20 Ways to Save Time in the Kitchen

How to save time in the kitchen? People have asked a lot, “How do you find time to make all these elaborate meals?” and the answer is that I don’t. I don’t make elaborate meals (I’m just good at making things look pretty), and I also know a bunch of ways to cut time so I don’t go crazy trying to get dinner on the table when 4:30pm rolls around. These are my best 20 tips on how to save time in the kitchen.

1. Save time in the kitchen by meal planning

If there’s one piece of advice on how to make cooking 1000% less stressful and less time-consuming, without a doubt, it’s meal planning. If you take 45 minutes, an hour, to plan out your meals for the rest of the week, it makes everything else so much less stressful.

By planning and shopping once a week, you’ll have everything you need all ready to go in the fridge, and this is a huge psychological load off your plate. Meal planning is the single most effective way to save your sanity during a hectic week. It saves you time, it saves money, it limits wastefulness, it limits the temptation to eat crap for dinner, and it makes preparing healthy home-cooked meals so much easier.

I wrote an entire blog post on meal planning here, because it’s the single most effective “kitchen hack” I know of.

2. Save time in the kitchen by using simple recipes

If the recipe is complicated, if there are many steps, it’ll take extra time. I tend to nope out of recipes with extensive lists of ingredients.

3. Read the entire recipe before you start

Being surprised by the three-hour required simmering time with that soup you’re trying to make is a pretty frustrating experience. It’s also frustrating (and time-consuming) when you realize you haven’t got a certain crucial ingredient on hand, and now you need to spend time making a last-minute mad dash to the store. Read the entire recipe before you start! (This is also why I’m such an advocate for meal planning. Plan once, shop once, be prepared, save time in the kitchen!)

4. Cut everything up ahead of time

Some recipes require a lot of cutting up fruits and veggies, and cutting is such a huge pain. Cutting in advance will save time in the kitchen.

My family loves stir fries, stir fries are incredibly healthy, stir fries are a breeze to cook — it takes like 5 minutes to cook up a nice stir fry, right? Unfortunately, making a stir fry requires A HUGE AMOUNT of cutting ahead of time. It takes me 30 minutes to cut all the veggies and meat I need for a stir fry. It’s easier if I cut veggies for five minutes here, five minutes there, and have everything all prepped and ready to go at dinnertime so I can whip out that delicious stir fry in 5 minutes.

You needn’t do a big hours-long prepping session on Sunday to save time in the kitchen. I don’t, I just cut things for five minutes here and there. Last night, I cut up a butternut squash for dinner. I used ¼ of the squash in last night’s dinner, I put aside another few cups of squash cubes for dinner tonight, and I froze the rest for next week.

A note about storing cut-up onions and garlic: It’s convenient to keep already cut-up garlic and onions in the fridge, but the problem is that this can make everything else in the fridge taste like onion, and that’s icky. Plastic containers don’t contain that onion smell particularly well. I use glass jars to store cut onions and garlic, because glass will protect the rest of the fridge from smelling/tasting like onion. Recycled jam jars, pickle jars make good onion containers.

5. Leave the peels on

You don’t really need to peel things like potatoes, apples and carrots. The peels are edible, and they contain a great deal of fiber and nutrition. Keeping the peels on is a great way to cut down on food waste, and it also saves you time in the kitchen!

6. Keep your kitchen minimal and organized

Saving time in the kitchen is all about staying organized! When your kitchen is tidy and you know where to find everything, it cuts prep time tremendously. (How many weeks of my life have I wasted searching for that tiny bottle of vanilla extract? Like my car keys, I keep the vanilla extract in a special designated spot.)

The time we spend digging through cupboards hunting for that missing jar of cinnamon, the time we spend frantically running to the store to buy ingredients for dinner, it really adds up.

If you don’t overfill your refrigerator, freezer and pantry with excess food, it’s much easier to keep track of things. I like to keep my kitchen tidy and minimal. It’s important to know what you’ve got on hand, and it’s important to know where everything is before you start preparing a meal.

7. Take inventory once a week

Once a week, look through your fridge, your pantry, your freezer. This is an important step in meal planning,

Not only is a well-organized, pared-down refrigerator satisfying to look at , it also saves a lot of time during dinner prep time. No more digging through drawers looking for that mislaid block of cheddar cheese. No more staring aimlessly into the fridge, trying to decide what to eat.

8. Organize your tools

You know when you’re in the middle of doing something, and you can’t find your potato peeler? It’s very frustrating to be in the midst of dinner-prep and to lose a mission-critical tool that prevents you moving forward to the next step.

Keep your kitchen organized, know where everything is, and avoid owning too many extra kitchen gadgets.

9. Always keep basic staples in stock

It helps when my pantry and refrigerator are well-stocked, because I know I’ve got most of what I need to prepare meals. With a well-stocked pantry, it’s possible to pull lots of delicious meals out of thin air without much planning-ahead. With a well-stocked pantry, I’m less likely to find myself racing to the grocery store at the last minute for that crucial ingredient I’ve forgotten to buy.

10. Keep a digital shopping list

When I run out of key pantry and refrigerator staples, I replace them immediately. Staple items are automatically added to the weekly grocery list, so important staples never go “out of stock.” I keep my grocery list in the notes app on my phone so I can add items as I think of them.

Keeping a running grocery list in a physical notepad or on a whiteboard would probably be just as effective, but I like to keep my list in digital form so I can easily bring it with me to the supermarket.

Transcribing a grocery list from a whiteboard to my phone would be an extra step, so I don’t.

