucial and more representative of common underestimation. They could also suggest things like buying Preminced garlic to eliminate common timely tasks. Instead they tend to go the other way and would be more likely to recommend you go foraging for wild garlic
I have the exact same problem/frustration and yet my wife consistently cooks the entire meal near or at the estimated cook time. Clearly I'm not as efficient as I think I am!
The thing is Hello Fresh is for people who are not used to cooking. If you're used to cooking then you know enough recipes, you know what to buy and you don't need Hello Fresh.
Having cooking time from actual customers instead of veteran cooks would be helpful.
On the contrary, my wife grabs recipes from Instagram (usually the Whole 30 crowd, but not exclusively). We've found their 20 minute recipes incredibly successful and tasty, and rarely cook anything else. Off the top of my head, one we get a lot of our recipes from is "deliciously Ella."
I think it helps that each post has a picture of the meal, which suggests that the author has actually made it themselves.
If you like salmon, and have a costco membership, one of the best, easiest, fastest and affordable meals:
Get the salmon with the (3) butter-herb balls on top of it. (They used to be ~$19 on avg but now they are closer to $29 due to inflation)
Get a Ceasar Salad Kit from the walk-in fridge. ~$7.99 (these used to be $5.99)
Cook the salmon in the oven at 425 for 27 minutes.
Make the salad kit.
Get a bowl and serve salad in an individual bowl and put a piece of the salmon on top. Serves 4. SUPER good. But the salad doesnt do well as left overs, so if you're not going to finish it that night - make the salad in individual portions to avoid a wilted mess the next day.
Also, if you have wimpy-limpy veggies (such as celery) put into an ice bath in a bowl in the fridge for a while (an hour or two) and it will become crisp again.
I almost never look at recipe timing, but anecdotally, I know I'm slower.
That said, I spent time as a line chef in a kitchen, and it gave me some useful skills in kitchen: cooking lots of things at the same time. These days, I'll fire up my grill, have something on the, and maybe something in the oven, and have done it enough times to know when to start/stir/turn-off to make sure everything is done right around the same time. Very much like a restaurant.
Also, some things are just easier when you let the tool do the job for you. I never cook rice any other way than in an Instant Pot, for example.
My wife and I use the Sorted Sidekick app from the Sorted Food youtube channel. It's the only recipes I tried where the stated cooking time pretty much matches how long it really takes us.
Absolutely! I think I am especially slow at cutting veg, which is a compromise between my motorically undeveloped and untrained self not cutting my fingers (happens every few weeks) and speed. Multiplying by 1.5 is a safe lower limit for me.
I did learn a few things through it though (how to use vinager and not to be afraid of more than 5 ingredients), which is a great outcome. Apart from a bigger selection of recipes I know.
I would highly recommend learning how to use a chef’s knife properly. There are techniques for cutting, cleaning etc that reduce the cooking time significantly. I had the luck to be taught how to use one in school and by my dad but I always notice most people don’t know how to use it and don’t take the time to learn it (which would save them a lot of time)
I love the advertising on some of the crock pot or instant pot packets you can find in the store. It'll say like "ten minute prep time!" (ignoring the 4-8 hour cook time) or the instant pot one will say "ready in 5 minutes" when that means the pressure cooker will cook at high pressure for 5 minutes, but it can take 5-10 minutes to heat up to that point.
I had the same problem with Hello Fresh. I dreaded doing all the prep. However, we tried one called Green Chef and found it much more realistic. The cost of any of these services is too high for me to stomach without some sort of discount but we actually enjoyed cooking the recipes with this one while it lasted.
The last step - 14 - is in fact two steps of (unspecified, but looks like 5-10), and 8 minutes cooking time. Which means you've about 15 minutes to do the other 13 steps. Maybe theoretically possible if you've kitchen-professional chopping speed and know exactly what you're doing, but allowing for thinking time? Hell no.
And let's not talk about the amount of shopping time to get the 15 required ingredients. Most of which are fresh so you're not going to have them kicking around in a cupboard.
Well, we know this is not true. At least Armando Scannone had a team of 4 cooks to make and rehearse each and every one of the recipes in his famous cookbook [1]. Armando Scannone has a famous Venezuelan cookbook, it is the obligatory reference for those who want to make Venezuelan dishes. I have personally tried many of the dishes and the recipes are correct and the result is just as the book indicates.
