Working in the kitchen can be very time consuming, especially if the kitchen is not very organised. If you feel that you spend too much time in the kitchen without great results to show for all that time spent, here are a few things you can try to increase efficiency and productivity.

Get Organised with Labels

How much of your time in the kitchen is spent opening containers and bottles and checking the contents and then putting them back because they weren’t where you thought they were? If you do that at all, you are spending too much time with a disorganised kitchen. I recommend labelling every container that you cannot see through clearly, and that includes spices, seasonings, storage jars, and leftovers. If you have any containers in your kitchen to hold flour, sugar, milk powder, and other ingredients, you should label those so that you can find what you are looking for quickly. This minimises frustration and speeds up your cooking.

That’s especially helpful for any containers that are difficult to open. If you have to pry at them and put in some effort to get the lids opened and closed, then you are going to save yourself a lot of expended energy by simply putting a clear label on these items.

By putting labels on the leftovers, you avoid the hassle of taking containers out of the fridge that you don’t need, and you prevent some food contamination that would happen as the same containers are opened and closed over and over again.  

Plan Out Your Recipes

Do you sometimes go into the kitchen and start baking without much of a plan in mind? Maybe you start cooking food without checking to see if you have all the ingredients or even knowing what would be included. Planning ahead is important for improving efficiency in the kitchen. Before you start pulling out ingredients and putting them into a mixing bowl, you first want to ensure that you have all the ingredients. It would be awful to work your way partway through a recipe only to realise that you don’t have what you need.

When you are preparing to cook anything, take the time to look all the way through the recipe and ensure you know how to perform all the directions. Then, check your ingredients in the cupboards and see if you have everything. You may have to go to the store to buy what you need or look up some substitutions or even use a different recipe altogether. It’s better to know about that situation before you start mixing ingredients.

Prioritise Your Drawers

Something else that will slow cooks down in the kitchen is drawers full of cooking utensils. How many whisks and spatulas do you really need? Do you need a full knife set or maybe just a couple of knives? Having lots of kitchen tools leads to lots of indecision. Do I use the big one or the small one? Some people will get really stuck up on these decisions.

Having drawers packed full of utensils will also make it more difficult to open a drawer and find exactly what you need quickly. What helps is to put the most commonly used tools in the top drawer or top two drawers, and then relegate everything else to the bottom drawers or some other area where they won’t be in the way.

You may even want to downsize your kitchen tools, getting rid of what you won’t use or hardly ever use. That’s going to create a lot more space in your drawers and make it easier to find what you are looking for. It also gives you fewer decisions to make. You don’t need to choose between two different carving knives when you only have one in your kitchen.

Do a Deep Clean

Your kitchen could just need some TLC. A proper deep clean can go a long way toward making your kitchen more organised and functional. Your kitchen drawers will open easier if they are cleaned, and you won’t have to spend as much time washing off pots and plates if you get rid of pests in the kitchen. A good clean can eliminate pests and keep them from coming back as often.

If you don’t have the time or the inclination to do a deep clean yourself, then a New York City cleaning company can help out. You can hire them to deep clean the kitchen, bottom mount fridges, or to clean your entire house. A clean kitchen will be more pleasant to work in, and it may be easier to find what you are looking for as well after it has been well cleaned.

Determine a Place for Every Item

Do you sometimes put your pots in one cupboard and sometimes put them in another? Do you move the spatulas between the top drawer and the second drawer in your kitchen? If you don’t have a set place for each item, you will always be looking through multiple locations to find what you need. If you determine that each item will have its own place and keep putting them there every time, then you will speed things up in the kitchen. That’s less wasted time and more time getting things done. That’s less frustration and less chance that you will just settle for using whatever you can find rather than using what you really wanted to.  

If it helps, then you can make up a list of items and corresponding locations and place it in the kitchen. That may benefit anyone who is helping you in the kitchen who wants to find something or who needs to put something away when they are done with it.

Your kitchen can be a disorganised disaster where every meal cooked requires a lot of stress or frustration. Or it can be a place where you love to spend time and where you easily find everything you need. With the tips provided, hopefully you can get things in order and be much more efficient as you prepare meals.