Everyone who is interested in cooking should do themselves a favour and buy a proper cookbook. Something that starts with the basics, and works itself up to full meals. It should have cheat-sheets for basic ways to cook all your staples, here's all the ways you can cook a potato, with times and temperature. Here's all the ways you can slice an onion, with examples of what it's good for. Here's how to cut a cow into pieces, here's what the pieces are called, here's how long each piece takes to cook and what it pairs well with.
Unfortunately, most people think they can cook something from a recipe collection without being proficient at the basics. "I'll just follow the recipe!", and then they wonder why it didn't work. A timer can never replace the knowledge of how something is supposed to look, feel, and smell when it's done or not.
And yet recipe collection regularly outsell cookbooks by a wide margin.
I guess they look good on a coffee table at least.
Would be useful for any home cook (I have it in my kitchen)
https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Chef-Culinary-Institute-...
https://www.amazon.com/Cordon-Bleu-Complete-Cooking-Techniqu...
The Key To Good Cooking on the other hand is a much better book for home cooks and focuses entirely on practical ingredients and techniques and is organised in a way that makes it much easier to find exactly the advice you need as you need it.
It certainly does.
Someone bought Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course as a wedding present for me and my wife. We were already reasonably proficient in the kitchen, but this book goes from the basics of boiling an egg, cooking perfectly fluffy rice onto more complex recipes. We've bought it for newlyweds since.
I agree with your basic point though. And there are tons of cookbooks today that do spend pages on relevant techniques--though certainly some are celebrity chef memoirs interspersed with recipes and high-quality photoss.
Table of Contents: Acknowledgments. Introduction. Meal planning (45pa). Food shopping (12pa). Cooking (530pa): measurements, beverages, breads, cake, candy, cereals, cheese, cookies, desserts, eggs, fish, meat, meat sundries, pastry and pies, poultry, preserving and canning, salads, sandwiches, sauces, soup, vegetables. Deep fat frying, leftovers, misc.
'Never used' as I get a lot of pleasure tasting and trying myself, picking up tips via browsing bookstores in the past and YouTube or talking to chefs now.
Time to watch Cunningham's Law in action.
He's also got a YouTube channel that's pretty fun to watch.
That said, be careful what you wish for. My partner and I joke that he's pretty over the top sometimes. For example, the first part of that book includes recipes for butter and Ranch dressing. I'm sure they'll taste amazing, but if you're trying to make dinner after work, it'll be late by the time you get to eat, vs. just using stuff off the supermarket shelf. Really depends on what you're trying to get out of a cookbook.
But making those recipes every once in a while can teach you a lot of techniques that you can carry over into other off-the-cuff recipes. One of my favorite things to do is add extra spices to mayo/ranch as a sauce or dressing. Sure, I can buy Siracha mayo at the store, but mixing it myself takes only a few seconds and I have more control. Little things like that can go a long way to making weeknight cooking more interesting and less monotonous.
- Ruhlman's 20 by Michael Ruhlman
- How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
I should have taken notes of what irked me so much about it, but there were multiple things about it that weren't for geeks. Any interview in it filled liked pure filler and because the book is black and white illustrating pictures loose nearly all meaning.
Most "illustrations" are more than unnecessary anyway and seem to be only there as a space filler. Don't get me wrong with 400 pages it is not a pamphlet or something and there ARE useful information in there, but most of the information wasn't useful, scattered through the book, interrupted by interviews with 0 value and littered with recipes I would never cook.
I personally rate "The Food Lab" from Kenji Lopez-Alt much higher than this and more helpful.
> .. littered with recipes I would never cook.
Me neither but that's exactly what I liked about it. I would have normally never tried them out, but because of this book I decided to try a few and was amazed how good they were.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Beard_Foundation_Award
Saving people a click https://weber.mizecx.com/knowledge/s3/retrieve?path=knowledg...
