In my house, we decide our dinners before we go grocery shopping. We always choose a couple of new recipes from our collection of cookbooks, focusing on budget-friendly and quick 30-minute meals. But, somehow, whoever is cooking will spend more than an hour in the kitchen.
After looking closely at all of the recipes I have been choosing, plus factoring in the slow rate at which my partner chops vegetables (much to my chagrin), I found that these times just didn’t match up. And then, I noticed the ingredients list.
Preparation and cooking times are usually separated in a recipe, but gathering your mise en place or ingredients isn’t included in either time. And this is where the problem lies.
Most ingredient lists in recipes now include instructions for how each ingredient needs to be prepared. For example, ‘600g chicken breast, cubed into 3cm pieces’, or ‘brussels sprouts, shaved with a mandolin’.
These instructions are not included in the preparation time, which brings down the overall time of a recipe. So, the crucial steps that aren’t included in a recipe are why you’re taking 1-2 hours to get your dinner on the table.
Mise en place time
The ’30-minute recipe myth’ has been widely discussed across the web, but especially on a Reddit thread titled ‘Why does every recipe I try take me a LOT longer than it says?’. With many people expressing their frustrations that a quick and easy recipe takes more than an hour, it’s the mise en place that consistently emerges as the root of the problem.
While there’s lots of advice for speeding up the cooking process, such as ‘before starting anything, preheat your oven and put a pot of water on to boil’, most have resigned to the fact that 30-minute recipes may just take longer, no matter what. Unfortunately, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any recipe that doesn’t have a few ingredient instructions in it, including our own BHG recipes!
Our recommendation? If there are mise en place instructions in your 30-minute recipe, take the prep times into account with a grain of salt. And, if you’re slow with cutting up vegies, then you can probably disregard the preparation time altogether!
Reading a recipe like a pro
When choosing a dinner recipe, there’s more than just the cooking time to look at. Read a recipe in full before you buy the groceries, and again before you get started in the kitchen. Here’s what to consider:
- Take a look at the ingredients list: if there are ingredients that have added prep instructions like ‘chop, blanch or slice’, then you’ll have to add on a bit of extra time to your preparation.
- Look for add-ons and sides: some recipes may have sides listed in the ingredients, like ‘jasmine rice, on the side’. This means you will have to cook rice as well as the main dish.
- Read the steps for hidden resting or marinating times: while all of BHG’s recipes have marinating and resting minutes listed with the cooking time, some recipes don’t. Make sure you aren’t starting a recipe with a 12-hour marinating period without the time to do it!
- Consider steps that are done simultaneously: if there’s the word ‘meanwhile’ in a recipe, it only means one thing: multitasking. This usually cuts down on your overall cooking time, but it can be tricky to juggle a few pans, the rice cooker and something in the oven.
- Make sure you’ve got all the tools needed: look in the steps for baking tin sizes and specific appliances like a blender or mandolin. If you don’t have them, consider whether they’re worth the investment, and add them to your shopping list.
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