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.
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.