The third number is the one that does the work
Cook time is easy and everyone gets it right. The number people leave out is how long a dish stays good after it is done, and that is what makes a timeline solvable rather than merely arithmetic. Roasted vegetables hold for half an hour. A braise holds for hours and is arguably better for it. Green beans hold for about ten minutes before they go dull, and a soufflé holds for approximately zero. Give each dish an honest number and the planner has room to move. Give everything a zero and it will report that six dishes all want the last fifteen minutes, which is true and useless.
The scheduling itself is simple. Every dish starts as late as it possibly can, which is serving time minus its cook time. Then the planner walks the dishes in order of how little they can wait, and any dish that finds its spot occupied is pulled a minute earlier, repeatedly, until it fits or until it hits the limit of its hold time. Short-hold dishes claim their slots first, so the things that must be served immediately keep their ideal timing and the forgiving ones get displaced. When a dish cannot fit even at the earliest its hold allows, it is named in the warnings rather than silently overlapped.
Counting positions honestly
The number to enter is not how many burners the range has. It is how many things can be cooking at once given that you have two hands. A pot that needs stirring every three minutes occupies you completely; a roast in the oven occupies a rack. Count the oven as one position regardless of how many trays fit, unless the trays need different temperatures, in which case they cannot share it at all and you have a different problem.
| Appliance | Count as | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Range burner | 1 each | Anything needing attention takes a person, not just a burner |
| Oven | 1 | One temperature at a time; staggered trays still share the position |
| Air fryer, toaster oven | 1 each | Genuinely independent |
| Slow cooker, rice cooker | 1 each | Unattended, so it costs a spot but not a pair of hands |
| Microwave | Usually skip | Minutes at a time, rarely the constraint |
Doneness is not on this sheet
Nothing in this tool decides when food is cooked. It moves start times around so the burners work out, and the cook times it uses are the ones you typed. Whether a piece of meat is done is decided at the meat, with a thermometer, not by a clock.
Public health authorities publish minimum internal temperatures for that purpose. In the United States the commonly published USDA figures are 165°F for all poultry, 160°F for ground meats, 145°F with a three-minute rest for whole cuts of beef, pork, lamb and veal, 145°F for fish, and 165°F for reheated leftovers. Those figures are set by regulation and public guidance, they differ between countries, and they are revised from time to time, so check the current ones with your own food safety authority rather than trusting a number copied into a web page. FoodSafety.gov publishes the US chart; other countries publish their own and they do not always agree.
A temperature reading is also a check, not a guarantee. It says the center of that piece reached that temperature at that moment. It says nothing about how long the food sat out before it went in the pan, whether the raw chicken and the salad shared a board, or whether the leftovers cooled fast enough overnight. Handling and storage are separate questions and a timeline cannot answer any of them.
Two plans beat one long one
Holiday cooking goes wrong when it is treated as a single schedule. Split it. Stock, brines, doughs, trimmed vegetables, cranberry sauce, anything braised and most desserts can be finished the day before, and the day-of timeline shrinks to something you can hold in your head. Run this twice: once for the day-before list, once for the day itself. When people are coming over, set the serving time rather than the arrival time, and put it twenty to thirty minutes after they are due, because nobody sits down the moment they walk in and that buffer is the only slack the plan has.
Questions people ask
What happens if I put zero for the hold time?
That dish is pinned to finish exactly at serving time and the planner will not move it, even if that leaves a burner over-subscribed. It is the right entry for something that has to go straight from pan to plate. Setting several dishes to zero tends to produce a warning rather than a plan, though, because they all converge on the last fifteen minutes. Most things tolerate five or ten minutes without meaningfully suffering, and entering that instead of zero gives the schedule enough room to resolve itself.
Why did a dish get pulled earlier than I wanted?
Because its spot was taken and it had hold time to spare. The planner assigns slots starting with the dishes that can wait the least, so a stew with an hour of hold will be displaced by green beans that have ten minutes. The amount it moved is shown next to its name in the table. If the result leaves something sitting longer than you are willing to accept, lower the hold time on that dish so it is treated as less flexible, or add a cooking position if you actually have one.
The start time says "prev day". Is that a bug?
No. It means prep plus the longest cook chain runs back past midnight from your serving time, which happens with an early lunch and a long braise, or with a very long overnight cook. The arithmetic is correct and the label just flags that the clock has wrapped. In practice a dish like that belongs in its own day-before plan, and two shorter timelines are easier to follow than one that crosses midnight.
Does it account for the oven being at two different temperatures?
It does not. The planner treats every cooking position as interchangeable and only counts how many are in use at once. An oven that has to be at 325°F for the roast and 425°F for the rolls is not one position that happens to be busy, it is a genuine conflict the model cannot see. The usual fix is to finish the roast, pull it to rest, raise the temperature and bake the rolls in the rest window, which is exactly what the hold time on the roast is for. Enter the rolls with a short hold and the roast with a generous one and the sequence tends to fall out correctly anyway.