How to Cook Everything Fast Revised Edition

Introduction

Time to Cook

The way we feed ourselves is always changing, evolving with the stages in our lives, the expanding availability of ingredients, and our knowledge of different preparation and cooking techniques.

As eaters we’ve become more sophisticated. We’re learning to understand and appreciate global flavors and cooking traditions, while paying closer attention to where our food comes from and where it’s going in the future. We know what eating well is but don’t always have the time to prepare meals at home, so we settle for some spin on eating fast.

Yet as I asserted in 2014 with the first edition of this book, cooking remains an essential human activity. It can relax us after long, stressful days, bring us closer to our families, and put a lifetime of nourishment and endless eating possibilities right at our fingertips. The trick is to get food on the table faster—and better—than the abundance of restaurants and food companies jockeying to feed us.

Life may have become more complicated, but cooking can become simpler.

The fact is that you do have time to cook: You just need better recipes. Imagine a road map that captures the rhythm of the kitchen, where preparation and cooking happen seamlessly. Soup begins to simmer while you prepare more vegetables for the pot; oil shimmers in a skillet as you chop an onion; broiled meat rests while rice steams. This is naturally fast cooking, the kind experienced cooks do intuitively.

Fast cooking involves strategy not compromise. Here I take seemingly complicated dishes like wonton soup and chicken Parmesan and reduce them to their essentials, taking them apart and reconstructing them with all the flavors and textures you love about the originals. Smart, easy techniques, like cutting meat into smaller pieces for lightning-quick braises and harnessing the power of the broiler, give you all the pleasure of eating homemade meals with minimal work and—perhaps more important—time.

The result is delicious food prepared from real ingredients—quickly. There are plenty of shortcuts here, and for the most part they don’t compromise flavor or texture. (When they do, they’re worth it.) As a practical purist, I open cans and boxes like everyone else, provided what’s inside is nutritious and minimally processed. (There’s a checklist of what qualifies as convenience food in this book; if you’re already a How to Cook Everything fan, there won’t be any surprises.)

This completely revised and updated How to Cook Everything Fast is both a series of strategies and a collection of innovative recipes that do the planning and organizing for you. And this time, photographs both inspire and provide additional details.

Whether you’re a beginner hoping to learn how to weave homemade meals into your regular routine or an experienced cook looking to become more efficient, I can help you get where you want to be—all in 30 minutes or less.

The Fast Kitchen

Fast doesn’t have to mean frantic. If you use your head, cooking quickly can be pleasurable and rewarding. As with many skills, learning to be fluid, comfortable, and confident in the kitchen comes with practice. Here the lessons are built into the recipes, so you can just dive in and, without realizing it, hone your skills and become naturally more efficient whenever you cook.

REAL-TIME COOKING

The process of getting a home-cooked meal on the table involves four tasks: shopping, preparing, cooking, and cleaning up. Common wisdom would have you complete these steps linearly, finishing one before beginning the next. Shop. Unpack the groceries. Wash, trim, chop, slice, dice. Stand at the stove. Serve. Eat. Tackle the dishes.

But that approach ignores the natural rhythm of experienced cooks. For them, the action ebbs and flows within a span of time rather than to the beat of a ticking clock. While something simmers, roasts, or sautés, you have the flexibility to make a loop between counter, fridge, and stove, pause at the sink to wash some dishes, or work on making a salad. Efficiency comes when you put time on your side and maximize every minute.

This is real-time cooking, where gathering, preparing, and combining ingredients become one seamless endeavor. It’s both faster and easier than the more common step-by-step process and embodies concepts that are not only fundamental to these recipes but applicable to all others. Embrace real-time cooking, and you’ll be looking at the components of cooking—food, tools, and techniques—from a completely different perspective.

Helping Hands

Too many cooks don’t spoil the broth; some of the best moments in the kitchen involve sharing a countertop with family and friends. Even one extra set of hands can be a huge help. (If there’s a youngster around who’s willing and able, you’ll be spreading the joy into the next generation.) In fact these recipes are perfect for divvying up tasks among all your helpers; see "Do the Blue."

Rethinking the Meal

It’s not a new concept, but you can cook one dish—like pasta, salad, soup, or even eggs—and call it dinner; or build a more substantial meal by adding simply executed snacks, sides, or desserts. So the bulk of the recipes in this book are for main courses that eat like meals, dishes that bring several components (such as meat, vegetables, and starches) together on one plate in ways that both retain their distinction and integrity and create a whole that’s more than the sum of its parts.

To reflect the way I—and many others—are eating now, one big difference since the first edition of this book is the balance of meat to vegetables in these recipes. There are also a lot more vegetarian and vegan main dishes and variations.