PDF page 65 onwards
pdftk 54372.pdf cat 65-end output weber-grilling-meat.pdfIn both Firefox and Chrome (probably Safari too) there is a page number at the top of the page when you open the PDF. Here you can manually type in a number. Open up the PDF and enter "64" and it'll take you directly to the page you enter.
Just open this link: https://weber.mizecx.com/knowledge/s3/retrieve?path=knowledg...
which is the original link, with "#page=65" appended. At least on Firefox, it will lead you straight to the page in question.
This sounds like made up recipe without ever trying too cook it, as some other commenter mentioned.
She made a cookbook of her recipes we all enjoyed for years and years and she included some of the original cutouts and index cards from probably the 50-60s or so. There’s also a lot of steps that you’d expect from a grandmother “cook until done” and “add some spices” to some of them.
I ended up experimenting with the recipe over the next six months, eventually getting the texture of the filling right. But those initial recipes were so far off, I doubt any of the authors had actually made it.
Nonserious recommendation: Just drop >600USD on
https://modernistcuisine.com/books/modernist-cuisine/
… and end up spherising your breakfast or something, idk.
I tend to disagree on that one, unless you are particularly experienced, or naturally gifted, measuring tools (timers, scales, thermometers,...) will give you the best results. At least for me, that's the case.
And if you can't follow a recipe to the letter, without knowledge of how things are supposed to feel, it is not a proper recipe. The entire point is to give you consistent results, if I had the intuition, I wouldn't need a recipe.
And even if you are an experienced cook, precise instructions and measurements will give you a better baseline from where you can improvise. Yes, I have an idea on how cook a potato, but unless the recipe tells me how to do it, how do I know how potatoes are supposed to be for that recipe in particular?
So yeah, no matter how good at cooking you are, if you "just follow" a recipe properly and it doesn't work, then the recipe is wrong or incomplete. It is like in programming, 99% of the time, where there is a problem, it comes from the software, not the computer running it. And successful developers don't ask users to fix their bugs, even on open source projects where users have the ability to do it, why should it be different for recipe writers?
Both. Have both. Ingredients are not 100 uniform and always cook in same way. Have "how it should be done" and "how it should look during/at the end of the process". You can't have exact same temperature on the pan as recipe, I guess unless you're constantly using IR thermometer to check
The main difference between cooking and process chemistry is that the latter actually cares about quality of the end result.
There is some unavoidable variation because of the inconsistency in ingredients and lack of access to tools that would mitigate it. However, the typical kitchen tools are also just bad by design, with any kind of precision or consistency long ago "value engineered" out of them. And now we also learn that cooking recipes are mostly pulled out of their writers' arses, to the point you might as well ask GPT-4, and save money on a cookbook / avoid exposure to ads and made up life stories on-line.
Hell, GPT-4 can at least also give you a Gantt chart to go with your recipe[0].
In the end, the only way to deal with this is by hand-holding the process, performing minute adjustments as guided by experience. This makes cooking much more of an art than it could - or should - be.
--
[0] - Some assembly required. Taste and safety not guaranteed, as I can't cook to save my life. https://cloud.typingmind.com/share/a349a38e-0e24-470e-a1c8-3...
Its ripoff engineered. I just threw in the trash an obscenely expensive pan with Vegan, cancer free, teflon free and gluten free coating thats coming off.
Do home cooks not care about how the food tastes? This seems like a strange take. People started cooking by roasting or boiling things over an open flame or searing them on a hot rock. Most of the techniques learned and passed down are about how to ensure good results under contexts where the inputs are naturally inconsistent and hard to control.
I don't know why we'd have an assumption that people have or want to work with precise scientific instruments all the time.
For example smoking a brisket. There is no perfect temperature that tells you it’s done. We know the thereabouts but one brisket might be done at 203 while another is at 200 and another at 205. You need to feel it.
Each animal is different and each smoker is different and the weather really matters. A humid day will influence cooking differently than a dry day.
