Salty & Clever
The Oven Traffic Calculator
Test a menu against your ovens, racks and burners. Inspect the schedule, compare equipment or menu changes, and download the result with its assumptions.
Salty and Clever · oven traffic
What does not fit?
Every recipe you own was written as though it were the only thing you were cooking that day. Tell it what you are making, one oven or two, and what time the food has to be on the table. It works backwards from that moment, least forgiving dish first, and shows which dishes this ordering can place under the stated assumptions.
Choose what you are cooking.
What this calculator does not do.
It runs one menu against one serve time and shows which dishes remain unplaced in this ordering. This page is the single-question version and it stays free.
What these numbers mean
Your plan: selected dishes and service time. Measure this: usable racks and burners. House assumptions: preset cooking, resting and quality-hold times, and the temperature-sharing allowance. Quality holds are not food-safety limits.
This is a greedy schedule tested at one-minute intervals. It does not model preheating, oven temperature transitions, refrigerator capacity or active labor. Verify timings against your actual recipes.
The day, laid out
What does not fit
The last twenty minutes
Why this happens to everybody
There are only four ways a kitchen runs out of room, and every recipe is silent about all of them.
Temperature. One oven cannot be two temperatures. Anything within about twenty-five degrees can share; past that, one of the dishes is moving. Racks. Sometimes the temperatures agree and there is simply no shelf. Burners. Four pans want four burners at a quarter to seven and there are three. Hands. Everything fits on paper and all of it lands on one person in the final quarter hour, which is also when the doorbell goes.
The number no recipe prints
What decides this schedule is not cooking time. It is how long each dish will wait between finished and eaten. Roast potatoes hold about ten minutes; after that they are potatoes, but they are not roast potatoes. Mashed potatoes over a pan of barely simmering water hold an hour without complaining. Gravy holds ninety minutes. Risotto holds eight, and it is not a negotiation. There is a rule underneath that column and it is worth two minutes: a dish holds badly in proportion to how much surface it needs to keep. Sort your menu by patience and the plan writes itself: the impatient dishes get the slots they need, and the forgiving ones go wherever there is room left.
Which makes the roast potatoes the tyrant of the whole menu, and nobody treats them like one. Ten minutes of patience against the gravy’s ninety. They should be the last thing in and the first thing out, and instead they are the dish that gets moved, because they are only potatoes.
A full oven is a slower oven
Recipe times assume one dish and a closed door, and on a holiday neither is true. As a rule of thumb rather than a measured figure, reckon on roughly six percent longer for each additional loaded rack, and a few minutes more every time the door opens. The calculator adds neither, so leave that slack yourself. That is not a rounding error. It is the difference between the potatoes being ready and the potatoes going in the bin.
Six percent a rack sounds like pedantry until you run it. A fifty-five minute dish in a full three-rack oven is nearer sixty-two, and every door opening sits on top of that. Seven minutes is not a rounding error at four o’clock. It is the difference between carving and stalling.
What this tool does and does not do
It reports the conflicts in the schedule it found and compares equipment or menu changes. That is worth knowing before service.
Planning arithmetic, not a food-safety authority. Cook to temperature rather than to a schedule. The companion tools: the board, the bar, scaling a recipe up.
Where this stops
Check the equipment, then check the hands.
Use the comparisons above to test equipment or menu changes. Then use Host Load Check for the last thirty minutes and Service Window for the final ten. Dish cooking duration is not active labor: enter the attention each finish actually requires.
How this calculator works, and where every number in it comes from
Every dish in a holiday menu has a temperature and a duration, and every one of them was chosen in isolation. The collision is not in any individual recipe. It is in the fact that four of them want the oven between four and five o’clock and there is one oven.
This is a scheduling model. A placement is conditional on the inputs; an unplaced dish may fit with a different ordering.
What the model actually holds
Twenty-six dishes, each carrying an oven temperature, a cook duration, a rack requirement, a burner requirement, whether it needs a rest, and how long it holds once it is out.
Your kitchen is declared as one or two ovens, a rack count per oven, a burner count, and a serve time. The scheduler then works backwards from serve time and attempts to place each dish, and it reports three things: the clock, the conflicts with the blocking dish named, and how many things finish in the last twenty minutes.
The four constraints it enforces
Temperature contention. The model allows a spread of up to 25°F among dishes sharing an oven. This is a house planning assumption; confirm that your recipes tolerate the shared temperature.
Rack contention. A dish occupies a rack for its whole duration. Two dishes on two racks at the same temperature is fine, three on two racks is not.
Burner contention, which is the one that looks like a bug and is not. A menu with three stovetop dishes can fire an every-burner-lit warning on four burners, because mashed potatoes take two: a pot for the potatoes and a pan for the dairy. Burner count genuinely reschedules dishes.
And the last twenty minutes. This counts every task that finishes in the final stretch, not every task that starts, which is the correct measure because a finish is a thing that needs hands, a plate and a decision. Four finishes in twenty minutes is a kitchen with one person in it doing four things badly.
A worked example
Serve at four o’clock. A fourteen-pound turkey at 325 degrees needs about three and a quarter hours and a 35-minute rest, so it goes in by 12:10 and comes out by 3:25. A gratin wants 350 for an hour and a quarter. Roast potatoes want 450 for fifty-five minutes and want them crisp at service. Stuffing wants 350 for forty-five minutes.
Three of those four want the oven in the last hour, the bird is in it until 3:25, and the potatoes want it 125 degrees hotter than the bird. That is the conflict, and it is visible on the clock rather than at four o’clock. The fix is a temperature decision made on Tuesday rather than a panic made on Thursday.
A temperature decision means choosing one number and making three dishes live with it. Run everything at 375 and the potatoes come out less crisp than they could have been, which is a real cost and a small one. The alternative is potatoes that go in when the bird comes out at 3:25 and reach the table at twenty past four.
What is free here and what is not
Deliberately generous. The free version gives you the whole 26-dish library, one or two ovens, racks, burners, serve time, the full schedule, every conflict named with its blocking dish, and the last-twenty-minutes count. The paid version gives the three specific fixes per conflict with numbers on them, the rest-window match, custom dishes, and the runbook with a cut list.
The free tool now also compares equipment and menu changes and downloads a schedule. This version uses OVEN-TRAFFIC 2.0; equivalence with separately distributed paid files has not been verified for this release.
Every duration and temperature above is listed on Every Number This Site Runs On. If the constraint turns out to be pan space rather than oven space, the scaling calculator is the one that answers it.
Assumptions, and when this breaks
Durations assume dishes at the stated size, in a calibrated oven, from refrigerator temperature unless the dish says otherwise. Most domestic ovens are not calibrated, which is a larger error than anything in this scheduler and is worth settling with a cheap thermometer.
Rack capacity assumes one dish per rack with air around it. Two trays crammed on one rack is not two racks, it is one rack cooking badly, for the same surface-area reason that governs every pan decision.
It breaks when you open the oven. Every door opening costs real recovery time and the model does not charge you for it, so a plan that is tight on paper is tighter in the room. It breaks with a second cook, because two people change the hands constraint but not the oven constraint, and the oven is usually what is binding. And it breaks for anything held warm rather than served straight out, which is a separate problem with its own rules.
The number worth taking away is not any single duration. It is that the oven was fully booked by ten past three, and nobody had written that down anywhere.
Where this goes next
You have the number. Now use it.
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