If you have the inclination, you can make a snack to begin the meal or try a salad, vegetable, noodle, rice, or grain dish from Components and Sides, which are easy to prepare while you’re cooking the mains (you’ll find specific suggestions in many of the recipe headnotes). These strategies provide plenty of options for assembling all kinds of fast meals, from everyday kitchen-table lunches and dinners to breakfasts, parties, and celebrations. (For a tutorial on other recipe features, see A New Kind of Recipe.)

Fast Ingredients

A well-stocked kitchen is the backbone of fast cooking; this section lists the staples to keep in your pantry, fridge, and freezer and provides a quick rundown of which time-saving ingredients are worth buying. I’ve also included a substitution chart to inspire improvisation when you don’t have (or don’t fancy) a particular ingredient. And so you can vary both flavor profiles and key ingredients easily, many recipes include additional spins—variations—on the main recipe. But before you can cook, you’ve got to shop.

Shopping for Speed

The faster you shop, the sooner you get into the kitchen. Making a shopping list is an obvious advantage and worth reminding you about here; it’s easier to keep one perpetually going on your phone or an old-fashioned notepad than to create one from scratch every time you shop. Then try to strike a balance between spontaneous, impromptu shopping—like stopping after work for fresh vegetables and meat—and weekly or even biweekly stocking up. Since the most efficient scenario is to cook from what you already have at home as often as possible, the goal is to get in the habit of using short-storing foods first. The lists here will help you do that.

Every kitchen should have the foods in the charts that follow. Some, like salt and pepper, are common sense, while others are the kinds of instant flavor boosters that are essential for fast cooking, like soy sauce and real Parmesan cheese. Other flavor-packed ingredients (not absolute essentials but nice to have around) include olives, capers, anchovies, dried tomatoes, tahini, miso, and (of course) bacon.

THE MYTH OF MISE EN PLACE

Although many terrific ideas have moved from restaurants to home kitchens, mise en place—prepping all the ingredients ahead of time—isn’t one of them. The term, which means put in place, is perfect if you have an assistant who gets all the food chopped, measured, neatly arranged in cups on a tray, and put within arm’s reach of the stove before you turn it on. But for people in home kitchens, doing all the prep ahead of time often leaves you twiddling your thumbs, waiting for food to cook. Yet this is how most cookbooks and videos direct you to work through recipes. Consider this book a call to break the habit of getting everything put in place before you start cooking.

Pantry Staples

Consider these the long-storing essentials you keep in either the fridge or a cupboard. As you explore the recipes, you’ll customize this list (and those that follow) to prioritize, add, and subtract depending on what you cook most.

Fridge Staples

For the most part, these are the least perishable of the perishables.

Freezer Staples

I treat the freezer like the pantry on ice. Lucky you if you’ve got space for a big one.

Interchangeable Ingredients

Whenever a recipe calls for something you don’t have, use this chart for Plan B. (Cooking times may vary.)

SHORTCUT CHEAT SHEET

Many will tell you that the key to fast cooking is to stock your kitchen with prepared convenience foods so that you’re left with very little work to do once you get home. While some might occasionally be useful, others sacrifice too much in the way of quality, flavor, and nutritional value. It’s best to make them yourself; see the page references for recipes and information. Here’s my breakdown:

Worth It

Canned tomatoes

Canned beans

Canned tuna (preferably packed in olive oil but water packed is fine too)

Frozen fruits and vegetables

Panko (sort of; see Croutons for even better bread crumbs)

Deli meat (as long as it’s of superior quality and you can get it sliced to order; otherwise roast your own proteins)

Preground spices and spice blends

Some dried herbs

Not Worth It

Canned or packaged stock (see Fastest Vegetable Stock and variations) or use water

Jarred salsa and tomato sauce (see Fresh Tomato Salsa and Tomato Sauce to make your own)

Packaged hummus (see Hummus and Vegetable Pita Pockets)

Rotisserie chicken (to roast whole chicken)

Prechopped vegetables

Pregrated Parmesan

Prewashed salad greens (just invest in a spinner)

Bottled salad dressing (see Vinaigrette)

Just about any other shortcut ingredient or component

Fast Equipment

A cluttered kitchen is a slow kitchen. I’ve grouped all the equipment you’ll need to cook from this book according to how it will be used, loosely in order of importance and frequency.

Fast Strategies

The practice of prepping and cooking simultaneously is by far the biggest key to fast cooking that I have to offer here; it can be applied to boiling, steaming, pan-cooking, roasting, baking, broiling, grilling, and even braising and frying. But I’m always thinking about ways to be more efficient in the kitchen, so here is a preview of the other time-saving tips that are incorporated into recipes throughout the book.

The Rinse Cycle

Rinsing fruits and vegetables isn’t always included in recipe Prep directions because I assume you will do it how and when you see fit (or not). But here are a few efficient ways to work it into the flow: If you have a bunch of different produce, consider putting them all in a colander together and rinsing under cold water all at once. If you run out of room in the colander, do them in batches and put what’s done on towels.

