The recipes are the easy part
Six people are coming at 6:30. You’re making a mushroom lasagna, roast potatoes, green beans and an apple crisp. Each recipe on its own is fine. The trouble starts when you cook them together: the lasagna and the potatoes both want the oven, the beans are best made at the last minute, and every recipe was written as if it’s the only thing you’re cooking.
Most of the stress of hosting isn’t the cooking. It’s the timing: which dish to start first, when the oven is free, and what you should be doing at 5:45.
Here’s how to work it out, with or without an app.
Step one: work back from when you want to eat
Write down the time you want to sit down. Then, for each dish, add up its steps and count backward from that time. A lasagna that takes 15 minutes to put together, 45 minutes in the oven and 15 minutes to rest has to start an hour and fifteen minutes before dinner, plus the time it takes to heat the oven.
Do this for every dish, and the earliest start is your start time. Most people do it the other way round. They start “around 4” and hope, which is how the potatoes come out an hour early and go soft while the lasagna is still baking.
Step two: give the oven one temperature at a time
An oven can only be at one temperature. Two dishes at 375°F can share it on two racks. A dish at 425°F and one at 350°F can’t, so one has to go in after the other, and that pushes your start time earlier.
When you choose the recipes, look at their oven temperatures. If every oven dish can cook at the same temperature, the whole meal gets shorter. Roast potatoes are fine at 375°F if you give them a few more minutes, and most crisps and crumbles are too.
Step three: spread out the work that needs your hands
A recipe’s total time includes waiting: the lasagna baking, the crisp in the oven. The work that needs you, like chopping, layering and stirring, should fall in those waits, not all in the last 20 minutes.
Leave quick stove dishes, like blanched green beans, until the end. They taste best fresh, and the stove is free while the oven dishes finish and rest.
Step four: do what you can the day before
A crumble topping, a sauce and chopped vegetables all keep in the fridge overnight. Moving them to the day before takes time off the day itself, and it means fewer steps to keep track of while guests arrive.
How batch cook works out the timing (Pro and Family)
Batch cook in Pantryfy puts several of your recipes on one schedule. You choose the recipes and say how many people you’re cooking for. Pantryfy reads the steps and times in each recipe and plans every step from the moment you start, then tells you how long it all takes, so working back from when you want to eat is one subtraction: a plan of 1 hour 52 minutes for dinner at 6:30 starts at 4:38. It treats the oven, the stove and your hands as things that can’t be in two places at once, so two dishes never need the oven at different temperatures at the same time. Steps that can be done ahead go on the evening before. The schedule reads like a list: 0:00, cook the mushrooms and garlic; 0:12, heat the oven to 375°F; and so on down to dinner.
What else it does:
- Suggests dishes, if you want it to. Turn on “Suggest my recipes” and Pantryfy picks sides or something to finish from your saved recipes to go with yours. Turn on “Search the web” to look for one more recipe. Checked allergens are filtered out of suggestions.
- Shows the schedule as a chart. There’s one row per dish, showing its oven time, stove time and hands-on work, so you can see when the oven is busy.
- Lets you swap a dish or move a step. Swap the potatoes for a side that doesn’t need the oven, or move a step 15 minutes later, and Pantryfy works the schedule out again.
- Saves it to your meal plan. Saving puts the batch on that day of your meal plan and reserves its ingredients from your pantry. The Shopping list button makes one shopping list for every dish.
- Walks you through the cooking. Start cooking shows one step at a time across all the dishes, with the ingredients and a timer when a step has one. If you fall behind, push everything 10 minutes later.
- Shares the schedule and keeps it. Send the schedule to whoever is helping with a link. The next time you host, open the batch and cook it again for a new date and number of people.
It works for a Sunday of cooking ahead, too. Choose “Batch for the week”, and the number of people becomes the number of portions.
Pantryfy suggests dishes from the recipes you’ve saved, so the more recipes you save, the more it has to choose from. If you only have a couple of mains saved, it tells you which part of the meal is missing instead of making one up.
Plan Saturday’s dinner on Friday
Save the recipes you want to make, then plan the batch the day before and check the start time. If it’s earlier than you’d like, swap the dish that needs a different oven temperature. Batch cook is part of Pro and Family. If you’re hosting a potluck instead, the potluck guide shows how guests can each bring a dish.