Unless you can get uniform ingredients you’ll never be able to follow a recipe to the letter and get great outcomes every time. You should use tools but in the end you need your senses and you should taste everything you can before serving.
If you’re baking then you usually must follow the recipes as it will yield the best results. Experience will tell you more or less water will result in what. More or less baking soda will alter the result in what way. Etc
But if you’re cooking dinners, you don’t really need to follow recipes. Soup? You can often just throw whatever you want in the pot and it doesn’t matter. If it said 1 onion and you added 4, just tastes more oniony”
No, this is 100% false, and this is exactly why recipe collections are popular, because people think they can just follow a recipe to get a delicious meal. There is an immense difference in quality and properties of ingredients, difference in cookware, difference in appliances, etc. What's "medium heat" ? What's a "medium-sized potato" ?
You need to know basic cooking to work around these differences, you need to know what something feels like and looks like when it's done, otherwise you will forever fail.
> A timer can never replace the knowledge of how something is supposed to look, feel, and smell when it's done or not.
And it's not only that. If you just eat a lot, you'll know what things are supposed to look like when they are done. However, the difficult part is knowing what intermediate stages are supposed to look/smell/feel like! If you get it wrong at T=15 minutes, there might be no way to save the finished product at T=30 minutes, however hard you try.
And that intermediate stage you don't experience just by eating. That takes cooking and understanding.
When I follow a recipe it may or may not turn out well. If the recipe is a bad one or there's a part of it which requires a technique I don't know, the end product won't be good.
When I learn a technique it opens up a variety of options for just creating delicious stuff. A good example was learning how to make a pan sauce. Suddenly a bunch of things lying around the kitchen became ingredients for whatever kind of delicious sauce I was in the mood for, accompanying pretty much any meat or vegetable I wanted to eat. Dozens of possibilities for making great meals all came from one technique.
When you learn the techniques you end up with tons of options for what you're going to cook and the end product turns out better because you understand why it works.
I'd be a lot more hesitant about adopting this approach to baking though!
For someone who didn’t learn to cook growing up, that book is a godsend.
On the other hand, I refuse to make recipes found on the internet. They work extremely rarely if you’re like me and don’t have a sense of “what the authors really mean when they say X.”
> On the other hand, I refuse to make recipes found on the internet. They work extremely rarely if you’re like me and don’t have a sense of “what the authors really mean when they say X.”
What I do is look at about half a dozen recipes online when I am trying something new. I compare them and make my own recipe based on that. Through practice I can usually glance at them and see pretty quickly what they are doing differently and similarly.
Most dishes come out really well because I can get a feel for the dish before it's made and I have the freedom to make changes based on what the different recipes say (and my intuition). I'd encourage everybody to take this approach and not follow just one recipe.
As an example, my first stop for instant pot recipes is Amy + Jacky and they’ve yet to steer me wrong: https://www.pressurecookrecipes.com/instant-pot-cheesecake-n...
The only time I need to stray from those is for various kinds of ethnic cooking, in which case, a cookbook devoted to them serves a lot better than a website with a bunch of machine generated boilerplate at the beginning.
[The Joy of Cooking]: https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Cooking-Fully-Revised-Updated/dp/... [Better Homes and Gardens]: https://www.amazon.com/Better-Homes-Gardens-Cook-Book/dp/069...
I've since added the America's Test Kitchen cookbook to my collection. (Others, too, of course.) It's very explicitly a cookbook developed by chefs testing out recipes and fine-tuning them to get them just right.
Unfortunately, I rarely have the time & energy to cook from scratch these days, and the majority of the recipes I actually make come from Blue Apron—but they're also a pretty good source, and make some damn good dinners in a very practical amount of time.
Here's my grandma's recipe for flapjacks ... accompanied by a picture of flapjacks ... the recipe I made up, the picture was from a stock photo site (best place to get pictures of gravy! /jk) ...
For me that revelation explains a lot.
