"On March 20, 1939, Wakefield gave Nestlé the right to use her cookie recipe and the Toll House name. In a bargain that rivals Peter Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan, the price was a dollar—a dollar that Wakefield later said she never received (though she was reportedly given free chocolate for life and was also paid by Nestlé for work as a consultant)."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/sweet-morsels...

[1] https://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best...

Last year I went to a fancy steak house in Las Vegas, and my thought was that I prefer my own steak. I was surprised, since I assume that restaurants have access to better cuts and can age it better. I mean, it was a fine steak, but I preferred my own.

I highly recommend the ChefSteps Joule.

This is important. My mother-in-law apparently made the best bread, yet despite my wife having both the recipe and having watched/helped her mother bake that bread several times she has never been able to replicate it. Also, my sister and I were both given exactly the same 'family' cookie recipe from our grandmother (she got it from a newspaper) and our cookies turn out quite different.

The only thing she did that was at all unusual was to use an oven thermometer; she found that ovens would be up to 20 degrees off from their set-point.

(My aunt is not known for her cooking.)

Making emulsions consistently is hard process science. Sometimes even dispersion is not what you want. Picking right cake form or cookie size is critical too as it changes water evaporation.