Kitchen timer

How to use the online timer

Cooking times are only ever half an instruction. The other half is the starting point they assume: water at a full rolling boil, an oven that has genuinely reached temperature, a pan hot enough to sear rather than steam. A recipe that says ten minutes and a cook who starts counting when the hob goes on are describing two different dishes, which is why so many timings feel unreliable in somebody else's kitchen.

These pages cover the everyday timings a British kitchen runs on: eggs at three degrees of doneness, pasta and rice at a steady boil, a chicken or a turkey roasted to a safe internal temperature, chips and jacket potatoes in a hot oven, and the small things that go wrong by a minute, a brew left to stew or bacon that never browned. Fan ovens run about 20°C hotter than the conventional figure printed in most recipes, and that alone accounts for a good share of burnt edges.

Where safety is genuinely involved, particularly with poultry, temperature settles the question rather than the clock. Everywhere else, the timer puts you in front of the pan at the right moment, and colour, smell and a skewer decide the rest.