Almost 5 in 10 Americans want to spend less than 30 minutes making dinner, while more than 1 in 10 would prefer not to cook at all. After years of aspirational cooking content, such as homemade pasta, the 47-ingredient curries and the fermentation projects, home cooks have declared a quiet rebellion. They want food on the table, but they do not want to babysit it.
Americans are done with complicated recipes. This story shows why easy dinners are taking over. Photo credit: Depositphotos.
The numbers help explain what’s been happening in American kitchens. Dumpling bakes, cabbage boils and crockpot dinners; the recipes going viral are dishes you barely have to touch. No searing, no stirring, no watching the clock. Just throw it in, walk away and come back to dinner.
The data is clear
A YouGov survey on convenience cooking found that 48% of Americans prefer to spend less than 30 minutes on dinner, while another 12% would rather not cook at all. Only 13% use a slow cooker or pressure cooker weekly, but that doesn’t mean people have given up on hands-off cooking. About 1 in 3 Americans now use an air fryer at least once a week, with 76% citing ease of use as the primary motivation. The appetite for low-effort cooking is real. The methods are just evolving.
Scroll TikTok’s food side and the pattern only sharpens. The recipes racking up millions of views aren’t the ones that require technique, but the ones where someone dumps everything into a pan, slides it into the oven and sets a timer. The less the cook has to do, the more the video gets shared.
Why now?
A few forces converged. Grocery prices pushed people back into their kitchens, but inflation also made time feel scarce. Nobody wants to spend an hour on a Wednesday night dinner when the budget is already tight. The rise of batch cooking and meal prep culture normalized the idea of doing the work once and eating well all week. And short-form video made dump-and-bake recipes look not just easy but genuinely appealing.
There’s also a generational shift, with more than half of Gen Z preparing ready-made meals at least once a week, nearly double the rate of Gen X and baby boomers. Younger cooks who learned to cook during the pandemic aren’t chasing culinary perfection but sustainability, not the environmental kind, but the personal kind. They want to feed themselves well without burning out.
The recipes going viral aren’t the impressive ones. They’re the ones where someone throws everything in a dish and walks away.
The slow cooker redemption arc
The slow cooker never disappeared, but it did get pigeonholed. For years, it meant soups and stews; comforting, sure, but limited. A slow cooker vegetable soup is a perfectly good reason to dust off the Crock-Pot. But the slow cooker’s real comeback is happening outside the soup pot.
Home cooks are discovering it handles dishes you’d never expect, such as a slow cooker ratatouille that develops deep, layered flavor while you’re at work, a Crock-Pot green bean casserole that frees up oven space on a busy holiday and a mac and cheese that comes out creamy without standing over a stove stirring a roux.
The appeal isn’t just convenience; it’s that low, slow heat does things to food that a quick saute or a hot oven can’t replicate. Vegetables get sweeter, sauces get richer and flavors that would take attention and adjustment on a stovetop develop on their own with nothing but time.
The dump-and-bake alternative
Not everyone wants to commit to eight hours of slow cooking. For those cooks, there’s the other side of the lazy cooking trend, which is the dump and bake. The formula is simple: protein or legumes, vegetables, sauce and heat. Minimal knife work, no stirring and dinner emerges.
Some home cooks are taking this a step further, prepping ingredients ahead and freezing them raw so they can bake fresh when they’re ready to eat. Ten minutes of chopping on a Sunday means a hot, just-out-of-the-oven dinner on a Thursday, with no microwave, mushy textures or sad leftovers. A cheesy green pasta bake works this way perfectly: pasta, greens and cheese go into a bag, then into the freezer, then straight into the oven when you need them.
The sweet spot for weeknight cooking seems to be about 10 minutes of active work and 30 minutes of hands-off time. That’s enough to get something flavorful on the table without requiring skill, attention or a recipe you have to read three times before starting.
Not everyone wants to commit to eight hours of or a freezer full of prepped meals that need reheating. For those cooks, there’s another approach: prep the ingredients ahead, freeze them raw and bake fresh when you’re ready to eat.
What this says about how we cook now
For a long time, food media rewarded complexity; the more steps, the more impressive. Social media initially amplified that, filling feeds with elaborate meals that looked beautiful but took hours.
What’s happening now is a correction. Home cooks aren’t aspiring to restaurant-quality anymore. They’re aspiring to consistency, with dinner on the table most nights without dreading the process. The slow cooker and the sheet pan aren’t trendy; they’re practical. And practical, it turns out, is what wins.
Shruthi Baskaran-Makanju is a food and travel writer and a global food systems expert based in Seattle. She has lived in or traveled extensively to over 60 countries, and shares stories and recipes inspired by those travels on Urban Farmie.
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