Cooking times ?

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If a food item says 25 minutes to cook, that's the time I expect the item to be ready for eating . Why say 25 minutes when it might actually be 35 minutes before the item is properly cooked?

How do you know the label is at fault and not your cooking appliance?

What are you cooking?

Because I 've had other cookers where the same thing has happened.

Do you bake it in the oven or cook it in the pan?

The item cooked today was cooked in the oven . Someone said the cooking time is based on a brand new oven .

did you set it to the right temperature?

...and wait until properly pre-heated?

If the answer to all these questions is yes, but your food is undercooked, you're either cooking oven chips / fries or slimming world sweet potato chips / fries.

They're always understated by about 50%, there is no logic to it.

I put one item in first, after waiting a little while ,and then the other item 15 minutes later based on their stated cooking times .

On electric ovens there will be a light that goes out when the oven is pre-heated.

With gas ovens it's when the flames auto-regulate down from their initial level.

Pre-heating can easily take 10 - 15 minutes, sometimes longer.

Opening the door to put the second item in will release some of the heat, but that shouldn't add too much to the overall cooking time.

Most cooking times are based on the food being on the top shelf, which is the hottest, unless the instructions specifically say otherwise.

Some foods always have understated cooking times, even so. SW fries and oven chips being the two I particularly remember as being much slower to cook than the instructions would suggest. Though I have a coal fired Rayburn now, and the opposite trouble - it is very easy to cremate everything

I never take recommended cooking times all that seriously. I think they're often less than is needed, and to me they're just guidelines. I don't cook much processed food, but recipes are often the same, sometimes they're just not very accurate. So I just cook things by inspection if it's the first time I've cooked whatever it is, adjust each time I cook it, and write my own instructions. It's quite handy to have a temperature probe to find out what's going on in the middle of a dollop of food.

I don't cook many different things anyway, so I get to repeat the processes and gradually tweak them to near-perfection. Baking bread annoys me because it's such a fine line between getting the inside cooked enough and not overcooking the outside. I have a crafty method of frying eggs on an electric hob - I warm the raw eggs in a microwave for about 20 seconds at full power, heat the frying pan with a spot of butter for 100 seconds on full, also heating a lid on another hob for the same time, turn it off, put the eggs in, put the lid on, and then wait a few minutes. It's very hard to burn the eggs that way because the pan cools down towards the end of the process. Of course it only works with the particular cooker and frying pan that I use - for different equipment the numbers would have to be tweaked.

Three reasons: Oven thermostats are not very accurate, and ovens are not always pre-heated.
Starting temperatures can be quite different.
"Properly cooked" is a matter of opinion.

I find that on several foods the cooking times on them are often too short. The food often still raw, or cold, depending on the food. My advice would be to take note of the times and remember them for the next time, especially if there are more than one food item to make, so you avoid other food getting cold or burned while waiting for the other to be done.

It could be a matter of personal taste.  For example, I like my beef roast on the rare side -- fully cooked, but still pink in the middle.  My wife likes hers well-done, with a slightly burned crust on the outside.  If I cook the roast "by the book", it comes out perfect for me, but "practically raw" for her.  I usually end up cutting out my half of the roast and cooking hers until it is almost black.

It may not be an issue with the OP's recipes or cooking gear, but a matter of the OP's own personal tastes.

^ My late wife and I were the same re roast beef. I like it on the rare side but cooked, while my wife liked it well done. I could eat it the way she liked it, but she could only eat it if it was well done.