If vegetables are going to be used toward the end of a recipe, wash while you have downtime as other things cook. Sometimes it’s easiest to run water over foods like carrots, cabbage, or leeks after they’ve been trimmed or peeled or even sliced, since you’re going to get rid of the peels anyway. (See A Word About Food Safety.)

Consolidate Chopping

If a recipe uses chopped garlic, ginger, and/or chiles at the same time, don’t chop those things one at a time. Instead, peel the garlic and ginger, trim the chiles, put them all in a pile, then start chopping them all together using a rocking motion until they’re chopped fairly evenly. I rarely call for mincing, but when I do, just keep going until the bits are smaller.

Thinner (and Smaller) = Faster

This is obvious but worth remembering: Big, thick pieces take longer to cook through than foods cut small or sliced thin. That’s as true of vegetables as it is of meat, and with a knife in your hand, you have quite a bit of control over the size and shape of the ingredients before they hit the pan. And grated vegetables cook the fastest of all; see the next point.

Grate for Puréeing

If you’re making a puréed vegetable soup, grate the vegetables so that they become tender as quickly as possible. After all, it makes no difference what they look like at the beginning.

Start with Heat

Appliances, pots, pans, water, and fat take time to get hot. So before doing anything else, turn on the oven, heat the broiler, and/or set water to boil. And since many of the recipes start with sautéing or pan-cooking, you can preheat skillets too. (In cases where the Prep will take more than a couple minutes, I direct you to heat pans on one of the lowest settings until you’re ready to cook.)

Adjust the Heat

While I’ve tried my best to balance the simultaneous flows of cooking and prepping, there may be times when you get slightly out of sync. Don’t worry! You can always raise, lower, or turn off the heat on the stove to accommodate the speed of your prep work. So if the oil in a skillet is hot, but you haven’t finished chopping the onion that’s supposed to go in it, lower or turn off the heat until you’re ready.

Don’t Wait for the Oven

Unless you’re baking bread, cookies, pie, or cake—or roasting something that requires an initial blast of very high heat—you don’t have to wait for the oven to reach its final temperature before putting the food in. Vegetables are the best examples, but slow-roasted or braised meat and chicken can be started in an oven that hasn’t yet come up to temperature. In some cases the recipe prompts you. In other cases, just judge doneness by visual cues since cooking times will differ from those in the recipes.

Heat Oil in the Oven

Put a rimmed baking sheet or roasting pan with a little oil in the oven as it heats. When you add whatever you’re roasting to the pan, you’ll immediately get the sizzle and sear that you’re looking for on the bottom.

Embrace the Broiler

Broiling is a useful way to provide quick blasts of heat to a lot of food at once while freeing up space on the stove and sparing you the work of cooking in batches. With the rack farther away from the heat, the broiler can also be used for thicker cuts of meat or firmer vegetables that need a little more time to cook through. (I call this long-distance broiling; see Broiling and Maybe Some Grilling for the details.)

Take Advantage of Steam

More efficient than using a real steamer is employing the steam that occurs naturally when you sauté or simmer something with moisture in it—usually vegetables or starches—to cook something else, especially proteins like fish, chicken, or eggs. A skillet of beans simmering with a splash of stock gives off steam, as does bubbling tomato sauce or zucchini cooking with olive oil. Put a lid on any of those pans and you’ve got yourself a steamer for whatever you might lay on top of the cooking food. (For recipes that effectively use steam, including in the microwave, see Microwave-Steamed Tofu with Baby Bok Choy and Miso Drizzle, Steamed Mussels with Garlicky Mayonnaise, and Poached Chicken and Asparagus with Lemon Aïoli. Or see Steamed Vegetables for how to rig a steamer and cook simple vegetables.)

Use Less Liquid for Braising

The amount of liquid that we normally use for braising can take a while to come to an initial boil and a long time at the end to reduce into a sauce. Cut down time on both ends by adding less liquid. Submerge your ingredients in about 1 inch of liquid, cover the pot, and cook, turning occasionally and adding a little more liquid as necessary.

Clean as You Go

A delicious meal is less enjoyable when there’s a messy kitchen waiting for you. Just like you use some natural breaks in the cooking process to prep, use other bits of downtime to clean dishes you’re done using, wipe down counters and cutting boards—that sort of thing.

How to Use This Book

The diagram on the back inside cover is a handy reference for using the recipes. Some of the book’s unique features are worth further explanation.

