I’ve got everything down to about 15 minutes of me having to participate before the rice cooker or air fryer takes over
Cook onion until caramelized - 5 mins
This and any recipe telling me to cook with extra virgin olive oil is an absolute no. You can’t caramelized onions in less than 30-40 minutes and EVOO becomes sour when heated, cook with plain old olive oil and keep the EVOO for dressings, any recipe that says otherwise should be thrown in the trash
I use recipetineats a lot and the recipes are all great. But almost every single one says to cook the onions for 3 minutes and to cook the garlic at the same time. I’ve started to just get the ingredient list and cook/assemble it without the instructions, cuz I know how to cook and no, the chicken is not done in 7 minutes.
For me, no meal involving cooking and more than a couple ingredients is getting done faster than 40 minutes
I have some things I can do faster than that just from practice. Even involving cutting up vegetables and shit. But yeah if it’s a new recipe I double the estimated time at minimum.
„One pot recipe“
Needs like 4 kitchen gadgets, 12 prep bowls, 1000sqft of work areaReady in 25 minutes*
* not including 65 minutes food prep and researching ingredient substitutes
This is why I like Ethan Chlebowski. He advocate to not learn recipe for home cook but straight to the basic. How to combine and mix ingredients so you can eat well with whatever you have. After you have build up those basic, then you can look at recipe so you know what can be substituted with what you have, and what you really need to have and buy new. Along the way, hopefully you’ll also be more proficient in using your knife which constitutes most of the prep time
I do like him a lot but he does fall into the same trap that many food content creators do, of having lost complete touch with what a normal persons kitchen actually looks like and how much time and money they have to invest into cooking.
To be fair, he did a lot of experimentation and that builds up his pantry and spice rack over time. His latest video about eating for $10 a day basically limit his spice selection too. And again, the takeaway from him is always to learn how the flavor actually combines rather than specific recipe. So you know when it is fine to substitute beef with pork for example and when it is not
That’s the description of basically every youtuber who makes videos about an hobby
Even with all the fancy more expensive stuff, the fundamentals are the same, understanding favors, aromas, textures and the like and using technique still applies whether you have $10 for dinner, or are splurging on more expensive stuff.
Bumping for Ethan Chlebowski mention, I also really like J Kenji Lopez Alt as a compliment to Ethan.
Kenji is an amazing guide to learning how to cook something
I just want recipes that leave me with the fewest dishes possible. Instead i open up a one pot recipe and somehow i have 15 dishes to do
I made buffalo chicken mac and cheese once. It was delicious but never again. I had to wash so much shit.
all those receipes assume you know how to cook in general - people not cooking on a regular basis will always take longer that 15 minutes to prep meals.
my tip: cook a small amount once even if it takes a while; if you are fine with the result, cook a larger amount that you can freeze or store for future meals, reducing your total cooking time far below those 15 minutes. dont just do large amount first - you will profit from having done the receipe before and achieve a better tasting meal the second time.
No, they’re just straight up lying. I’ve been cooking for 30 years, I can eat at a restaurant once go home and make you the exact thing or very similar from most places and this is still a problem for me. The prep times and cook times are often just plain lies. Prep time can be trimmed down to some degree with training/practice and I’m a lot faster at this than your average beginner but when something tells you to cook something that will still be completely raw by the end of the cook time given there’s no skill curve there, it’s just how long things take to cook.
Onions won’t be soft in 2 minutes, they won’t be caramelized in 5, veggies will still be raw in 5 minutes of cook time, expect to double or triple anything that uses potatoes that aren’t boiled. It’s just lying so you visit their site.
They also assume I have already chopped 5 carrots and 2 peppers, peeled 10 potatoes and crushed 100 g of almonds before I start cooking the recipe
Except for the potatoes, thats less than 5 minutes of work. I’ve heard you can peel potatoes fast by blanching them, but I’ve never tried.
If you ignore getting a knife, a cutting board, throwing away the trash you are making, putting the cut stuff into bowls where they can wait for their mission aaaand you are also pretty skilled in cutting vegetables. And I need to admit that while I am living alone for more than 15 years and cooking at least 3 times a week I am just not that fast. Also except for the potatoes.
Leave the stuff on the cutting board, put the waste in the compost or broth bags, your knives and cutting board are stored where you cut so prep is like 16 seconds.
Getting individual bowls to store every prepped ingredient is just for youtube.
Are you chopping multiple items together where possible? Using a slicing motion?
The list of vegetables I need to cut was purely fictional as was the time I estimated. I just wanted to make the point that recipes often do not include the time you need to prepare the ingredients, but just the cooking time. I am not the fastest chopper but I am happy with the velocity I am reaching.
I really appreciate your advices on how to improve my technique though, so thanks for that!
np, I’ve had similar experiences with teaching others to cook, where it takes them an hour to do a recipe I can usually whip up in 15 minutes, because I’m used to chopping a shitton of veggies from work and optimize the process.
A stirfry for me is “1. Heat a pot of frying oil while chopping veggies+ginger and garlic, set veggies aside, reduce oil heat once at frying temp, chop meat (usually chicken), putting everything in rows on the edge of the cutting board, usually using 2 boards depending on number of ingredients” 2. Get oil back to frying temp, throw each ingredient into the oil in time to pre-cook. 3. use a colander to strain all ingredients from the oil into your stirfry wok or pan, set colander aside, pour hot oil into your oil frying jar. 4. Add some more oil to your wok, add garlic and ginger and maybe some fermented bean paste. 5. Crank heat to max, add all ingredients, add sugar, stir, make cornstarch slurry. 6 Deglaze with wine, then soy sauce, then add cornstarch slurry. 7 Serve quickly."
A stirfry for my ex was 1. chop veggies, putting each in its own bowl. 2. Wash cutting board. 3. Cut meat. 4. Wash cutting board 5. heat oil. 6. Add veggie, cook 30 seconds, strain, add second veggie, cook 45 seconds, etc. 7. Put ingredients in their own clean bowls. 8. Wash dirty bowls because you ran out of space somehow. etc. It took her over an hour and exhausted her enough she cooked very rarely.
My advice : buy canned soups in bulk. That’s how I roll
Or make broth/stock with leftovers. A pressure cooker makes this much easier.
An electric pressure cooker makes it a mindless activity. Load it, turn it on, come back when it beeps, or tomorrow… Who cares, it’s sterile in there.
Then to reduce: turn it on, come back when it beeps. Dial in the times and electric pressure cookers make recipes ridiculously repeatable.
My only criticism is their food is fairly homogenous so I add some crunch on the side just for some heterogeneity. Insane effort to value ratio.
1 hour, four pots, seven bowls and three ingredients I forgot
I always skip the “quick and easy” recipes. Cooking is fun, and I want to feel a kick of dopamine after I’m done. I don’t want to make Cathy Mitchells dump dinners.
Bruh
american dad
'Muricans can’t cook
Most of their “cooking” is from tins and packets
To make Bland, shitty, 'Murican slop, start with a box of shitty excuse for food and add a packet of crap you could just do yourself, add a huge amount of sugar and then deep-fry
Tell me your are not british at least
Found the time traveler from 1963
Please tell me you’re not British lol
'Muricans can’t cook
Is this a stereotype? I’ve never heard this before. Anyone who believes this has clearly never been to a Southern cookout.
‘Southern’ is also so broad that it covers at least 3 distinct styles of cooking. Soul food, barbecue, Tex-Mex, I’m sure there’s others (and even these categories can be further divided).
Thats just white, middle-class boomers who got their recipes from magazines because it was trendy and gen X whose parents didn’t bother to teach them.
