Gift ($10)Efficiency Is Everything In Cooking(Eat for $21/week) or ($20)Efficiency Is Everything Perfect Eating(Eat for $11/week) for someone who would love tasty, healthy, efficient, low cost recipes.
Protein Per Second was the original proposed study for eating food based on time and any long-time follower knows how many times this study ran into a wall of complexity. Today we have 2 recipes, part of the ongoing first round of data collection. These hit 1000 Calories Per Minute, meaning you spend less than 2 minutes per day actively preparing food. Its pretty crazy spending 1 active minute in the kitchen at 5pm, being done and having ~40 minutes until dinner is ready.
I have 2 recipes to share. The first is my wife’s favorite, Broccoli/Chicken Sesame Rice. The latter is a novelty 2 minute pizza to show what’s possible.
“Flavor is pretty good, has good texture.”- Dr. Mandy Kirk, and she’s particular with her American Asian foods. This is pretty versatile too, if you don’t like it, change the sauce or vegetable.
Speed: 1000 Calories Per Minute
Passive Time: 20-90 minutes
Active Time: 2 minutes
On Sauces:
Go to your Asian aisle and pick out a few sauces. Not to overcomplicate this, but if the sauce is a common dish name like General Tso’s it’s worth trying. This is different than a single ingredient sauce like oyster sauce or fish sauce. We liked sesame sauce and Kung Pow sauce. The sauce wasn’t even great, but it still hit the spot.
On Rice:
I use a rice cooker and max out as many cups as I can make. If you don’t have a rice cooker, look up the Americas Test Kitchen Cooking Rice. Perfect Rice, super easy, but you need to understand your ratios. Life changing video, I’m no longer scared to cook large or small quantities of rice.
Ingredients-
>Bottle of Sesame Sauce (or any other Asian aisle sauce)
>(Max Quantity Rice Cooker, 8 cooked cups) Rice
>Cooked Chicken Breast/Broccoli/Any favorite roasted or microwave steamed vegetable
Directions-
1-Pour rice and water into rice cooker
2-Hit buttons to start
This should take 40-60 seconds.
Serve this with baked chicken breasts or roasted vegetables/microwave steamed vegetables. Roasted broccoli is a favorite.
Plating order goes: rice on bottom, chicken/vegetables in the middle, then sauce. Head to your dining location and either eat, or mix then eat.
To hit your time goals you are limited to only 1 vegetable or premade mix of multiple vegetables. Make sure they are decently cut up, frozen vegetables or more expensive refrigerated vegetables can be bought already cut. Vegetables can quickly be thrown onto a pan and put in the oven to let cook for 30+ minutes depending on size and temp.
There are endless combinations with various meats, veggies, and sauces. If you didn’t like one sauce/vegetable, try another.
This is more of a novelty than genuine pizza. I believe this is technically flat bread covered in sauce and cheese.
Speed: 2650 Calories/2.25 minutes= 1177 Calories/ Minute
Passive Time: 14 Minutes
Active Time: 2 minutes and 15 seconds. This one is hard.
For this to be 1000 calorie/minute you need everything to go perfect, although you could add extra oil to guarantee your caloric success.
The flour and water are measured fast and inaccurately, the oil is eyeballed. You won’t have a round, flat pizza. These are the sacrifices we make, but it still tastes great.
Ingredients-
>3 Cups Flour
>1 Cup Water
>Oil (as much as you like)
Toppings
>Mozzarella Cheese
Pick one-
>Pizza sauce
>Sweet Baby Rays BBQ sauce
Directions-
1-Put Flour, water, and oil in a stand mixer
2-Turn on stand mixer
Get out ingredients that will go on the pizza, remember these shouldn’t take more than seconds to apply. This means something like pepperoni would take too long. We only used cheese.
3-Spray pizza/baking pan with nonstick spray
4-Turn off stand mixer
5-Move dough onto middle of pizza pan. Mash/spread it flat as possible, fast. After about 30 seconds give up and move on.
6-Less than 1 minute to put all the sauce on AND cheese.
a.Don’t fix anything, its not worth it.
b.Cover the crust with sauce/toppings, this isn’t going to magically turn into butter garlic.
7-Pizza in the oven, turn on.
13 minutes later, our pizza was ready. Let cool for 5-10 minutes before tearing. Your oven will change this time by a few minutes. Keep an eye on the first time you make this.
The pizza isn’t sliced. My solution was to hand rip half and put it on a plate, about 1000 calories. You might be able to get away with ‘cutting the pizza’ at the dining table to remove ‘active time’ and convert that time to consuming media or having social time.
One more tip, you can cook whole wheat noodles without stirring. This means you can put noodles in cold water and put it on the stove, high heat. It will take 2-4 minutes to get boiling, start your alarm(3 minutes heat up) + (8 minutes cook time). At some point the water will boil over and you can lower the heat. This is how we are cooking the 1 minute noodle recipes.
My wife said I should tease the new 2 minutes/day cookbook.