Pay attention: I’m about to tell you a secret.
This is the information that makes cooking fluid instead of frustrating. It’s the key element that isn’t spelled out in cookbooks, because authors are afraid to insult your intelligence. It’s the step that allows you to set dinner on the table as advertised, instead of chopping frantically in your kitchen while your guests mill about the house. This secret is all about time management. It will make a world of difference for you. But first, a word about recipes.
Recipes are a necessary evil. Don’t get me wrong–when I was first learning to turn a pumpkin into a plate of ravioli, I would have had equal odds of turning it into a carriage if I hadn’t used cookbooks. But this approach has its drawbacks. When we get directions, we assume those directions are sequential. In cooking, this isn’t necessarily so. Sometimes extra directions lie hidden in the list of ingredients (“1 lb butternut squash, roasted and cubed”). Sometimes you don’t realize you’ve missed a step until you have onions sizzling on the stove and you find yourself measuring out seventeen spices, all of which could burn if you leave them unattended with the onions for more than thirty seconds. Sometimes you have everything measured and sliced, but you find yourself waiting for a pan to preheat. My initial attempts at recipe-following were full of such moments, where I would end up delayed or frustrated by something I hadn’t considered.
The book that changed my thinking was Work Clean by Dan Charnas. Writing for members of the 9–5 workforce, Charnas unpacks the culinary concept of mise-en-place (pronounced “meez on plahs”), the approach chefs use to manage time and minimize waste. And the most valuable lesson I learned was the difference between what Charnas calls “immersive time” and “process time”–the hands-on time needed to chop vegetables or measure spices versus the hands-off time required to preheat an oven, marinate a steak, or simmer soup. Once I understood this concept, cooking (and a lot of other things) suddenly started to flow.
So here is the secret: before you start cooking, identify anything that might demand process time. Often, you’ll have to read between the lines, because cookbook authors tend not to spell this out. In addition to the three examples above, tasks requiring process time include:
- Heating oil in a skillet
- Boiling water
- Pre-soaking beans
- Cooking rice the day before you make stir fry
- Allowing dough to rise
- Salting certain vegetables to remove water or bitterness before cooking
- Chilling a bowl or a glass of water
- Cooling melted butter
- Bringing meat to room temperature
- Roasting a potato
- Anything else involving a lapse of time where you are waiting for a chemical process to take place
Most of these tasks are time-intensive but light on effort. If you look for these components in a recipe, you can time your hands-on work to happen while something else is already taking place. Measure out the spices while the pan heats up (but before adding the onions). Melt the butter before you measure the flour for the pancakes; let it cool while you beat the eggs. Clean the kitchen while the lasagna bakes so you don’t have to do it later. Mastery of this concept is key to serving dinner on time and minimizing the amount of panic you experience along the way. Give it a shot!
