7 Ways to Make Recipes Work

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In my experience, the best way to ensure recipe success is to learn from food scientists who are also great cooks, my favorite being Shirley Corriher. Her book CookWise details (and I mean details) excellent recipes and explicitly identifies what makes them work and what can cause failures. Her Southern heritage is a plus for this Rebel boy.

Except when baking, I think of recipe instructions in the same way as speed-limit signs on the freeway -- earnest suggestions. Seasonings are always adjustable, but if you have an eye, a tongue, and a hand for heft, so are material ingredients, after a certain amount of experience. When you’re in the process of acquiring experience, you can get much help from a serious cooking site like epicurious.com, with its thousands of recipes from the pros as well as often-useful ratings and chatter from home cooks. Looking at several recipes and comments for related dishes on epicurious helps you separate interesting variants from typos and careless writing. (Especially from readers. If most recipes use a tsp. of salt per lb. of ground meat in stuffings and meatballs, but “A Cook from Upstat Now Yirk” says that famed cook Mortadella Hoisin recommends one tbsp., you know something’s amiss. And it’s not just those Now Yirkers!)

But IMHO the surest road to recipe success is to study food scientists who are also great cooks, my favorite being Shirley Corriher. Her book CookWise details (and I mean details) excellent recipes and explicitly identifies what makes them work and what can cause failure. Her Southern heritage is a plus for this Rebel boy.

No doubt, all of the above is known to people on this thread, but it might be useful to blushing brides and background lurkers. -SB

Except when baking, I think of recipe instructions in the same way as speed-limit signs on the freeway -- earnest suggestions. Seasonings are always adjustable, of course, but if you have an eye, a tongue, and a hand for heft, so are material ingredients, after a certain amount of experience. When you’re in the process of acquiring experience, you can get much help from a serious cooking site like epicurious.com, with its thousands of recipes from the pros as well as often-useful ratings and chatter from home cooks. Looking at several recipes and comments for related dishes on epicurious helps you separate interesting variants from typos and careless writing. For example, if most recipes use about a tsp. of salt per lb. of ground meat in stuffings and meatballs, but “A Cook from Upstat Now Yirk” says that famed cook Mortadella Hoisin recommends one tbsp., you know something’s amiss. (And it’s not just those Now Yirkers!)

But the surest road to recipe success is to study those few food scientists who are also great cooks, my favorite being Shirley Corriher. Her book CookWise details (and I mean details) excellent recipes and explicitly identifies what makes them work. Her Southern heritage is a special plus for this Rebel boy.

No doubt, all of the above is known to people on this thread, but it might be useful to blushing brides and background lurkers.

Except when baking, I think of recipe instructions in the same way as speed-limit signs on the freeway -- earnest suggestions. Seasonings are always adjustable, of course, but if you have an eye, a tongue, and a hand for heft, so are material ingredients, after a certain amount of experience. When you’re in the process of acquiring experience, you can get much help from a serious cooking site like epicurious.com, with its thousands of recipes from the pros as well as often-useful ratings and chatter from home cooks. Looking at several recipes and comments for related dishes on epicurious helps you separate interesting variants from typos and careless writing. For example, if most recipes use about a tsp. of salt per lb. of ground meat in stuffings and meatballs, but “A Cook from Upstat Now Yirk” says that famed cook Mortadella Hoisin recommends one tbsp., you know something’s amiss. (And it’s not just those Now Yirkers!)

But the surest road to recipe success is to study those few food scientists who are also great cooks, my favorite being Shirley Corriher. Her book CookWise details (and I mean details) excellent recipes and explicitly identifies what makes them work. Her Southern heritage is a special plus for this Rebel boy.

No doubt, all of the above is known to people on this thread, but it might be useful to blushing brides and background lurkers.

Thank you for all your hard work Jeanne...one of my first magazine subscriptions was Bon Appetit. I will love the magazine forever for getting the AOC Curried Cauliflower out to the masses... :)

However, another pet peeve of mine are recipes that use too many utensils/dishes and the over insistence on a full mis en place. I tell my friends just to take out all the ingredients and tools first and then fully read the recipe (Which I LOVE that Amy put as #1) so you know if you know what you need to chop first, etc... Again, as someone who is a cheerleader of young people cooking at home, I know that little piece of cooking joy is diminished by each dish we have to wash. Although L.A. isn't the east coast, many of us live in 1920s-50s apartments that DON'T have dish washers...

Hi Amy-This post should be required reading for any would be cook. Having all ingredients prepped out (mise en place) before starting to cook is helpful, and following a recipe that actually works is huge. Sadly, most cookbooks have not had the benefit of recipe testing. Chefs' cookbooks are popular now, but often (not always) chefs are the poorest source for recipes as they don't cook from them and think they're sort of lame. Chefs intuitively combine ingredients and often cannot visualize the difference between a tablespoon and a teaspoon. (I know this as I tested countless recipes from chefs over many years in the Los Angeles Bon Appetit test kitchen, which sadly closed it's doors for good today.) Recipe testing is serious stuff--accurate weighing, measuring, double timers, note taking---it's not something you see on food t.v., and most cookbook authors don't have the budget (or dedication) for it. A good recipe can make a good cook.Thanks,Jeanne

Great post, particularly with rule #1 and super-especially with restaurant cookbooks and expectations that they'll turn out like the restaurant, as one writer tested out.

And one more rule of mine is to test completely new recipes for yourself (maybe your family/roommates.) Stick with the tried-and-trues for your parties/potlucks/gatherings.

Nice comment! Could write a treatise on the economics of recipe testing. If you're making pancakes and the recipe doesn't work, it's one thing. But if you go to Surfas and spend a fortune on Valrhona chocolate and 000 flour and duck confit and whatever else and the recipe(s) are a disaster, not only do you not have dinner but you've blown your whole paycheck. Or a few of them. It's demoralizing, exhausting, and maddening. A recipe is a kind of social contract, and as such it should work. But then I once spent $30 on a muffin recipe, so I'm a little biased.

Nice post. Cookbook authors and foodwriters have a nifty way of blowing off mistakes that cost their readers a fortune in lost time and ingredients. I baked the sourdough bread from a Chez Panisse book enough times to have opened a brick factory before Steve Sullivan of Acme Bakery remarked that the author had screwed up the recipe. What was funny to a small circle of clever clogs in Berkeley has never amused me. Shopping and cooking is time consuming. Ingredients are expensive. People who blithely pass along bad recipes might as well siphon your petrol before reaching into your wallet and ripping up cash and as a last insult wiping a good chunk of time from your calendar.