How to Read a Recipe Before You Start Cooking

How to read a recipe before cooking comes down to one habit: read the whole thing once, start to finish, before you pick up a knife. On that read, look for the steps where you wait, gather what you’ll need shortly before you need it, and look up any word you don’t know while nothing is on the heat.

Read it through once

Most recipe trouble starts at step four, when it turns out the dough needed to chill for an hour or the butter should have been softening since breakfast. One read-through catches that. Look for:

Total time and active time. “Ready in 45 minutes” may not include marinating, chilling or soaking.
Yield. Is it enough for the people you’re feeding? If not, scale the recipe before you shop.
Equipment. Pan size, a food processor, a thermometer, a roasting tin with a rack. Find them now, not mid-step.
Oven temperature and when to preheat. Ovens take a while to heat up; the recipe may only mention it in the method.
How each ingredient arrives. “1 cup walnuts, chopped” is measured whole and then chopped; “1 cup chopped walnuts” is measured after chopping. “Butter, softened” means it needs time out of the fridge. “Divided” means the ingredient is used in more than one step, so don’t tip it all in at once.
Notes at the end. Recipe writers often put the most useful advice, and the make-ahead options, after the method.

If you’re reading from a web page, the ingredients and steps can be buried. Getting just the recipe from a website covers ways to strip the page down first.

Mise en place, sensibly

Mise en place is French for “putting in place”: restaurant cooks measure and prepare every ingredient before service starts, so nothing holds them up once orders arrive. At home, doing all of it up front is often more washing up than it’s worth, and it can mean chopping for twenty minutes before anything is cooking.

A more practical version:

Gather everything before you start. Get every ingredient and tool out. You’ll find what’s missing while there’s still time to change plans.
Prepare the first few steps fully. Whatever goes into the pan in the opening minutes, such as the onion, garlic and spices, should be ready before the heat goes on.
Prepare the rest during waiting time. While the onions soften or the water comes to the boil, chop what comes next.
Measure baking ingredients up front. Baking moves quickly and leaves little room for correction, so this is where full mise en place earns its keep.

Spot the waiting steps

Waiting steps are where the time hides, and where the opportunities are. Mark them on your read-through:

Before you can start: soaking beans, thawing meat in the fridge, softening butter, marinating.
Heating up: preheating the oven, bringing a big pot of water to the boil.
Hands-off cooking: simmering, roasting, baking, rising dough.
After cooking: resting meat, cooling a cake before icing, chilling a dessert to set.

The first group decides when you have to start, sometimes the day before. The middle groups are your free time: that’s when the salad gets made and the pans get washed. If you’re cooking more than one dish, the waiting steps are how they fit together; cooking several dishes at once shows how to plan them backward from when you eat.

Unfamiliar terms

Look up words you don’t know during the read-through, not with butter foaming in the pan. A few that trip people up:

Simmer: small bubbles breaking the surface gently. A boil is large, rolling bubbles.
Sweat: cook vegetables gently, without browning, until soft.
Deglaze: pour liquid into a hot pan and scrape up the browned bits stuck to the bottom.
Fold: combine gently with a spatula, cutting down through the mixture and turning it over, to keep air in.
Until fragrant: usually garlic or spices in hot fat, often less than a minute. Move on before they brown.
Al dente: pasta cooked until tender but still slightly firm in the centre.

If a term matters to the result and you still aren’t sure, decide what you’ll do before you start, so it isn’t a decision made under pressure.

Keeping your place

The last skill is not losing your place once you’re cooking. Some simple ways:

Tick off steps on a printout, or put a clip at the step you’re on.
Move used ingredients aside. Once something is in the pan, its container goes to the other side of the counter or into the sink. A glance shows what’s left.
Read the next step before you finish the current one, so you know what’s coming while your hands are still busy.

Cook with Kre is one way to keep your place for you. Before you start, it shows an overview of the plan, with the steps and rough durations. Then it gives you one manageable step at a time with the amounts in it, has you gather or prepare things just before they’re needed, and explains unfamiliar terms briefly, with more if you ask. See how Kre cooks with you.

Sources

Wikipedia, Mise en place