Four skilled cooks will be able to complete recipes much faster than even a good home cook.
It's like watching an electrician wire a bathroom in two hours and assuming anyone can do it. They can; after years of experience and knowing what to do, what not to do, and what to avoid.
IME Hello Fresh and Gousto were always double their quoted time. 40 minutes was almost always 80 minutes. There is just one exception, namely that Gousto's 10 minute recipes are actually 30 minutes, but that's explained if you notice that they're often 15 minute recipes and they're lying and claiming they're 10 minutes (they have 5 minute, 10 minute and then 20 minute recipes, but no 15 minute recipes, which suggests that they round down for 15).
I never pay attention to the overall cook times. I read through the recipe and picture myself doing the steps to get a feel for how long it will really take.
My experience is similar to yours. Prepping takes the longest time for me. I feel that cooking is all about prepping as the actual cooking on the stove takes a lot less time. Many recipes just mention the actual cooking time and some very vague prep time.
Do you prepare following the steps in the guide? I’ve found that it’s much quicker to prepare based on what hits the pan when. If you do that the first items hit the pan sooner and you are in a nice rush to keep up the cutting with the cooking. Massive efficiency gain. And do some YouTube based cutting training. But that was coming from total beginner level.
I've also been surprised at how often the times listed in a recipe are outright fiction. There seems to be little reason for it except in cases where they want something in a "30 minute meals" type category that it really has no business being in. Or maybe the meal only takes 30 minutes if you have your personal sous chef do all of the chopping, prep, and oven preheat for you ahead of time.
The biggest issue with their recipes is that they, to an extent, tell you to do things in the wrong order. Picking a random recent one we had there was a step to season the meat and then heat some oil and then cook the meat. Well, heating the oil (to the point you'd want to add the meat) can take a few minutes and should have started before you even got the meat out of the package. What you actually have to do with the recipes is read the entire thing to find all the meat and produce and spice prep steps and all the measuring steps. Do all of those first while the oven is heating and maybe the pan with oil (though this can usually be delayed until you put something in the oven since the total stovetop time is usually 5-10 minutes less than the oven time). Then you start cooking, usually, with the recipes we've had, by putting a baking sheet of vegetables in to roast. Then start heating the oil (maybe a few minutes delay) and then start cooking the meat.
If you do that, the prep part takes 5-10 minutes depending on your knife skills and then the cooking takes as long as the longest cooking step (usually a vegetable roasting step). You cannot execute their recipes as written in the time they suggest, but you can definitely cook the meals in the time they suggest if you read the recipe and execute it in a proper order.
It would be nice, for people who aren't used to parallelizing work (most of us are engineers and programmers here, it's kind of what we do) if they laid it out differently, with a timeline or something.
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Prep: List all prep steps (chopping, dicing, measuring, seasoning, mixing sauces, etc.)
4. After 10 minutes remove onions, add oil, wait a minute and add meat (the pan will be so hot the oil needs little time to heat up)
5. Flip meat after 5 minutes
6. Remove meat from heat (have description and target temperature so people can know it's actually done), plate and cover with onions and herb butter mix (described in prep steps)
7. Remove vegetables from oven (include description of how they should look so they aren't over/undercooked) and plate
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That's how essentially every recipe ends up executing from what I've seen. If you read and parse the recipe steps into the actual prep portion (which they mix throughout) and heating portions (which they often list after they should be started) and cooking portions, the prep and cook times (more the cook times, prep depends on skill and focus) are pretty spot on.
This has been a long-standing gripe of mine when it comes to recipe syntax - by listing all the ingredients up front, recipes look like they should be parseable with a single pass, but in practice there are too many forward-references. I recently bought a cookbook for my child which has recipes written in a clear, procedural way, and the absence of gotchas is really refreshing: I wish this style would become standard.
Thinly slice 10 onions, dump them in a big pot with some oil on a medium heat for 10-15 minutes stirring frequently. Then turn the heat down to low and cook for a further 45-60 mins, check on it and stir every 10 mins or so. When it gets dry, add water and use it to deglaze the bottom of the pan to prevent burning. It's finished when the onions are a deep brown colour and their volume has reduced to about 1/6th of what it was to begin with. Store in fridge, enjoy with every meal in the following few days.