11. Plan in advance

Take things out of the freeze ahead of time. If you know you’re having chicken for dinner at night, take the chicken out of the freezer in the morning and let it defrost all day. It’ll be ready to cook at dinnertime, and this saves the frantic panic when it’s time to make dinner and your main ingredient is still frozen.

Think about leftovers ahead of time. You can save massive time in the kitchen by having already-cooked food ready to go for the next meal.

If you know you’re making two meals with similar ingredients, you can prepare both meals at the same time.

12. Mise en place

Have you ever watched TV chefs with their little bowls of pre-measured, pre-cut ingredients, everything assembled and ready to go? This is a great tactic for saving time in the kitchen. Famous French pastry chefs call it mise en place, or putting everything in place before you start.

I don’t always do mise en place for everything I cook — it can be overkill for a quick meal, but mise en place really eliminates a lot of chaos when you’re doing something more complicated.

13. Canned and frozen vegetables are great

Canned bans and canned tomatoes are great items to have on hand. Dried beans are fantastic, but you need to plan in advance (dried beans take a long time to soak and cook.) Canned beans are a great convenience when you need beans in a hurry.

Making a healthy, low-sodium pasta sauce with canned, already-cooked tomatoes is a breeze.

Frozen vegetables like asparagus and carrots are already cut, and they don’t need to cook as long as their fresh counterparts. This is a big timesaver!

14. Leverage your freezer

There will be nights when you won’t want to prepare an entire home-cooked meal. There will be nights when the hour before dinner is too hectic to cook anything, and there’ll be times when you just won’t feel like it. This is where storing leftovers in the freezer comes in handy. Boom, a home-cooked dinner ready to go!

15. Slow cookers are an amazing time saving tool

If you can’t be home to cook something in the hour before dinner, slow cookers are a great way to prepare a healthy, home-cooked meal. Cut up the meat and vegetables the night before, then throw it in the slow cooker in the morning.

16. Batch cook and feed yourself all week

Cook a whole chicken, or a big pot roast. Portion it out, repurpose it in various ways all week long. Bake a big lasagna on Sunday night and eat it for the next three days. Make a meatloaf and use the leftovers in a meat sauce for pasta. Double the quantity of whatever you’re cooking so you can freeze half of it for another meal (just be careful not to forget about your leftovers in the freezer!)

This is where meal-planning is so crucial: You can plan to repurpose ingredients throughout the week to save yourself time. This week, I knew I wanted to use roasted butternut squash for two meals. On Monday night, I cut the squash into cubes and roasted it. On Tuesday night, half of the roasted squash was waiting in the fridge so I could throw dinner together in 15 minutes.

17. The microwave is your friend

A microwave can quickly defrost something, it can prepare baked potatoes in 10 minutes, it can melt butter/coconut oil in seconds, it can warm up bread and tortillas in seconds. If you’re relying on freezer meals throughout the week, a microwave is a must for quickly reheating food.

18. Keep your knives sharp

If your knives are sharp, you’re less likely to hurt yourself. Sharp knives make slicing and dicing 1000% easier. Cutting up meat and vegetables is a real pain, one of the biggest time-sucks in the kitchen. When your knives are sharp, you don’t need to struggle as much. It’ll be much quicker, much easier to chop everything.

19. Set a timer

Over time, you’ll learn how much time you need to do various kitchen tasks. Many kitchen tasks don’t need to be supervised. You can set a timer, walk away, and do something else.

Don’t waste time standing in front of a pot waiting for water to boil. Don’t waste time standing in front of a saucepan full of food waiting for it to cook. You know that the steak needs to cook for 4 minutes per side, so set a timer and spend those 4 minutes doing something else.

I like to divide stovetop cooking into 5 levels of attention:

Low heat: I don’t stand around and watch it cook. On low heat, I set a timer, walk away for 20 minutes and don’t on check on it.

Medium heat: On medium heat, I’ll check it and stir it around every 2 to 3 minutes or so. I spend those few minutes doing other tasks.

High heat: All eyes on the pan!

**Important note: Heat up a skillet or pan before you put any food in it. Over medium heat, it takes 5 minutes to heat the pan. Put your pan on the burner, turn on the heat, set a timer for 5 minutes, walk away, and come back when you’re ready to cook. Standing around for 5 minutes waiting for the pan to be hot enough is a huge timewaster.

***Even more important: You don’t actually want to burn your house down or torch your food, so don’t ignore that timer when it buzzes. It’s important to keep an eye on the stove/oven whenever it’s turned on.

20. Clean up as you go

Nothing worse than finishing a lovely meal and facing a completely trashed kitchen. Cleaning up is the biggest time-suck, and definitely the least-fun aspect of preparing homecooked meals. When you clean as you’re cooking, it cuts down on the number of pots and pans and dishes waiting in the sink when the meal is ready.

Cleaning as you go also keeps your workspace uncluttered, which limits the chaos involved in cooking.

There’s often downtime between cooking steps. When you’re cooking, there’ll probably be some passive time where you’re waiting for something to boil or simmer or bake. You can use this time to wash a few dishes and keep your workspace tidy. Cleaning as you go makes cleaning up so much more manageable at the end of the meal.

So, those are my best tips on how to save time in the kitchen

I don’t always cook a meal from scratch every night. When I do, there are lots of tips and tricks that help me save time in the kitchen.

Because Eric had a heart attack, this is an important priority for us as a family. Therefore, I do make dinner prep time a priority. I block out one hour a day, from 4:30 to 5:30 pm for this (at the expense of other things.) Usually I don’t spend the entire hour actually cooking, but cleanup is always part of it.