5 ms·

> Often, they promise it only takes 15-30 minutes for an entire meal, but apparently I'm not a professional chef who can wash vegetables, dice them, prepare mar

> Often, they promise it only takes 15-30 minutes for an entire meal, but apparently I'm not a professional chef who can wash vegetables, dice them, prepare marinades, chop garlic, and do all of this in just a few minutes. I end up usually spending between 60-90 minutes just to cook a recipe, which is way too much labor for a meal that is already priced about the same as a restaurant meal. I think this is one place where the focus in lifestyle magazines and meal startups on quick and easy meals has created unrealistic expectations. As you say, unless you have the skills of a professional chef, cooking pretty much anything in 15-30 minutes is unrealistic. More realistically, you would expect cooking from scratch to take 45-60 minutes. To some extent I feel like people's frustration over the experience comes from under-appreciation of how much time cooking takes. Unless your ingredients come pre-chopped and pre-mixed, one hour from fresh ingredients is normal! Just like the adage "better, faster, cheaper, pick two," cooking has a corresponding dilemma: "quick, easy, delicious, pick two".

s73ver 9y ago
Maybe these services should add an extra box of about to go bad vegetables, with a card that teaches you knife skills?
btilly 9y ago
Are we talking your time, or wall-clock time? Melt butter, add lemon juice, salt and a dash of hot sauce to make a liquid. Rub liquid over chicken. Put chicken in oven at 400 until done. (How much you need and how long you take depends on whether you did this with a whole chicken or pieces of chicken. Let's call it an hour. Use an oven thermometer if you don't know how to tell.) Put some water in the bottom of a pot, put one artichoke in the pot, cover, and put on low heat around 40 minutes before your meal. Use a peeler to take the skin of a Daikon radish off. Peel the rest of it into a dish. Put sour cream + salt on, mix. Sprinkle chopped green onion on top. Shortly before you're ready, melt butter, add salt. This is to dip the artichoke in. Wall-clock over an hour because food spends time cooking. My time spent is perhaps 20 minutes. Most of which is spent peeling the radish. And now you've got a main dish with 2 side dishes and enough food to feed a family. Now a lot of things take longer than that. For example making pancakes means spending a lot of time actually cooking the pancakes. When I make a soup from scratch I probably spend a couple of hours.
- munchbunny 9y ago
  I meant wall-clock time. You have a point that there are lots of recipes that don't need much hands-on time - I personally do that a lot. However, since wall-clock time often does need to go up to an hour, you have to schedule it into your day. You can't put the chicken into the oven if you're not home. I think the allure of 15-30 minute recipes is that 30 minutes is sort of the upper threshold for spontaneity: "I'll just cook whenever I get home." The problem is that if your filter is "recipes that take less than 30 minutes of wall-clock time," you end up with a very restricted book of recipes to work with.
  - tomjen3 9y ago
    I have a sousvide cooker and a slow cooker so that I can have the machines make food for me when I am not at home. Throw some meat into the sousvide in the morning, come home to a really nice piece of meat that you can take right out of the machine. Save any excess and reheat out the next day.
    - Chris2048 9y ago
      You need a pretty good (tight) container though, or the water evaporates. I intend to get one of those blowtorch attachments to sear afterwards, although I suspect griddle/thick base pan might do just as well.
      - Vendan 9y ago
        Not terribly, rough fit (like, my tub has a half inch gap around the hole where the circulator goes in) will be negligible water loss unless you start talking multi-day cook times. I just cooked some meat for 24 hours and lost about 2~4% of the original water level
- Chris2048 9y ago
  I think what we actually need is a recipe site that sticks to just a few curated recipes like this: - low downtime, meaning personal time prep/etc were you are unable to do anything else. - healthy, obv. (I note the above recipes seem to have quite a bit of salt and fat..) - easily obtained ingredients. special consideration for those that need to be fresh, or go off quickly (vs pantry), and those that are hard to obtain in meal-size quantities. (as a side-note, Asian markets are treasure troves, if you can figure out what things are, and if they're healthy). - Not too difficult to wash up after. If it uses 5 different pans, 10 different utensils etc, and I have to spend 30 minutes washing up, then that needs to be considered as part of the "downtime". - Another possible consideration, other than ingredient price: energy price. Ovens can use a fair bit of electricity. If you use it for 45 min every day for your evening meal, could the costs add up? I say this because I'm currently trying to reduce my monthly energy bill (my last one was 50 EUR), and the immersion heater is the first suspect. Generating heat tends to use a lot of electricity, although the high heat capacity of water probably means water heating is more costly, consider that one you are finished with the oven, all that excess heat is just wasted (unless it happens to be winter). Plus, it might seem basic, but an app or something that can A) produce possible meals-to-make based on what you have, and present a choice (or even choose at random) B) produce a shopping list in advance for future meals. An "Who's turn is it to cook" tracker would be nice too.
pbreit 9y ago
People looking for quicker cook time: GoodEggs new kit offering cuts down on time. Ingredients are extremely fresh and you get 3x3 portions for $70. Might be SF-only now.
- shostack 9y ago
  I wish there was one for slow/pressure cookers that I could make stuff in bulk with that froze nicely.
  - illumin8 9y ago
    +1 I would buy this!
jerkstate 9y ago
They used to take me longer, but I've figured out that almost all of the recipes are mostly parallelizable. I usually read through the recipe all the way at first, and then wash and chop only what's necessary for any marinade/boil/roast steps, then after that's started wash and chop any frying steps, and if there's a sauce or salsa to be made, get my wife to prep that while I'm frying the meat or veggies. It's important to keep an eye on your clock and gain confidence about how long things have been going so you don't have to keep checking on them, opening the pot/door and losing heat and time. I am able to prepare almost every recipe in less time than they say. It does take some confidence and time/temperature management to do multiple steps at the same time, though.
logicfiction 9y ago
The trick all recipe writers use is the recipe time assumes you are mise-en-place, that all your ingredients are prepared for the recipe ahead of the recipe time. I'm fairly certain Blue Apron and such are no different.
- knodi123 9y ago
  > I'm fairly certain Blue Apron and such are no different. You're half wrong. Blue Apron gives you two values, "prep time" and "recipe time". They don't include dicing and peeling, but they don't overlook it either.

