I'm really struggling here: aside from baking and pressure cooking, why would you ever need a timer for cooking? Is that a cultural thing? Don't you guys see and taste when things are done? (And for pressure cooking, just get an InstantPot, it's cheaper and you don't have to wear it in front of your eyes.)
I don’t do a lot of cooking, but when my dad is cooking for a holiday meal he will almost always have his iPad out to time stuff. He has an app that shows the burners on a stove and he can set times for each one so he can keep track of what’s going on.
The stuff might not need exact timing, like with baking, but if he is prepping something else on the counter, or gets caught up in a conversation, the timers keep things from going off the rails. He has a tendency to lose track of some of that stuff without the reminders. He also keeps track of how long things take, so he can better plan in the future, as he tries to get all the stuff to finish up around the same time. When it starts getting close to dinner time there are a lot of timers going off and things seem a bit chaotic, so I think it would be easy for things to fall through the cracks.
I don’t think he cooks often, especially not for a group, so it’s not a skill he’s developed where he can just go by feel. The recipe will say something like, “simmer for 10 minutes,” so that’s what he does.
Gives a rough idea/reminder. I'll often wander off and do something else for the 10 minutes it takes to cook pasta or whatever so a timer is preferable to ruining my food. I don't know why I'd need it spatially over the specific dish, my cheapo smart speaker will do multiple just fine.
I regularly set timers for things like pasta, steel-cut oats, baking cookies, backing lasagna, roasting chicken, chilling pastry in the fridge. Many of those things take significant time and do not need constant attention. I can wander off and do other things and be reminded when to come back and check on them. (If something takes an hour, I’ll usually set a 30-45min timer to check on progress.) Sometimes that other activity is just sitting in the kitchen table and browsing the web or watching a video. I could do that on the AVP, too.
Obviously you wouldn’t pay for an AVP just to set cooking timers, but if you are wearing an AVP, it is handy to be able to do this.
Not the OP, but right now I set a timer on my $200 phone so I can shitpos^W engage in the comments here. I don't need to watch the pot, I don't want to watch the pot. And my pressure cooker has a built-in timer so aside of the initial check what it did got the required pressure I don't need to bother with it at all.
As said, I'm fully in favor of timers for pressure cooking. I love my InstantPot. It solves an actual problem. No more turned-to-sludge potatoes!
And I think we can agree that if you don't want to watch the pot, having the timer spatially over it makes little sense, and that little phone in your pocket is probably better suited to remind you...
BTW, guys, a large part of cooking is actually pipelining: for instance, while the pasta is cooking, you can cook other stuff in parallel!
