No matter what your attitude to cooking, it’s safe to say we all appreciate spending less time in the kitchen. Practice does make perfect, and over time improved kitchen skills will help you speed up, but these tips will free up your time immediately!

If you have any other time-saving cooking ideas that we’ve missed out, let us know about them in the comments.

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Get in touch with your wild side and tear up your mushrooms by hand. Not only is it much quicker than slicing them with a knife, but you also end up with lovely textured chunks that add a little variety to a recipe. We use this technique in our Portobello Mushroom & Pesto Pasta for just this reason, and it works a treat.

It might not be the most obvious peeling utensil, but a spoon is perfect for removing the soft skin of ginger without cutting off loads of the inside of it in the process! You can peel ginger in seconds this way – it’s a whole lot less time consuming than using a peeler and less wasteful than using a knife. We use this trick whenever we’re cooking with ginger in a recipe, as in our Fragrant Cambodian Fish Amok Curry recipe for example.

Garlic, peeled ginger, mushrooms (when tearing isn’t enough), carrots, onions… When time’s against you, pretty much anything that needs to be finely sliced can simply be grated instead. Take a look at our Pork & Leek Sausage Bolognese recipe for an example of some serious grating that keeps the cooking time down to just 20 minutes. 

If a recipe doesn’t mind you mixing up your ingredients, you can take time saving one step further than grating by blitzing everything in a food processor. Suddenly, everything is ready in seconds and you’re already well on your way to clawing back that lost hour from daylight savings.

One of the less well-known time saving tricks on this list, but if peeling endless potatoes is your idea of hell, this will blow your mind:

1. Run a knife around the middle of each potato, cutting just through the skin, until you score a full circle around each
2. Pop the potatoes, skins still on, into a saucepan and boil them in water until cooked
3. Drain the cooked potatoes, run them under some cold water, then remove the skin from each potato one at a time simply peeling it off!

This time saving trick is well-known in areas water shortages are common, but not so much in the UK. Rather than thawing frozen meat by sealing it in a bag and running it under cold water, simply place it on an aluminium or stainless steel tray to defrost. These metals transfer heat from the air to the frozen meat, defrosting it quickly and without wasting a drop of water.  

When boiling water on the hob, make sure you put a lid on the saucepan to bring it to the boil much more quickly. Also if you boil water with a kettle first then it’ll take way less time to bring it to boiling on the hob. 

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Let us know what you think of these time saving tricks in the comments! If you liked this post, why not use the time you save with these hacks to make one of our 3 Healthy Desserts You Can Make In 3 Minutes?