(And sometimes they do clearly vary from the recipe - like clearly not the called-for cheese, or without the described scattering of something over the top or whatever. Which I think's mostly fine or even good, but occasionally I think 'what do you mean by x' and either can't tell from the photo, or have to remind myself that that's only someone else's interpretation anyway.)
Very likely this has changed but once there were specialized artists that made mock-ups (often using wax, but not only), besides the ready-made props (usually plastic).
And then there is an endless list of non-food ingredients that are used because they come out great in photography, example:
https://petapixel.com/2018/11/30/tricks-food-photographers-u...
I'm not saying that they don't also do fake food, but a lot of real food is used as well.
You may be looking at glue used as milk, motor oil as sauce or mashed potatoes pretending to be ice cream [1].
(And don't call me Shirley)
[1] https://petapixel.com/2018/11/30/tricks-food-photographers-u...
Food photography very often is staged for visual appeal, not prepared as directed (for a recipe illustration) or as actually prepared (for a restaurant illustration.)
No they do not. Haven't you ever tasted something and said "this needs salt?"
Once you know what x+y tastes like and y+z tastes like, you can sometimes imagine what x+z would truly taste like; Any two things you think might taste good together probably do, for just as surely as you can imagine what something looks like, or sounds like, you can imagine what something tastes like.
The amounts generally remain the same orders of magnitude so even if they're not to your taste, the dish will probably "work", and if it doesn't, home cooks have priors:
Everyone has a crap oven, or high/low humidity or altitude or whatever, so there isn't a single recipe that would work for everyone, and I think most home-cooks know this! Hasn't a recipe ever turned out badly for you?
So if there are any issues they might have with a recipe, I could believe they would blame their skill and/or their kit, and/or adjust a few times before they ever blamed the recipe, because surely that can't be true!
> Plus every modern recipe has pictures to show what the result should look like. I
We have hi-resolution AI pictures all the time on this very site that people can't tell from fiction, and food surprises you?
C'mon! You can get pictures of just about anything from stock photography services. At newspaper-dpi nobody is going to notice!
> I just don’t believe she would get anything approximating a good result from this.
Well I guess it depends what exactly you mean by a "a good result..."
Not Delia Smith's.
It would not happen. Right? Right?
It came with experience, but knowing whether 1 TSP or 1 tbsp of something per portion is the right rough ratio comes in handy significantly more often than you think
I wonder what you would think of Ethiopia: Recipes and Traditions from the Horn of Africa ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/1623719631/ )
The recipes are good. But the book rarely specifies an amount of anything, and sometimes when it does it's accompanied by a note saying "I toned this way down for an American audience". [1] Many recipes include the direction "add enough water to prevent scorching" one or more times.
I just take the philosophy that that book mostly expects you to know what you want and how to get there, and whenever you try making a new recipe from it you might be wildly off. But it's not a matter of the recipes being "incorrect" -- they're great! It's that they're underspecified.
I don't think the requirement for familiarity with a recipe can really be gotten rid of. Learning to make rice-a-roni from a box had its hiccups; over time I tended to get better results despite not consciously doing anything different. And if any recipe is going to be tested for reliability and ease of following by people who are barely able to cook, it will be the directions on a box of rice-a-roni.
[1] And he wasn't kidding about that. I had to use five times the amount of berbere indicated in that particular recipe to get it to taste right.
Well, that makes two of us, her, and me buying too many recipe books ;)
Then I realize I don't know what half those ingredients are, wouldn't know where to source them, and in any case I don't have time to go shopping for nonstandard stuff.
Most recipe books have pictures, how are those created then?
It's almost safe to say you can't actually eat the meal that gets photographed.
"Certainly! Here's a delicious recipe that combines mozzarella and bacon: Bacon-Wrapped Mozzarella Sticks"
Do you want to hear the rest?
