- 31 Dec, 2025 *
I recently wrote about kitchen optimizations. People are complaining about it. Some of them disagree about how to boil water, but most of them are complaning for the usual reasons: they dislike the very idea of optimizing kitchen time or they want to advocate for certain tools. So, first, I’ll review those latter objections:
The whole idea of optimizing kitchen time
I can’t, and don’t want to, tell anyone to take on the project of being more efficient in the kitchen. That’s their choice. But many people seem to be drastically underestimating how much savings is available. Saving seven minutes a day, for a year, will get you more than a 40-hour work week. Many people would go to great lengths (much great…
- 31 Dec, 2025 *
I recently wrote about kitchen optimizations. People are complaining about it. Some of them disagree about how to boil water, but most of them are complaning for the usual reasons: they dislike the very idea of optimizing kitchen time or they want to advocate for certain tools. So, first, I’ll review those latter objections:
The whole idea of optimizing kitchen time
I can’t, and don’t want to, tell anyone to take on the project of being more efficient in the kitchen. That’s their choice. But many people seem to be drastically underestimating how much savings is available. Saving seven minutes a day, for a year, will get you more than a 40-hour work week. Many people would go to great lengths (much greater than learning some dishwasher optimizations) to get a full week off work. Perhaps seven minutes a day is too optimistic; depending on your kitchen setup and how much work you do there, it might be. But even a fraction of that is enough time to really matter.
Another sub-category of this complaint goes: kitchen time is good for the soul, and not to be optimized away. I, again, do not care to dictate anyone’s spiritual decisions, but I hope they have a sense of the costs and benefits of an intentionally casual approach. Is it really worth whole working days per year? Is is really less meditative, in the long term, to learn a more efficient routine and follow it?
Some people espouse views that seem to entail that they should sabotage their kitchen efficiency for the sake of even more spiritual benefits. I don’t think they do this, though.
Kitchen time is better optimized by improving tools or recipes
Yes, using the right equipment and choosing certain recipes is a lot of the kitchen-efficiency game. My posts are about how to optimize your time, holding all that stuff constant. The subject gets much less attention than it deserves.
And, finally:
The boiling water example
I didn’t explain this clearly enough before. I have a gas stove and an electric kettle. The electric kettle can boil the water faster than the gas stove. My options are:
- Don’t worry about boiling the water quickly, because this step shouldn’t be the limiting factor of anything.
- Boil the water on the stove.
- Boil the water in the electric kettle.
- Boil some of the water on the stove and some of it in the kettle, then combine.
Surprisingly many people believe (1), but boiling water is very often on the limiting path for me, especially because there’s almost always passive time after the water boils. If I am making lunch for my kids and myself, and if that lunch includes pasta, the pasta-making process is almost always on the critical path.
There’s also a lot of advocacy for (3), because the electric kettle puts more heat into water per unit time. If you don’t lose much energy in the transfer, though, (4) is better than (3): I can boil 1/3 of a gallon on the stove and 2/3 of a gallon in the electric kettle faster than I can boil a full gallon in the electric kettle. If this seems counterintuitive, imagine boiling a single cup on the stove and the rest in the kettle: you save time with the kettle (because you’re not boiling as much), and the cup on the stove is boiling already when you go to combine them.
This is a simplification: some of the water boils away, there’s heat lost in the transfer, there’s the time it takes to actually split and combine the water, and you need to make sure you can do the more complicated routine as safely as the simpler one. Just empirically, though, I find I get a significant speedup.
Maybe you have an amazing kettle or stove that makes this optimization irrelevant; maybe boiling water is never on your critical path; maybe you boil water only rarely. In that case, this doesn’t matter for you–but there’s probably something else in the kitchen that does.
P.S.: Whatever else you do, don’t boil way too much water in a time-sensitive situation. You might still want to quibble about the example above, but I hope we can agree there’s no point in waiting on an extra half-gallon of water you’re just going to put down the drain in fifteen minutes.
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