Faster Cooking
There are times when you can leisurely cook a meal, sipping a glass of wine while music or a podcast plays softly in the background. But at least for me, cooking a meal is usually a race against the clock to get dinner on the table.
Faster Cooking
Stir-frying is one of the best quick-cooking techniques because the proteins and vegetables are cut down into small pieces, so remember that the smaller the pieces, the quicker the cooking. Thinly sliced chicken breast will cook in minutes flat, whereas a thick, uncut chicken breast will take more time to cook.
Preparing your meals at home instead of ordering takeout is good for more than just your wallet. Researchers from the University of Washington School of Public Health have found that cooking at home is associated with a healthier diet, but is not correlated with higher food spending. However, despite the myriad benefits of a home-cooked meal, more than a quarter of adults don't cook at all, and the average American now spends more than 43 percent of their food dollars on food prepared by someone else.
The most important three words in the kitchen, aside from "don't catch fire," are "mise en place." This French phrase, meaning to put things in their place, refers to the chef-approved technique of measuring, cutting, and otherwise prepping ingredients and laying them out before attempting a recipe. Doing adequate prep before you start cooking will make the cooking process a whole lot faster. Better yet, it's easy to avoid overcooking your food if you're not frantically trying to find ingredients.
If you're cooking your meals in a cold pan, you're wasting time in the kitchen. Preheating your pan means your food starts cooking the second it hits the stovetop, and you can use the time while your pan is heating up to prep.
You may think you're great at eyeballing portion sizes, but you might be overestimating your ability. Research suggests that people tend to miscalculate portion size, which can mean you're spending too much or too little time cooking your food, wasting precious minutes along the way. Fortunately, a food scale can help alleviate this problem, keeping your portions precise and cooking time to a minimum.
Those convection settings on your stove are your friend. Ovens with convection functions can cook your food significantly faster than your average stove, so go ahead and use them when you want to save yourself time in the kitchen. This handy convection cooking chart will help you make a faster and more flavorful meal every time. If you want to save yourself even more time in the kitchen, try adding these healthy and easy crock pot recipes to your repertoire.
Instead of using plain butter in your recipes, make your own herb-infused compound butter and save time in the process. Compound butter has already taken on the flavor of the herbs and spices you've added to it by the time you're ready to start cooking, meaning you won't have to cook your herbs separately first to get the rich flavor you're looking to achieve.
If you like it, then you should have put a lid on it. Putting a lid on your pot means the external air temperature will have less influence on the cooking temperature of your food. This, in turn, will help you prepare your food faster.
Saving yourself time in the kitchen is as easy as using a finer cut to create your meals. Smaller pieces of food cook faster, so when you're eager to prepare something quickly, make those pieces extra small.
Instead of wasting time leaving butter out overnight or melting it in the microwave, use a grater to help it soften faster. Grating frozen butter makes it easier to spread and incorporate into recipes, saving you time along the way.
Although common culinary wisdom dictates that you should roast things slow and low, embracing higher temperatures can help speed things up. Higher roasting temperatures will help you get a nice crispy exterior on your food while avoiding the mushiness that comes along with longer roasting times at lower temperatures. In fact, cooking meat at a low temperature over a long period of time is more likely to rob it of its moisture, leaving it tough and chewy, while a fast, high-temperature roast will leave it juicy.
A faster meal starts with some aluminum foil. Lining your baking sheets with aluminum foil before roasting can cut your clean-up time to virtually nothing. Better yet, adding some aluminum foil on the top of dishes can help them from over-browning, too.
Rather than spending time each day prepping, cooking, and portioning your food, do just one or two mega cooking sessions a week. Creating meals for the better part of the week in one or two sessions means less prep time, less total cooking time, and less clean-up, too.
A big clean up session at the end of the meal can feel like it takes forever. To speed things up, clean while you're cooking; this simple multitask means that by the time your meal is over, so is your work in the kitchen. And before you prep your next meal, save yourself time by making sure you have these healthy kitchen staples handy.