Bacon-Wrapped Mozzarella Sticks
Ingredients:
- 12 slices of bacon
- 12 mozzarella sticks
- 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
- 2 eggs, beaten
- 1 cup breadcrumbs
- 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
- 1/2 teaspoon paprika
- Vegetable oil, for frying
- Marinara sauce, for serving
Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C). Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Wrap each mozzarella stick with a slice of bacon, starting from one end and wrapping it tightly. Place the bacon-wrapped mozzarella sticks on the prepared baking sheet.
Bake the bacon-wrapped mozzarella sticks in the preheated oven for about 12-15 minutes, or until the bacon is crispy and the cheese is melted. Remove from the oven and set aside.
In three separate shallow bowls, set up a breading station. Place flour in the first bowl, beaten eggs in the second bowl, and breadcrumbs mixed with garlic powder and paprika in the third bowl.
Heat vegetable oil in a deep skillet or pot over medium heat until it reaches 350°F (180°C).
Take each bacon-wrapped mozzarella stick and dredge it in flour, then dip it into the beaten eggs, and finally coat it with the breadcrumb mixture, pressing gently to adhere. Repeat this process for each mozzarella stick.
Carefully place the coated mozzarella sticks into the hot oil, a few at a time, and fry for about 2-3 minutes, or until golden brown and crispy. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the fried mozzarella sticks to a paper towel-lined plate to drain excess oil.
Serve the bacon-wrapped mozzarella sticks warm with marinara sauce for dipping. Enjoy!
These bacon-wrapped mozzarella sticks make for a delicious appetizer or snack that combines the gooeyness of melted mozzarella with the savory crunch of bacon.
Looking forward to the Stable Diffusion based Illustration.
Ask it for a sweet and sour twist, or a French-inspired version, or to reformulate as a casserole. Or tell it you don't have any mozzarella right now.
I can come up with..say 10-15 Cabbage dishes with pictures and a write up in 30 minutes. The recipes might take less than one hour if I know where to look. The main thing we learn at culinary school is flavour pairings + texture + colour. French cuisine is very codified with its mother sauces..the six main cooking methods etc ..everything else is derived from the main templates. It’s a little more now with sous vide and gels and alginate etc. but that’s not for home kitchen recipes.
Example: cabbage. Goes well with sweet potato, guacamole, onions, citrus, chilli peppers. carrots, peas. Another example: Walnuts+cabbage. Because there is walnuts, apples will piggy back on those flavors. Because it does, cranberries will piggy back on the apples. Decide which one of the mother sauces. Then I can make a salad or in a taco or a sandwich or a quinoa bowl or soup or like a cabbage roll. That’s like at least..6 recipes I can come up with this one flavour combination.
But there is a method and order to it. You can’t pair cranberries with chilli peppers and cabbage. It won’t work unless you have apples and walnuts. It’s kind of nested.
This is how we build flavours as layers. Next we repeat the same process for textures. Then we do for colours(because we eat with our eyes too). French cuisine being so codified, this process can be applied to any cuisine and any ingredient.
I am putting it across in a simplified manner, but it takes years to ‘get it’ intuitively to build a dish on the fly. I started cooking professionally twenty years ago. I can come up with a book of recipes within a day.
But the pictures tho’ … AI generated photos are a time + money saver. Game changer. I love it!
Ask it for something bizarre like sweet and sour potatoes and see how it does.
Or a recipe that combines anchovies and strawberries, that's a good one.
So the recipe is really just some rough proportions that have probably never been cooked exactly; you are expected to make adjustments. That's why I find video recipes super helpful - you can see how each step is supposed to look, so if the timings in the recipe are wrong you can still adjust on the fly. And tasting as you go is always a good idea too.
Maybe edit some details out? That might impact said person's career.
Either way. He's got the consistently longest cooking videos on youtube. He explains that long videos don't do well. But it takes time to cook. Sometimes a long time. And he's a professional chef. So he goes very fast. All in order to make videos shorter so the audience doesn't turn away. Even with prep time where everything is arranged before filming, it will take him something like 20-30 minutes to finish one recipe. But his cooking is consistent, you watch him caramelize onions, you watch him multitask. Once again, he's very fast, but still, it's just not that fast to cook.
