WeeklyDelight
Cooking guide

Prep, Cook and Total Time: Reading a Recipe's Clock

Three numbers sit at the top of every recipe, and the one that decides whether dinner is at seven or at nine is the last.

Prep time is the work before anything goes on the heat: chopping, weighing, mixing. Cook time is the time the food spends cooking. Google's documentation for recipe pages defines them the same way, as the time to prepare the ingredients and workspace and the time to actually cook the dish, and asks for both.

Neither covers waiting. A marinade, a dough rising, a cake cooling before it can be iced, tofu pressed under a weight: the cook is free during these, but the dish is not ready. On this site that waiting is read from the method itself and added to the total, so a focaccia that proves overnight is never listed as a 50-minute bake.

What "total" means here

  • Total is start to finish: prep, cooking and every wait the method requires.
  • Where the method gives a range ("prove 1 to 2 hours", "simmer 2½ to 3 hours"), the total is a range too.
  • Where the method needs time it does not state ("cool completely"), the page says "at least" and names the stage. A number that hides an untimed stage would be a promise the recipe cannot keep.
  • A wait that happens while you do something else ("chill the base while you make the filling") is not added twice.
  • Optional make-ahead steps and storage are not part of the total.

What no recipe time includes

Heating the oven, bringing a large pan of water to the boil, finding the tin, and the washing-up are not in any recipe's minutes, here or elsewhere. Your hob, your pan and the size of your onions all move the numbers. Treat every time as the recipe's estimate and the cue in the method ("until golden", "until a skewer comes out clean") as the instruction.

Using the times to plan

Read the method before you shop. If the total is much larger than prep plus cook, there is a wait in it, and the waiting is usually the part that can happen the day before. The 30-minute filters and collections on this site use the total, never prep plus cook, so a recipe with a two-hour marinade is never offered as a quick dinner.

Recipes that use this