Kitchen Mathmatics: Part II

Recently I spoke of the mathematics you’ll need to employ in the kitchen, to better understand how our time will be spent when we cook. It’s not meant to suggest that you’ll have to work really hard or wait for hours on end just to eat something. Fact of the matter is, you need only invest about five minutes of time if the height of your culinary aspiration is a peanut butter sandwich. However on the other side of the spectrum, you could throw that roast into an oven, cook it for five minutes, and then start eating it. I doubt the end result would be safe to eat, and would probably taste pretty gross, but it’s definitely within your means (that said, don’t do it!)

The purpose of our time in the kitchen is twofold:

• To cook the dish to completion
• To be pleased with the end result.

Cooking to completion is based completely on personal preference. Take for example, a good old fashioned steak. For those of us who love our cattle cooked medium rare, to completion takes on a different meaning than it does for those who love to burn their stuff to well done. But one thing we can all agree on is that cooked means something more than raw, so let’s just run with that shall we? So, we spend as much time as necessary to cook our food to a pleasing state of doneness.

The second purpose is what will make up the brunt of our kitchen time. A meal can be cooked to completion with very little fuss. Stick a piece of meat and a potato in the microwave and radiate the heck out of it for twenty or so minutes, and things will be cooked through. But I highly doubt that your dining experience will be a pleasurable one. In fact, I’m going to safely say that it’s going to trigger your gag reflex more than anything else.

So we invest more time into our food to make a more satisfying meal. And this can entail anything from chopping up vegetables to picking herbs, to making broths, and everything in between.

So how much time on average can we expect to spend in our kitchen? I would say for anything more intense than a sandwich, expect a minimum of a Rachael Ray-friendly 30 minutes. This counts everything from preparation to sitting down to eat the finished product. This number also assumes that we’re going for optimal quality, since there are ways to cut down this number, but it will be at the expense of taste.

As for the maximum amount of time you can spend in the kitchen, well the sky is the limit. It can be as little as an extra five minutes, or it can even reach into several days for some dishes (like coq au vin for example.) It really boils down to how much time you want to put into your meal. My attitude is that the more time you’re willing to spend on a dish, the better it’s going to be.

Now this doesn’t mean that cooking steaks for two hours straight on high heat will find a new nirvana of tastiness beyond burnt. It’s just going to be a different, more unpleasant, class of burnt. But you can invest more time in preparing good sides, or whipping up marinades for your wonderful steaks, season them early, let them reach room temperature, etc etc. Such things can only make the meal better.

But it’s going to come down to how much time you have available to spend, and your willingness to use it. For me, spending a bit more time to make an average meal special is a better use of my time than catching up on Simpson’s reruns. And I think, with a little know how and a bit of confidence, you’ll find yourself feeling the same way.