Gathering Ingredients

To save valuable prep time, I always focus on streamlining ingredients to what’s absolutely necessary. And since the lists for the recipes are essentially shopping lists, all you need to do before you start cooking is to put the required items on the kitchen counter, or at least make sure that you have everything you need handy. Ideally there isn’t much advance planning required—defrosting meat or poultry a day ahead in the fridge perhaps, developing a menu that includes a side or two, that sort of thing.

You should use the ingredients list to give you an accurate idea of how much you need of each item; the recipe directions tell you how to prepare and cook them. To keep shopping simple, I’ve listed produce by simple count unless the amount sort of matters; then the size will be included as a description. If the exact quantity is important, the weight appears.

Fresh herbs are a special case. Unless you have an herb garden, you buy them by the bunch—the size of which will vary—or pick up a small container when you just need a few sprigs. Though how much you need is revealed in the directions, it’s tough for even experienced cooks to estimate the yield. Here’s my solution: When you need a little, the recipe calls for a few sprigs. Otherwise, a whole bunch is directed. Check the quantity in the recipe; if you’ve already got some in the fridge (or again, have a garden), you might not need to buy more. When you do need to buy fresh herbs, figure there will almost certainly be extra. And that’s good news. Interchangeable Ingredients gives you permission to make substitutions, and describes how to store them.

Do the Blue

All recipe directions are listed in blue (Prep) or in black numbered steps (Cook) and reflect the most efficient order and timing of tasks. They might look longer than traditional recipes, but all activity—preparation and cooking—is included in the detail. Believe me, they’re faster.

The sequence and timing of the Prep and Cook steps are written for a single cook, working at a steady pace. There is some overlap and repetition of detail so you don’t have to keep looking back at the ingredient list or the previous instruction. And sometimes cooking continues through multiple steps while you work on the Prep.

The recipes can also accommodate those who feel more comfortable prepping ingredients ahead of time, as well as those who are lucky enough to have a helper in the kitchen. Since Prep steps are highlighted in blue, you can easily identify them when you first look at a recipe and do all the necessary chopping and slicing before you start cooking. Or you can simply say to your helper, You do the blue steps while I do the black (or vice versa). This is really cool.

Component Recipes

How much faster could you cook if some of the work was already done when you started? A lot. So in addition to the hundreds of recipes and variations in this book, I’ve included a handful of Component Recipes (you can think of them as master recipes) that are the basic homemade staples I like to keep stocked in my fridge or freezer at all times—things like vinaigrette, cooked beans, stock, roasted proteins, and tomato sauce. You can buy these, of course, but they’re significantly better if you make them yourself.

Spotlights on Ingredients and Techniques

All How to Cook Everything books include detailed information about buying and storing key ingredients—in lists and tables I call Lexicons. This latest addition to the family works similarly. The difference is that the ingredient features here are streamlined to target their focus on precisely what you need to know in order to cook fast from scratch. These tidbits appear in the recipe introductions, or sometimes in separate notes or sections where they are most useful.

The same goes for techniques. From general topics like maximizing your grill and broiler, to ingredient-specific topics like pressing tofu or shaving hard cheese, these tips will help you cook both better and faster—and learn by doing.

A Word About Food Safety

Fussing over kitchen hygiene while you’re trying to cook isn’t particularly fast. But neither is getting sidelined with a food-borne illness. And though I’m not obsessed with cleanliness, I always say it’s well worth your time to practice the most basic food safety habits.

This means washing your hands before, during, and after handling food, especially when going from raw meats to anything else. Keep all of your work surfaces, sinks, and utensils clean the same way. (Soap and hot water will do the trick; antimicrobial concoctions can promote germ resistance. Use a weak bleach solution once in a while for deep cleaning.) Your refrigerator should always be between 35 and 40°F and your freezer around 0°F (this temperature also helps minimize freezer burn).

Washing fruits and vegetables is really a matter of personal choice. At one end of the spectrum are people who use soapy water, especially on produce that’s visibly dirty or has been known to have problems—like melons, greens, and squash; other folks wash virtually nothing. I usually come down somewhere in the middle and decide case by case based on what it looks like and whether I’m going to eat it raw or cooked; I tend to be quite blasé about food that I’m cooking, for better or worse.

All of those rules are easy enough to follow. But things do get a little more complicated when we talk about bacteria and cooking temperatures. Sometimes meat, poultry, fish, or eggs contain disease-causing bacteria. There are two ways to minimize the risk: The first is to cook thoroughly, which can result in dry food that isn’t ideal from your palate’s perspective. (I don’t do that myself, and my recipes don’t recommend doing it either, but it’s a judgment call.) The second way to minimize the risk of harmful bacteria is to buy the best-quality products you can from sources you trust the most. This I do recommend. It’s not a failsafe, but it’s much less of a sacrifice than a life of eating well-done steak.

Browsing the Recipe Titles

Deciding what sounds good to eat on any given day is a crucial part of efficient cooking. The recipe titles should be clear,