Audiences want fast. "quick 10 minute recipes" are all the fad. Equivalent to bite size twitter feeds and tik tok videos even though cooking can take a long time. But that's what the audience wants, and that's what the audience gets.
One of my biggest learnings is that no matter what I do it takes quite a while to cook a meal. Huge complex meals can take hours to prepare, but even a simple meal usually takes me half an hour - because that's just the time it takes to grab the ingredients, boil water for pasta/rice/potatoes/..., cook and present it. The time it takes to cook a meal is largely determined by the duration of the longest step. All the rest is done in parallel, with more complex recipes simply requiring more multitasking. So cooking a simpler meal often makes for a less stressful experience and simpler flavours, but often doesn't save much time.
Also I found that slow cooking brings out the best flavours and aroma.
1. To chop an onion or a shallot real fast, you need to do it a lot. In restaurant, you can probably chop 100x what you can do at home. Grated carrot with julienne knive ? It seems absurd to me at the time, but in the end that's a training.
2. To not lose time, you need the proper tools (and know how to use them). Sharped knive, flour stifler, ... . For example, my knives are not sharpened often enough, which means I cannot chop vegetables that well.
3. Cooking several things in parrallel will go wrong if you do not know what to look at before things get burned. If you are too "prudent", you will lower the fires and degrade your scalability.
This is not a mystery. People don't "cook along" with videos. People watch cooking videos for either to get inspired or for a vibe, most often for both.
A stew might take hours to be ready, but the core idea of it can be expressed succinctly in a few sentences. Totally made up example: "We brown beef, and then simmer it with potatoes low and slow with the bones in. It is ready when the meat falls off from the bones. Spice with a pinch of cinnamon." Those are long and sweaty hours in a kitchen to make it, but you can read the idea in seconds. Put the details and quantities in the description. Those few who want to cook it will find it there.
If there is some technique or twist, make a video about that specifically? It doesn't all have to be recipes. I have watched a video the other day where a person explained why they put a few drops of water in the pan when they are frying bacon. If they would have done it in the middle of a 20 minute video I might have missed it. Or what is even more likely would have been skeptical of the technique without the added explanation and test pieces where he has done it both ways to show the difference.
And videos you watch for vibes are not about cooking. They are about the personality of the presenter, that parasocial interaction. It doesn't matter how the food tastes. You won't eat it anyway. What matters are the feelings you experience while watching it.
But a lot of recipes require you to multitask between several parallel workflows of ingredient preparation and combination, keeping you active in cooking until either the final step ("put everything except the garnish into the oven for X minutes") or until the recipe is complete.
Audiences don't want long segments of monotonic action with predictable outcome. No need to show how to slice a kilo of onions. It doesn't sound like the chef videos you mentioned suffer from this, but your "want fast" generalization is off the mark.
I wager that most people hardly ever try the recipes they see, and of those that do, most suck at cooking. The point at which you start fast forwarding through stuff is the point in which you don't need cooking videos anymore and can just work off a written recipe. People want entertainment, and cooking is one of those easily monetized. non-politicized things on youtube that's just ripe to turn your brain off and follow along.
You don't need to show the initial 5 minutes of stirring which are unambiguously not golden brown, you do need to show the "it looks brownish but it's not yet golden brown" and the "this is done" steps - and if you cut out the unimportant parts which aren't relevant to any decision, then it helps focus the learner's attention where it's pedagogically most effective.
In an ideal world they would also show "this is how it looks when it's too much and you should have stopped earlier", but that requires cooking/wasting an extra batch.
And for onion cutting, instead of spending the valuable viewer's time on looking at how you cut 5 onions, instead show how you cut 1 onion but make sure that the camera angles make it clearly visible how exactly you do it while you explain it; then the other 4 onions then add no value and can be cut off-camera.
Its like buying expensive things, a higher price doesn't always translate to higher quality. Sometimes it just looks like high quality, is marketed and priced as such, but it falls apart when used. Sometimes it does however, and it takes some experience to be able to discern between the two.
