Aside from certain master recipes, such as those for stocks and beans, every dish here is engineered to take 45 minutes or less.įor amateur cooks, his approach could have been a dark ride down a dead-end tunnel had Bittman not provided strategies on how to work faster and techniques on how to prep fruits and vegetables efficiently. As such, “Fast” features recipes that ask people to prep as they cook, providing tight windows to complete the tasks. He believes those idle minutes waiting for water to boil, ovens to heat or vegetables to cook can better be spent chopping onions, grating cheese or mincing garlic. I’m the guy who makes his own guanciale and obsesses over the fire in my offset smoker, staying up all night to maintain the proper temperature to slow-cook a Texas brisket.īittman argues that mise en place, the time-honored approach of prepping ingredients ahead of time, is an obsolete concept in the contemporary, time-depleted kitchen. I’m not typically seeking out recipes to make Fast Pho or Cheat-a-Little Pizza with store-bought dough or - avert your eyes, barbecue friends - a chopped pork sandwich in 45 minutes. In many ways, the cookbook is not designed for people like me, childless gastronomes who, when not dining on the town, want to spend more time in the kitchen, not less.

“Fast” spans more than 1,050 pages, most packed with recipes (approximately 2,000 of them, including variations), techniques and tips for working smarter in the kitchen. Now one of the most influential and prolific voices in food has joined a crowded field of meals-in-minutes celebrities: New York Times columnist and author Mark Bittman has just released “ How to Cook Everything Fast: A Better Way to Cook Great Food” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $35), the fifth in his series of dense, recipe-rich tomes that place an emphasis on food preparation, not food-porn photos.

The publishing world has created a whole genre of cookbooks designed to help the harried put food on the table during a workday that seems to end only when head hits pillow. Nor, it seems, does anyone have time to cook. It’s no coincidence that fast-casual restaurants are on the rise we don’t even have time to eat anymore. The 1960s launched the trend, but over the past decade, speed - as in swiftness, not stimulant drugs - has been used to sell almost everything in the nervous, second-hand sweep of modern life: wireless networks, ovens, microprocessors, office couriers, you name it. (Deb Lindsey/For The Washington Post tableware from Crate and Barrel)

Bittman how to cook everything