If there's one thing that we could all use more of, it's time. Okay, time, and chocolate birthday cake. Although we love rolling up our sleeves and embarking on an ambitious cooking project now and then, most days we're scrambling for an extra hour as we whip together dinner. Thankfully, having these tricks up our sleeves makes quick work of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Liquid is a good conductor of heat, so adding a splash of water, stock, or broth to your pan will speed up the cooking process. In fact, one of the first techniques taught in many culinary schools is how to sauté vegetables to tenderness without overcooking them: Start them in a sauté pan with a splash of water, a pat of butter, and salt and pepper, and cover with a tented parchment paper cap. By the time the water evaporates, the vegetables are almost done cooking; all that's left for you to do is let the butter caramelize them. You can skip the parchment paper at home, but keep an eye out so the vegetables don't scorch once the water evaporates.
Boiling or simmering away? Cover the pot with a tight-fitting lid, and trap in the heat and steam that will do double-duty on your food. But keep in mind: If you're trying to reduce and thicken a sauce, keep that lid off so the liquid can evaporate faster.
Cooking is something that you can learn to do well, even if you currently know nothing about cooking. Knowing how to cook will serve you well for your entire life and bring great enjoyment to your family and your stomachs!
Most pressure cooker instructions state a minimum amount of water required for pressure cooking even a tiny amount of food. Inside the tightly sealed pressure cooker, the water is heated and eventually boils into steam. Since the steam cannot escape, it collects above the food. All those trapped water molecules increase the pressure inside the cooker.
As temperature increases, gas molecules move faster, which increases the pressure inside the cooker.So what do water and pressure have to do with cooking food faster? Cooking generally involves raising the temperature of food until chemical reactions take place, like those that break down the tough tissue in meat or soften the starch in vegetables. Those reactions usually happen faster at higher temperatures.
The same phenomenon explains why cooking at high altitudes can be tricky. Air pressure decreases as you move higher above sea level. At lower pressures, water boils at a lower temperature. That means something simmering away is cooking below 100C (212F) and will take longer to cook. At high altitudes, by raising the pressure and boiling point above what happens at sea level, a pressure cooker can really boost the reactions cooking your food.
In a similar vein, make extra of whatever you're cooking -- a bunch extra -- and freeze it in single-serving portions for later. Cook in batches. This works especially well with tomato sauce, stock, soups, casseroles, breads and stews. Check out these five big-batch recipes and 13 make-ahead meals you can freeze for some specific ideas.
Slow cooker pulled pork and other heaping helpings of protein can also be distributed among several meals over the course of the week. See these large format cooking projects and what to make with the leftovers for even more ideas.
In the same wheelhouse, don't underestimate the versatility of a parchment or foil pack. Fold up a protein -- quick-cooking fish or shrimp are great options -- plus vegetables and aromatics and harness the power of steam to cook your meal. This method makes for easy clean-up too. Try this easy fish baked in parchment recipe (add some asparagus spears in season).
Cut your meat and vegetables into thin slices or bite-size chunks (or buy them that way to make things even quicker), instead of cooking and serving them whole. They'll be done faster that way. You can quickly stir-fry them, or even broil the food in your oven, which will cook it faster than baking or roasting, providing a nice crust on top. If it's thin, the heat will cook the meat or vegetable all the way through in less time.
Read the recipe the whole way through before cooking. The. Whole. Way. Through! So many times, some of us (ahem, note to self) gather and prep the ingredients and start on the instructions before realizing midway through the recipe that something we created needs to chill or marinate for an hour. Ugh. If you had read through the recipe, you would know to do the first couple steps in the morning, possibly, then leave it in the fridge to finish when you get home.
Instead of using small saucepans and roasting pans, try pans with a larger surface area, so the food is spread out and not on top of each other. Your food will be able to receive more direct heat and will cook faster (also, if you're roasting, crowding ingredients together will steam them instead of properly caramelizing them).
Honing your knife skills can take time, but it's worth it. Chopping, dicing, mincing and slicing can be the part that takes the longest, and unlike cooking time, it's something you can speed up by getting better at it. First, make sure your knives are sharp. Either get a sharpener or take them to a place that sharpens knives for you. That will make cutting so much easier and safer. Then, take a knife skills class at your local cooking school or kitchen store, or just look it up on YouTube. We also have quick video lessons on how to hold a knife the right way, dicing (the most common cut), mincing, chopping, bias cut, chiffonade and troubleshooting. 041b061a72