Comment by balderdash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by balderdash | Hacker News Reader

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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.

A. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place

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.

As someone with limited counter space, cleaning while you cook is essential for saving time while cooking.

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.

mise en place is more efficient for restaurant kitchens, where you can get an assembly line rolling, but it is less efficient for home cooking.

Its a lot less stressful, but its clearly slower to not optimize your order of operations.

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

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