The Secret “Ingredient” Every Great Cook Swears By

In the kitchen, a few minutes can mean the difference between crisp, golden potatoes and burnt rubble. Several hours can transform dense dough into an airy, bubbly, pillow-like loaf of bread. A few weeks of curing meat allows it to develop complex umami flavors. Time really is one of the most important elements of cooking.

Keeping a timer nearby helps when you’re cooking, but truly great cooks know that sensory cues—aroma, color, sound, texture, and taste—are often more important than counting the minutes when judging the doneness of food. Doneness is still a matter of time, but the exact timing can vary depending on the ingredients, tools, and environmental conditions.

A cook can spend a lifetime improving their understanding of time as it relates to food preparation, but here are some of the most important things to know about how time impacts your cooking.

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of articles sharing essential tips and techniques that have changed how I, our readers, and the other Serious Eats editors cook. The first installment explored game-changing prep tips and the second installment featured key uses for salt. This series is by no means an ultimate collection of essential techniques—just some of the more important ones that separate good cooks from truly great ones.

Marinating longer is better—the longer you let your meats hang out in a flavor bath, the better they’ll be. Right? Well, not really. Marinades and brines can do a lot for meats, including improving flavor, texture, and juiciness, but—surprise, surprise!—most foods don’t need to be marinated for as long as many think.

First, let’s talk about brines, which describe salting meat and then letting it hang out while salt works its magic. Salt can penetrate deeply into meat, both seasoning it more deeply and also helping it retain juices once cooked. Exactly how long to brine, though, depends on the meat. In our article on dry brines (the brining method we tend to prefer), steaks and chops can be brined for as little as 45 minutes, while larger roasts can be left for a few days, with plenty of other options in between.

Marinades, on the other hand, are best thought of as brines with flavor added. Except that the flavor part of a marinade is just a surface treatment and will not penetrate deeply into the meat the way salt will. This means marination times can be much shorter than many realize, with meats gaining a clear benefit in as little as 30 minutes. The sweet spot for most meats, according to contributor Tim Chin’s testing, is one to eight hours. The ideal time, however, varies depending on the type of meat, the marinade, and how intensely seasoned you prefer your food.

There are no shortcuts to deeply caramelized onions. If anyone tells you otherwise, be wary! Instead, patience and attentiveness are key to unlocking the mellow sweetness of onions. First, the onions release moisture as they cook off. Only then will caramelization and the Maillard reaction kick in, transforming pungent raw onions and other alliums, such as shallots, into an incredibly soft, sweet, and deeply flavorful ingredient that’s great in tarts, over pasta, as a burger topper, and even smothered over chicken. There are some tricks to speed things up, including covering the pot during the early phase of cooking to help the onions steam and soften faster, but it’s usually still going to take at least an hour, if not more.

Stewing and braising are low-and-slow cooking processes in which tough, collagen-rich cuts of meat are fully or partially submerged in liquid, such as wine or stock, then gently simmered until the collagen melts into tender gelatin. That gelatin also thickens the flavorful braising liquid, giving it a rich mouthfeel.

How long the process takes depends on the meat you’re cooking as well as the temperature at which it’s being cooked. In our tests of different cuts of beef for stews, we found the time to doneness ranged from 2 to 3 hours in a gentle oven. Compare that to the under-an-hour time for coq au vin made with a modern hen (not a tough old rooster). Or, grab a pressure cooker, which takes advantage of the sealed environment to significantly raise the cooking temperature, and a three-hour stew can become a weeknight under-one-hour affair.

Proof Your Dough

Bread bakers know that adequately proofing the dough makes all the difference between dense, flat loaves and bubbly, crusty ones. Kneading and resting the dough gives gluten a chance to develop, creating a sturdy structure to support the loaf’s rise in the oven. This resting period is also crucial for fermentation, when yeast consumes simple sugars, producing carbon dioxide and developing the complex flavors that give bread its characteristic aroma and flavor.

Here’s the key, though: There’s a proofing sweet spot. Both underproofing and overproofing the dough can result in a deflated loaf. Underproofed loaves haven’t had enough time to develop enough carbon dioxide and structure, whereas overproofed loaves have a weakened gluten network and slowed, potentially inactive, fermentation.

Some bread recipes, like Jim Lahey’s famous no-knead method, rely on extended resting time instead of physical kneading to develop gluten. When flour and water combine, two proteins, glutenin and gliadin, link up to form gluten, the elastic network that gives bread its structure. Kneading accelerates this process by physically aligning and strengthening the gluten strands, but given enough time, those same proteins will do it all by themselves. That’s why no-knead doughs typically rest for 12 hours or more: The long fermentation not only builds structure but also deepens flavor.

Aged beef often outshines its fresh counterparts. In our own taste tests, tasters preferred steaks aged for 30 to 45 days over fresh beef and appreciated the complex combination of savory, cheese-like flavors.

While full-on dry-aging at home can seem like a hassle—requiring big cuts of beef and precise temperature conditions—we offer a few tips to make the slow, methodical process a bit smoother. Aging steak requires a nifty setup: Purchase a large untrimmed, bone-in prime rib with the fat cap intact; set up a dedicated mini fridge that runs between 36 and 40°F (2 and 4°C) with a fan; and wait anywhere from four to eight weeks so the meat develops a tough outer layer, which must be trimmed away before cooking.

When exposed to carefully controlled temperature conditions, the meat’s natural enzymes break down the muscle and fat, concentrating flavor and creating intensely beefy, nutty, and almost cheese-like aromas that define dry-aged beef. What’s more, the protein and connective tissue also break down as the meat ages, tenderizing the meat and allowing it to retain more juices when cooked.

Many of the world’s most beloved ferments need time to develop peak flavors. Take wine: Fermented grape juice undergoes various chemical reactions as it rests, softening astringent tannins and developing complex flavors. While you might not be up for making wine at home, it’s possible to make a cabinet of other flavorful ferments, including lacto-fermented pickles, water kefir, kombucha, and yogurt, with a few simple ingredients. However long it takes, the payoff is clear: Microbes transform sugars and proteins into delectably tangy acids, bubbly brews, and other flavor-rich compounds—as long as they’re given the time to do it.