Want to be a faster cook? Start with these 7 tips.
As much as I enjoy cooking, I usually don’t want to spend more time in the kitchen than I absolutely have to.
Because we know your time is just as precious, over the past few years, we have started including cooking times in our recipes - active, which is the amount of hands-on time, and total, which includes the active time plus any inactive or hands-off time, such as when a dish is roasting, baking or simmering.
We also know that sometimes our times don’t line up with what you experience, and that’s to be expected. For any number of reasons - equipment, differences in skill levels, distractions, children and pets underfoot, whatever - there’s no way every person will make every recipe at the same pace.
Just remember: Speed isn’t everything. Working too quickly can lead to errors or, worse, injuries. That being said, there are ways to be a faster, more efficient cook. Here are some of our top tips.
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Read the recipe. Multiple times.
Any time you put into studying the recipe before you set foot in the kitchen will pay off once you start cooking. Errors can be just as time-consuming, or more so, than a few rounds of reading in advance, so make the investment up front. Plus, analyzing the ingredients and steps first will familiarize you with the broad strokes of the recipe, meaning less slowing down in the process. Pay particular attention to substitution suggestions, sub-recipes (some cookbooks separate them) and ingredients that are listed once but used at multiple points (often specified as “divided”).
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Check your ingredient supplies
This tip goes hand-in-hand with reading the recipe. Make sure you have all the ingredients at home before you get to work. Ideally, you’re doing this in advance of your trip to the store, such as when you do your weekly meal planning. There’s nothing that will bring a recipe to a screeching halt like realizing you don’t have what you need, prompting an unplanned excursion or forcing you to try to figure out an appropriate substitution. Although I realize this strategy is not for everyone, I subscribe to the approach of pulling all the ingredients out before I start cooking. If your cabinets or fridge are anything like mine, it can take some rummaging to find what you need, and I’d rather not stop to do that once I get going.
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See what can be made ahead
If you know your time for making the bulk of a dish is limited, figure out what you can do in advance while you may already be in the kitchen doing something else. Recipes will often tell you what works well to make ahead, but be on the lookout for more. Dressings and sauces store very well. Chopped or even roasted vegetables can hold for a day in the refrigerator. Ditto grated cheese. Other components - pie crusts, pizza doughs - need time to rest. (Again, read the recipe early and often.)
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Take advantage of downtime
Well-written recipes will specify what other ingredients or parts of the process you can tackle while a different part of the dish is cooking, though it never hurts to study up and see where you can shave off overall time. Sometimes that means putting off the prep for certain elements. If an ingredient is being used as a garnish or stirred in at the end, do you need to have it done before you start cooking? No. Can you make a sauce while your meat roasts? Absolutely. This is the kind of thing to flag when you first read the recipe.
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Let your tools do the work for you
You may already have tools in your kitchen that can make cooking faster, so why not use them? A recipe may not suggest a certain piece of equipment, but that doesn’t mean it won’t help, even if it’s just to free up your hands for something else. Are you a slow chopper? Pull out your food processor to break down vegetables, especially where exact size and shape don’t matter, such as with soups, stews or sauces that will be cooked down or blended. The food processor can also make quick work of grating cheese or cutting butter into flour for pie crusts.
Air fryers speed up roasting vegetables or small cuts of meat, among many other things. An Instant Pot can steam vegetables or cook rice in minutes. Of course, you must decide whether there’s a trade-off in terms of additional equipment to clean, but that may be a compromise worth making depending on the recipe, your skill level, time restraints or, ahem, whether you have someone helping you with the dishes.
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Use good store-bought shortcuts where they make sense
While not all shortcut ingredients you can get at the store are worth your money, some really can save you time and help you get dinner on the table faster. Pizza dough, puff pastry, concentrated broth bases and peeled, chopped butternut squash are a few of our favorites. And don’t sleep on the frozen food aisle, either; frozen vegetables can be an affordable way to get healthy, already prepped ingredients into your routine.
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Practice, practice, practice
Speed and efficiency are often the result of increasing competence. The more you cook and hone your skills, the faster you’ll get. The more you make one particular recipe, the faster it will go. (I am sometimes shocked by how much I can eventually commit to memory, even with everything else competing for space in my brain.) Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see an immediate improvement. It’s often a gradual process. Then, one day, it hits you all of a sudden that you’re in and out of the kitchen quicker than you expected.
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