How to use the finish dishes together calculator
Set the moment the food has to reach the table, list each dish with its cooking minutes on its own line, and the page returns the clock time each dish must start so that everything lands together, sorted from the earliest start. For a holiday table or a dinner party with many dishes, reading the first dish and its start time is often enough to fix the whole order. When every dish needs the same amount of trimming or measuring, put that in the shared prep field and all the start times move earlier together.
How the numbers are produced
The page only subtracts each cooking time and the shared prep time from the target moment, which is plain clock arithmetic. Totals round to whole minutes before being split into hours and minutes, so a reading of 60 minutes never appears, and a start time that falls before midnight is marked as the previous day. As of October 2026 the page does not judge whether a cooking order is a good one.
Limits and what is not covered
Cooking times vary with ingredients and equipment and are not published by an official source, so the page suggests none and takes the minutes you already use. It does not model burner or oven-rack limits, the time saved by overlapping dishes, or the inner stages of a single recipe, and it ignores holding and cooling time.
Frequently asked questions
One dish per line, with the name and the cooking minutes separated by a comma. A space works too, because the last number on the line is read as the cooking time, so names containing spaces are fine.
It is added in front of every cooking time equally, so each start time simply moves earlier by that amount. When dishes need different prep times, fold each one into its own cooking time instead.
Yes. The page assumes every dish can run at the same time and only works backward to the start times, so it does not account for the number of burners or oven racks you actually have.