And there are actually high quality recipe books that are more than just inspiring, sometimes they are unpretentious and you know it because the recipes 'just work'.
Lately I've been hunting recipes online for FODMAP compatible meals. Some of the recipes are just weird/wrong or poorly written.
Last night I was following a recipe that listed 8 eggs in the ingredients but in the instructions only telling you to use 3...
So many other weird things as well... non standard measurements or putting things in the instructions that dont show up in the ingredients, or instructions with completely unrealistic timeframes (like the caramelized onions). Also.. the number of FODMAP recipes that have major no no foods in them like Garlic or Onion :-$
And on the topic of onions: it has a three page section on caramelising onions, which will take you anywhere from half an hour to over an hour, depending on the quantity. That book doesn't lie.
I also have cookbooks that have been gifted to me that belong in the trash. You can tell from just looking at the ratios, times, and method description that the dish isn't going to turn out as expected. Worst of all, my partner is the type that can only cook from a recipe book and this has brought on many arguments over a simple suggestion to deviate from the recipe.
Except... a) they're ideally making big batches, enough for 10 or 20 servings, and b) their stuff is usually very modular, i.e. made out of other recipes. How do I make that great chicken with the yogurt dip? First make the marinade (recipe on page 42). Then make the spice mix for the yogurt (recipe on page 65). Then make blackened peppers (page 210). etc etc
If there are pictures, are those 'fake' too, as in the author did not care how it tastes? Atleast the dish was made once?
This is why you buy recipe books that was written in the 70s or prior. The base collection style of books.
I do have a few heuristics for pure recipe books:
1) the recipes have short lists of ingredients. There is a tendency to include obscure or hard to get ingredients for the sake of it, even if it's impossible to taste in the final product, I guess as a source of pride for home cooks.
2) the recipes discuss possible failures and ways around them. Especially with baking, there is inherent variability in ingredients, so you can tell the author prepared the dish many times before when they saw things going wrong and worked around that.
3) not always easy to find out, but the author being a professional working chef (not a celebrity chef) is a good sign. There is no time for unnecessary embellishments in a working kitchen, things must be robust and as simple as possible for the given final result.
The best example I've seen so far were David Lebovitz's recipes. Always stripped down to bare necessities, with multiple contingencies discussed, robust and simple. You can tell that's something that can be made dozens times a day with consistent results. Too bad it's so rare.
Nice to see a +1 for Lebovitz - not really familiar with him, but have been getting into home-made ice cream and just ordered The Perfect Scoop last night as my first/only ice cream recipe book.
As for quality, I expect a bread recipe printed on a flour package to have better chances of having been verified.
People put a number of stars based on their mood, presumptions, willingness to support a buddy's business, but not so often based on the real experience with the product or service.
Some people break down the science of a particular dish and explain in all detail the purpose of every single ingredient and cooking technique. They run experiments and tell you the impact of every single decision and come up with an optimized blueprint.
I realised long ago that most published recipes are not very good, but it's the first time I've heard that the writer doesn't even try them. "Turns out OK" is a terrible bar, if I make up something in my head it'll almost always turn out "OK", if I'm following a recipe it's because I want a better chance of it being better than OK.
As far as YouTubers go you have the holy trinity of Adam Ragusea, Ethan Chlenpwoski and Joshua Weissman, although I dislike the latter and would sub (haha) him out for Brian Lagerstrom.
All of those YouTubers hit a good balance between: scientific basis, concise clear steps and taking reasonable shortcuts.
She absolutely tests the recipes. A huge part of her work is testing for other people in addition to writing them etc. Testing itself is a HUGE industry.
I don’t want to say anything bad about a family member, but please treat your comment as a reflection on her, and not of recipe writers in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Australian_Women%27s_Weekl...
If she's experienced I guess that means she does (did?) cook something. So what does she cook when she does cook?