s73ver 9y ago

Maybe these services should add an extra box of about to go bad vegetables, with a card that teaches you knife skills?

btilly 9y ago

Are we talking your time, or wall-clock time? Melt butter, add lemon juice, salt and a dash of hot sauce to make a liquid. Rub liquid over chicken. Put chicken in oven at 400 until done. (How much you need and how long you take depends on whether you did this with a whole chicken or pieces of chicken. Let's call it an hour. Use an oven thermometer if you don't know how to tell.) Put some water in the bottom of a pot, put one artichoke in the pot, cover, and put on low heat around 40 minutes before your meal. Use a peeler to take the skin of a Daikon radish off. Peel the rest of it into a dish. Put sour cream + salt on, mix. Sprinkle chopped green onion on top. Shortly before you're ready, melt butter, add salt. This is to dip the artichoke in. Wall-clock over an hour because food spends time cooking. My time spent is perhaps 20 minutes. Most of which is spent peeling the radish. And now you've got a main dish with 2 side dishes and enough food to feed a family. Now a lot of things take longer than that. For example making pancakes means spending a lot of time actually cooking the pancakes. When I make a soup from scratch I probably spend a couple of hours.

munchbunny 9y ago
I meant wall-clock time. You have a point that there are lots of recipes that don't need much hands-on time - I personally do that a lot. However, since wall-clock time often does need to go up to an hour, you have to schedule it into your day. You can't put the chicken into the oven if you're not home. I think the allure of 15-30 minute recipes is that 30 minutes is sort of the upper threshold for spontaneity: "I'll just cook whenever I get home." The problem is that if your filter is "recipes that take less than 30 minutes of wall-clock time," you end up with a very restricted book of recipes to work with.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  I have a sousvide cooker and a slow cooker so that I can have the machines make food for me when I am not at home. Throw some meat into the sousvide in the morning, come home to a really nice piece of meat that you can take right out of the machine. Save any excess and reheat out the next day.
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    You need a pretty good (tight) container though, or the water evaporates. I intend to get one of those blowtorch attachments to sear afterwards, although I suspect griddle/thick base pan might do just as well.
    - Vendan 9y ago
      Not terribly, rough fit (like, my tub has a half inch gap around the hole where the circulator goes in) will be negligible water loss unless you start talking multi-day cook times. I just cooked some meat for 24 hours and lost about 2~4% of the original water level
Chris2048 9y ago
I think what we actually need is a recipe site that sticks to just a few curated recipes like this: - low downtime, meaning personal time prep/etc were you are unable to do anything else. - healthy, obv. (I note the above recipes seem to have quite a bit of salt and fat..) - easily obtained ingredients. special consideration for those that need to be fresh, or go off quickly (vs pantry), and those that are hard to obtain in meal-size quantities. (as a side-note, Asian markets are treasure troves, if you can figure out what things are, and if they're healthy). - Not too difficult to wash up after. If it uses 5 different pans, 10 different utensils etc, and I have to spend 30 minutes washing up, then that needs to be considered as part of the "downtime". - Another possible consideration, other than ingredient price: energy price. Ovens can use a fair bit of electricity. If you use it for 45 min every day for your evening meal, could the costs add up? I say this because I'm currently trying to reduce my monthly energy bill (my last one was 50 EUR), and the immersion heater is the first suspect. Generating heat tends to use a lot of electricity, although the high heat capacity of water probably means water heating is more costly, consider that one you are finished with the oven, all that excess heat is just wasted (unless it happens to be winter). Plus, it might seem basic, but an app or something that can A) produce possible meals-to-make based on what you have, and present a choice (or even choose at random) B) produce a shopping list in advance for future meals. An "Who's turn is it to cook" tracker would be nice too.

pbreit 9y ago

People looking for quicker cook time: GoodEggs new kit offering cuts down on time. Ingredients are extremely fresh and you get 3x3 portions for $70. Might be SF-only now.

shostack 9y ago
I wish there was one for slow/pressure cookers that I could make stuff in bulk with that froze nicely.
- illumin8 9y ago
  +1 I would buy this!

jerkstate 9y ago

They used to take me longer, but I've figured out that almost all of the recipes are mostly parallelizable. I usually read through the recipe all the way at first, and then wash and chop only what's necessary for any marinade/boil/roast steps, then after that's started wash and chop any frying steps, and if there's a sauce or salsa to be made, get my wife to prep that while I'm frying the meat or veggies. It's important to keep an eye on your clock and gain confidence about how long things have been going so you don't have to keep checking on them, opening the pot/door and losing heat and time. I am able to prepare almost every recipe in less time than they say. It does take some confidence and time/temperature management to do multiple steps at the same time, though.

logicfiction 9y ago

The trick all recipe writers use is the recipe time assumes you are mise-en-place, that all your ingredients are prepared for the recipe ahead of the recipe time. I'm fairly certain Blue Apron and such are no different.

knodi123 9y ago
> I'm fairly certain Blue Apron and such are no different. You're half wrong. Blue Apron gives you two values, "prep time" and "recipe time". They don't include dicing and peeling, but they don't overlook it either.