How to Be More Efficient in the Kitchen
We’ve all finished cooking a meal only to check the clock and realize it’s taken double the time. Add in the cleaning time and you’ve lost a considerable chunk of your evening. Taking hints from chefs, we’ve compiled a time-saving list to sharpen your efficiency in the kitchen and convert a frantic process into a smooth one.
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Mise en place
There’s a reason your favorite restaurants can serve up elaborate dishes in under 20 minutes. The key to their efficiency is “mise en place”. This fancy-sounding kitchen term is French for “everything in its place”, and it just means having all your ingredients fully prepared before you begin cooking anything.
It may seem efficient to chop something up while another part of the dish cooks, but this can lead to overcooking your food and making your kitchen look like a tornado has just passed through.
Take the time to chop your veggies, assemble your spices into a bowl, season your meat, and get your pans on the stove. It sounds simple, but trust us, it makes a huge difference. Cooking will begin to feel a lot less frantic. To help your mise en place, grab this set of prep bowls and thank us later!
Organize, organize, organize
In the heat of the moment, when the pans are hot and the meat is sizzling, if you need to dig through a cupboard to get a dash of salt or a splash of oil, all of that prep can go to waste. We recommend keeping your most-used ingredients and tools closest to you. Generally, you should keep oils, salt, and pepper beside the stove, then organize outwards with your least-used ingredients farthest from your cooking station.
Spices can be the bane of the disorganized home cook, but taking just a few minutes to get them sorted out can save you tons of time and frustration. If you don’t already have one, get a spice rack and consider organizing it either alphabetically or from most-used to least-used. And don’t forget to measure out your spices before you start cooking!
JustTheRecipe
In this world of information overload, even a search for a simple recipe can lead to pages of superfluous content. JustTheRecipe.com takes any online recipe and distills it down into just the ingredients and the steps. No lengthy anecdotes, time spent wondering if the recipe will work, or neverending popups for email lists.
Few tools are as easy to use and save as much frustration as JustTheRecipe. Say goodbye to endless scrolling on food blogs and focus on the fun parts of cooking.
Clean as you go
Keeping a clean workspace is imperative for being efficient in the kitchen. It makes the cooking process itself simpler, and it reduces the amount of time you spend cleaning up the mess afterward.
Start with a clean kitchen and keep it clean as you go. Here are a few tips for doing so:
- Instead of making frequent trips to the trash can, place a large bowl on your kitchen counter for any scraps, packaging, or other disposables
- Stack all your dirty dishes in a neat pile by the sink
- When you’re waiting for something to cook, take advantage of the time to wash a few dishes
Use the right tools for the job
There are endless kitchen gadgets on the market. Most of them serve a niche purpose and will just end up cluttering your cabinet space (nobody needs an “indoor s’mores maker”). But there are a handful of versatile tools that will consistently make you more productive in the kitchen.
Here are a few items that we love and we think you will too:
- Multi-Purpose Scraper & Chopper: We can’t praise this enough. It’s a simple tool, but it plays a major role in our kitchens. Use it to scoop up and transfer chopped ingredients and to easily scrape off dried bits from the countertop at clean-up time.
- Garlic Press: Mincing garlic can get tedious, especially because it’s such a common ingredient. Garlic presses like this one from OXO are inexpensive and have saved us hours over the years.
- Instant Read Thermometer: If you still bring meat in and out of the oven wondering if it is cooked, you need a meat thermometer. This one from ThermoPro is instant and reliable.
- Zwilling Chef’s Knife: To make prep work quick, efficient, and most importantly safe, you need a high-quality chef’s knife. Great knives can be expensive, but this one from Henckels is a bargain.
Do you have a great time-saving trick that we didn’t list here? Let us know in the comments!
