What Equipment 1,763 Recipes Actually Need
We read every step of 1,763 recipes and counted the equipment. 93% need nothing beyond a pan, a pot, a tray or an oven, 68% name exactly one vessel, and 58% never turn the oven on at all. Full data.
We read the steps of all 1,763 recipes in the Anychef library and counted the equipment each one asks for. 1,642 of them — 93% — need nothing beyond a pan, a pot, a tray and an oven. Only 121 recipes call for anything else at all, and the most common of those, a blender or food processor, appears in fewer than one recipe in twenty.
This is a count, not an estimate. Every number below comes from the literal text of the cooking steps — the same steps printed on each recipe page — so it says exactly what these recipes ask for, and nothing about what a kitchen ought to contain.
What the recipes ask for
A recipe can name more than one thing, so these do not add to 100%.
| Equipment | Recipes | Share of catalog |
|---|---|---|
| Skillet or frying pan | 890 | 50.5% |
| Oven (bake, roast, or broil) | 645 | 36.6% |
| Saucepan, pot, or Dutch oven | 329 | 18.7% |
| Sheet pan or roasting tray | 231 | 13.1% |
| Baking or casserole dish | 187 | 10.6% |
| Grill or griddle | 104 | 5.9% |
| Blender or food processor | 81 | 4.6% |
| Wok | 62 | 3.5% |
| Slow cooker | 4 | 0.2% |
| Pressure cooker | 1 | 0.1% |
| Stand or hand mixer | 1 | 0.1% |
| Air fryer | 0 | 0.0% |
The shape of that table is the finding. One item — a skillet — covers half the library on its own. Add an oven and a sheet pan and you are past 80%. Everything below the grill line put together accounts for 149 recipes, and four of the twelve rows are in single figures.
Most recipes use exactly one pan
Counting the distinct cooking vessels named in each recipe's steps:
| Vessels named | Recipes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| None | 355 | 20.1% |
| One | 1,200 | 68.1% |
| Two | 199 | 11.3% |
| Three | 9 | 0.5% |
Two-thirds of recipes are one-vessel cooking, and the 355 that name none are mostly assembly — salads, sandwiches, overnight oats, boards. Fewer than 12% of recipes ask you to have two things on the heat at once, which is the real cost of a weeknight dinner: not the pan, the washing up and the timing.
Three in five recipes never turn the oven on
1,016 recipes — 58% — contain no baking, roasting or broiling and need no appliance beyond the stovetop. Another 99 involve no heat at all. That matters more than it sounds: it is the difference between cooking in a studio flat with two burners and a microwave, and being locked out of most of a recipe library.
Step count tracks cook time almost exactly
The median recipe is six steps long. Step count turns out to be a decent proxy for how long a recipe takes, which is not obvious — a single step can be "simmer for 40 minutes".
| Steps | Recipes | Median cook time |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | 138 | 15 min |
| 5 | 463 | 25 min |
| 6 | 869 | 32 min |
| 7 | 210 | 35 min |
| 8 | 78 | 30 min |
It rises steadily to seven steps and then stops. Eight-step recipes are no slower than seven-step ones, because by that length the extra steps are usually assembly and garnish rather than more cooking.
What this library does not have
The zeroes are worth stating plainly, because they are a fact about this catalog and not about cooking. There are no air fryer recipes in the library at all, four slow cooker recipes, and one pressure cooker recipe. Anyone searching for those is not served by us today. We are writing them; until then, the honest answer is that this data describes a library built around a pan and an oven, and it will over-represent that shape for as long as that is true.
How we counted
Every figure above is a count over the 1,763 recipes in the Anychef library as of 9 September 2026, computed from the literal text of each recipe's cooking steps. A recipe counts toward a piece of equipment if its steps name it or name the action that requires it — "bake", "roast" and "broil" all count as an oven.
The method's limitation runs one way: a recipe that says "cook the onions until soft" without naming a pan is counted as naming no vessel, which is why 355 recipes land in that row. So the one-vessel and no-vessel counts are conservative, and the true share of one-pan cooking is higher than 68%, not lower. Nothing here uses the cost, calorie or protein figures shown elsewhere on the site, which are estimates rather than measurements.
