How to Use Timers with Recipes

Mulling over the idea of using a recipe organizer on your phone but still can't resist pulling out the much-loved, beautifully photographed and illustrated cooking books? Easy to understand, especially if you love the tactile, sensory-satiating calm (I mean, you love food too...) you can get between the period of the book being tilted down from the shelf, to being wedged back in.

But then there are timers. Some of us are great at cooking with feel and intuition but will likely still rely on having something jumping at us, screaming, to let us know that a small or large passage of a meal being conjured is complete. Egg timers, fridge magnet timers, and phones are all very reliable but recipe organizers still shine in the timing department. It's not really a fair race.

Working with Timers in Recipe Apps

Every recipe organizer app treats timers differently but, for this how to, I am using Some Fine Food and will walk through how to easily leverage its built-in timer tools to have some fantastic help in the kitchen without changing anything on an existing recipe.

Setting Timers for Existing Recipes

Some Fine Food works by being able to recognize periods of time, already written in your recipe, in natural language. It highlights time, to make absorbing and skimming this information simple, and has them armed as ready-to-go timers. No extra action is required from you. So without you doing anything, you have 2, 5 or however many timers already waiting for you to activate or ignore in your recipe, from whatever is written there. For example, if the recipe has the following sentence:

Stir for 10 to 12 minutes, place a lid on top, then leave to simmer for half an hour.

The app will recognize that there are two useful periods of time here and sets the first one at 11 minutes (halfway is a safe bet when using ranges), and the second for 30 minutes. If you don't decide to use the timers, you still have the benefit of having these periods of time automatically highlighted.

Setting Timers for New Recipes

This is exactly the same as with existing recipes so, using the same logic, you do not need to do anything but write your recipe. Some Fine Food works by understanding recipes in natural language, in your own style, so you write them as you would on a page. It recognizes what are times, what are quantities and what are units. Whenever you write a period of time, naturally in a sentence, it will become a timer when you, or anyone else (recipes can be shared) go to use the recipe.

Want to Get Fancy?

This bit's just for those who like to go overboard, or those who might have very particular needs. Beeping on a phone's speaker is fine for most but what if you want to get fancy? Or what if your kitchen environment, or your own situation, makes it difficult to hear anything? For those of you who have Home Assistant or Node Red, you can use just about anything in your kitchen to signal that a timer is done. If a light needs to turn a certain color, flash, or you need an even bigger speaker to play something that your phone can't, Home Assistant can set up a trigger for that to happen and Some Fine Food's timers can hit that trigger when they reach 0.

Using the Timers

A timer is just a matter of setting the time, starting it, pausing it, and resetting it, right? Usually, yes. Some Fine Food takes care of setting the times, but here's how to do the rest:

• Activating a Timer: You might not want to use all or any of the timers that the app finds in the steps, so they're hidden until you activate them. Just tap any highlighted period of time and you'll find a timer pops up above it, looking like a typical countdown in the form of 00:15:00.
• Starting and Pausing a Timer: Once a timer is activated, tap the timer itself to start it, and tap again to pause it. A timer that has been started will fade in and out to let you know it has already begun. If it's still running down to zero, it will be a dark grey, and if it's paused, it will be a light grey.
• Resetting a Timer: Just double-tap a timer to set it back to its original countdown time. You'll likely only want to do this if you started a timer by mistake.
• Hiding a timer: To hide or remove a timer, just tap the original period of time, under the timer, and the timer will disappear. If you do this by accident, just tap again, and it will reappear without losing its countdown.

The timer hovers next to the period of time, in the step that generated it, so you never lose track of what time is for what.

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