Batch cooking 101

Batch cooking is when you dedicate a chunk of time to cooking the bulk of your food for upcoming meals. It’s similar to the concept of meal prep but doesn’t usually include the assembly of full meals.

Team Dirty is all about batch cooking. When you batch cook for a meal plan over the weekend, it allows you to have the foundations of your week’s food ready to pull together into a delicious, healthy meal in a fraction of the time it would take to cook from scratch each day. Every minute spent batch cooking is a minute not spent in your kitchen later. Read more about why people batch cook.

There are lots of different ways to batch cook and you can do what works for you. Batch over multiple days, only batch recipes with lengthy baking times, pick and batch two or three meals with higher portions to have leftovers throughout the week, etc.

Batching is the foundation of our Wizard Plans

Each Wizard Plan utilizes batch cooking and includes easy-to-follow instructions so you can shop, prep, and batch without the headache. You can also create your own plans with batching lists in the Magic Meal Planner. Read more about the Magic Meal Planner here. 

It’s optional but can be so helpful

If you’ve never batched or if you’re pressed for time on the weekends, you may be wondering if you really have to batch to use our Wizard Plans or the Magic Meal Planner. The answer is absolutely not! 

We have lots of members who have used, loved, and raved about our plans without ever batch cooking. How to do this is totally up to you. Some people prefer to cook everything for a meal on the day they plan to eat it. If it works, it works. Just keep in mind that the Wizard Plans are designed for batch cooking, so some meals might take considerably longer to prepare without it.

Batch times

The amount of time it takes you to batch cook will depend on several factors:

• Which plan you’re using
• Your experience level
• Your kitchen setup
• Your physical mobility
• Whether you have help
• If you’re able to batch without interruption (hello, parents!) 

Keeping this in mind, batching a Gourmet Wizard Plan can take an experienced batcher about 2–4 hours. A Simple plan will take about 1–2 hours.

Batch times on Magic Meal Plans you create will depend on the complexity of the plan and which recipes you’ve chosen to make ahead. 

Read more in the Batching More Efficiently help article.