How we get every dish to land together
No magic, no guesswork — just backwards planning, honest buffers, and a model of your real kitchen. Here's exactly how Fatto builds a timeline, and how our team researches everything we publish.
The timing method, step by step
Every Fatto timeline is built the same way a professional kitchen plans service — from the moment of plating, working backwards.
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Start from the serving time
We anchor the whole plan to one number: when you want to eat. Everything else is scheduled relative to that single deadline, not to whichever recipe you happened to open first.
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Break each recipe into timed steps
Every dish is parsed into discrete steps with a duration and a resource — prep, stovetop, oven, rest, or reheat. A roast isn't "90 minutes," it's season → roast → rest, each with its own clock and its own demand on your kitchen.
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Find the longest pole
The dish with the longest unbroken chain of steps sets the backbone of the schedule. Shorter dishes are slotted in around it so they finish at the same moment, not before.
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Resolve equipment conflicts
Your kitchen has limits — a fixed number of burners, oven racks, and a single you. Fatto won't schedule two dishes onto one burner or assume you can be in three places at once. When something has to give, it staggers and tells you why.
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Add realistic buffers
Onions take longer to soften than recipes claim. We build in honest transition time so the plan breathes instead of snapping the first time something runs long.
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Recalculate the instant reality changes
Running ten minutes behind? Nudge the timeline and every dependent step reflows automatically. The plan is live, not a printout you abandon at the first hiccup.
Where our timing data comes from
Step durations start from the source recipe wherever it states them, then get sanity-checked against established cooking references and our own repeated testing. When a recipe is vague ("cook until done"), we fall back to conservative, tested defaults for the technique and quantity rather than guessing optimistically. We would rather your plan finish two minutes early than leave you serving raw chicken on schedule.
Our editorial standards
The guides on our blog are held to the same bar as the product. Here's what that means in practice:
Tested, not theorised
We cook the techniques we write about on real dinners before we recommend them. If we haven't tried it, we say so.
Sourced and specific
Timing claims are grounded in established food-science references and concrete numbers, not vibes. Specifics over hand-waving, always.
Reviewed before publishing
Every article is reviewed by a second member of the kitchen team for accuracy and clarity before it goes live.
Kept current
When techniques, food-safety guidance, or the product change, we update the guide and note when it last changed.
No fluff, no filler
We don't pad articles with 800 words of backstory to chase a word count. We get to the timing and respect your time.
Corrections welcome
Spotted something wrong? Tell us and we'll fix it. Accuracy beats ego. Flag a correction →
A note on food safety
Fatto optimises for timing and coordination, not for replacing your judgement on doneness and safety. Always cook meat, poultry, and seafood to safe internal temperatures with a thermometer — our timelines are designed to get you there with time to spare, never to rush you past it.
See the method in action
Add a couple of recipes, pick a dinner time, and watch Fatto build the timeline.
Cook smarter, free