How to Reduce Cooking Time by 30%?

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If you love cooking, you might be spending a lot of time in the kitchen missing those family meal experiences. Although cooking can be a passion, doing that regularly takes a lot of your precious time. Not to forget the time you spend shopping for groceries, planning what to cook, and preparing things. I, too, love cooking. But when I found there’s a lot I could do if I got more time, I found some hacks to cut down on kitchen time.

Planning ahead of time, preparation, functional storage techniques, intelligent workflow, and the right appliances help reduce the cooking time by around 30%.

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Planning, chopping and storing vegetables in sealed containers over the weekend, preplanning every meal ahead of time, organizing your workstation, taking help from anyone who is willing to help, and using the help of gadgets are the ways of minimizing your cooking time. 

How to Effectively Reduce Cooking Time?

I found many other cooking lovers who miss out on the bliss of the world outside the kitchen. That’s when I planned to curate a detailed guide on what all you can do to manage your kitchen schedule. So, keep on reading to find valuable strategies, tips, and products for the same.

Tips to Reduce Cooking Time

You might be following none, all, or a few of these. Let’s see how you can improve your meal preparing times to steal more minutes to spend outside the kitchen.

1. Planning and Preparation Ahead of Time:

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• Many folks in the USA are used to bulk buying and freezing foods. This practice helps save shopping time and serves as a savior during the times when going out shopping isn’t feasible. However, you can improvise this practice to cut down on the cooking time.
• Prepare and freeze foods that can be stored for long and can be reheated and used, such as beans, pasta, rice, stews, and soups.
• Write down a meal plan for a couple of days (or a week) to save last-minute planning.
• Bulk cut vegetables and items for a week’s requirement ahead of time. Store them in air-tight containers to shorten your meal preparation times. 
• After preparing the meal plan and cutting the veggies, store them in the required portions. This saves a huge amount of time finding and gathering the material needed before every cooking schedule.

2. Use Meal Leftovers:

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There are times when you don’t consume the entire portions you prepare. For foods that can be reheated and consumed, you can use their leftovers from dinner for lunch and vice versa.

3. Clean while you Cook: 

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Let me guess. You spend a major part of your kitchen time washing utensils and other items after the meals. Even that overfilled basin looks gross after a mealtime. Isn’t it? Here’s what you can do about that. When cooking, you aren’t using 100% of your time doing chores. So, instead of looking at the food being cooked or waiting for the soup to boil, wash a couple of things that need to be washed. This reduces the total bulk of utensils, pots, and items you need to wash after dinner or lunch.

4. Intelligent Workflow and Functional Storing:

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You might haven’t noticed, but you could be spending time gathering spices or other items while cooking. This one is a gem of the tip for me that helped me improve efficiency in the kitchen.

• Start by organizing pantry items and ingredients in cabinets and shelves where it will be easy to find and use them.
• Use dedicated containers for spices, group similar items together, and label them. This one-time effort will make it easy for anyone visiting the kitchen to find the required things.
• Plan a workflow that reduces your total distance walking across different areas in the kitchen. This includes positioning items and areas like ingredients, cooking area, utensils, and washing area as you use them.

5. Asking for a Help Never Hurts:

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Do you feel shy or uncomfortable working with someone else in the kitchen simultaneously? Let me tell you, getting an extra hand always helps me save anything from 10 to 30% of my time. Whether you like others working around or not, you can assign them duties accordingly. Examples include fetching and storing items, doing dishes, monitoring the pot while you wash utensils, etc.

Another way of getting some help in the kitchen is using products and appliances that save time. Wondering how would that help? Then, read on the next section to discover some amazing products.

Kitchen Tools and Products to Reduce Cooking Times

After all those strategies, here’re a few time-saving kitchen tools that will help you multitask and do chores faster.

• Instant Pot Duo Nova Pressure Cooker:

   This one’s a cult favorite. Do you know why? Let me tell you. First, it combines multiple appliances like saute pan, rice cooker, yogurt maker, food warmer, steamer, and pressure cooker. Second, it lets you adjust cooking duration, heating intensity, monitor temperature, pressure, and keep time. The best part is, you can cook and steam simultaneously, halving the final time required to prepare rice and beans.

• Express Food Chopper:

   As the name says, it’s an express solution to multiple cooking tasks. You can use it to grind, chop, mince, and blend ingredients like cheese, onions, spices, herbs, garlic, zest, and more. How the Express Chopper saves time? It does the job in seconds that you would do in many minutes by hand.

• Kitchen Leaf Herb Stripper: 
  

Herb leaves are a part of almost every recipe. And the job of cutting and stripping leaves can take a considerable time. However, with this leaf herb stripper, you can do the same work in less time. The tool comes with a kitchen blade on one side and multiple holes for stripping different herb leaves. Again, using a tool saves several minutes at least over doing the same task by hand.

• Slow Cooker:

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This looks like an odd addition to the list. Does that to you too? Well, there’s a catch on how it can save your cooking time. A slow cooker takes a long time to cook a recipe. You can use this feature to get the meal ready when you get home from work. Add ingredients, set it to cook slowly, and you can leave for work while it cooks your dinner until you return.

How was that? Are you ready to save more time on your kitchen chores for your family or pursue some interest? Share your best cooking time-saving solutions and experiences in the comments.