Kitchen timer

How to use the online timer

Half of any cooking time is missing from the page. What gets written down is the number; what gets left out is the moment it counts from — water already at a rolling boil, an oven that has arrived at temperature rather than one still climbing, a pan hot enough to sear. Two cooks starting their counts at different points do not end up with the same dish, and that gap explains most of the timings that seem to work for everybody except you.

These pages cover the everyday figures a kitchen here actually runs on: eggs at three degrees of doneness, pasta and rice at a steady boil, a chicken or a turkey roasted through, chips and potatoes in a hot oven, and the small things that go wrong by a minute — tea left to stew, rashers that never crisped, a pot of soup reduced too far. Ovens in rented flats are frequently inaccurate and rarely say so, which accounts for a good share of the disappointments.

Where safety is genuinely involved, particularly with poultry, temperature settles the question and the clock only raises it. Everywhere else the timer's job is to put you in front of the pan at the right moment, and colour, smell, a skewer and a fork decide the rest between them.