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