For example, here America’s Test Kitchen: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/5237-join-our-c...
I _hate_ bell peppers. I can tolerate them in big chunks where I can pick them out but if you dice them up and mix it in, I won't eat it.
One that sticks in my mind was a recipe that called for a dozen whole cloves, where really you'd just use one or two. If any.
A dozen whole cloves, used in the way the recipe called for, would make pretty much any dish painfully inedible.
- Don't just read one recipe. Read three, see what they have in common and what seems off in each of them.
- Keep a dossier of your hybrid or modified recipes. Annotate the recipe with any changes you made.
- If the end result isn't great, what went wrong? Annotate the recipe with any changes you think you should make next time you try it.
These become easier the more experienced you are, of course.
Books have a much higher production value than content farm material like your sister writes. They also rely heavily on reviews, which is incentive to invest the effort to do it right.
Modern recipe books have photos of the dish, so obviously they made it at least once. It would be unreasonable for them to invest all of the effort into writing a book, typesetting it, creating photography to match, proofreading, and getting it published, but to not actually try the recipe inside.
I’m sorry, but your sister is projecting her behavior on to everyone else in order to justify it. She is writing content farm material, but that doesn’t mean the entire industry works that way. Especially not the paid material book industry that hinges on reviews, gifting, and referrals.
Also, note that the average book sells very few copies. Even traditionally published books. Some books have higher production values that'd justify a lot of extra effort, but tends to be linked to name recognition for people with very established names. It's not at all a given that all that much money has gone into producing these books.
I have very low trust in online recipes in general, and always evaluate the source of them first.
But books are not, overall, that much better! Whatever testing was done was often done ad hoc or in professional kitchens, or on a much larger batch that was arithmetically scaled down to home sizes. This often works fine but not always, and usually needs some tweaking. It tends to be especially true of cookbooks affiliated with a well known restaurant or chef, but certainly not limited to that.
Cookbook recipe testing is basically like fact checking in non-fiction. It's up to the author and not invested in or validated by the publisher, unless the publisher is specifically specialized in cookbooks. Usually this means some of the recipes were tested by the same handful of friends & family. The fact that there's a photo means very little, just that someone made that dish once. No cookbook has photos of every recipe.
All these comments are making me think that I should never trust any proportions in a cookbook again. I guess that leaves experimentation and keeping notes, which I already do -- but curious if there are existing published recipes tested in home kitchens that I can rely upon a little more.
The things I look for in recipes are unfortunately not things that are easy to share as advice to look for, mostly intuition based on long experience. I just sit down and mentally "cook" the recipe, visualizing each ingredient and step and seeing if it makes sense and the directions are realistic.
One simple thing you can definitely look for is count how many pans, bowls, measuring cups a recipe calls for. If it's several of each that recipe was certainly written for an environment with professional dishwashers and likely not tested for home cooking. Might not be a bad recipe either, but it's more likely to leave out some details because it was originally written for a professional audience where you could assume familiarity with the techniques.
Another thing to look for is check the measurements and see where they came from, especially now that metric measures are becoming more common. If all the metric measurements are too precise it probably wasn't written or tested in metric. No one is measuring 118ml that's a half cup that was converted on paper. Or like 75mg of egg isn't one egg or two eggs, so that recipe was scaled down from a much larger one and probably not tested at this volume. Again though a red flag not a condemnation.
When the pandemic lockdowns hit and the Bon Appetit test kitchen people all started filming from their home kitchens there was a marked shift in what they cooked and how over time. One of the things Carla Music noted was that having to do her own dishes completely changed her approach to designing recipes because she realized how much of a hassle it is to be pulling out all kinds of specialized pots and pans and multiple spoons and such.
Except for rare pockets, the state of Internet recipes is utter garbage. Get a good foundational cookbook, cook and learn from your experience, which no shortcut can substitute. The people who do test their recipes as far as I know, are Cooks' Illustrated and America's Test Kitchens (they're the same company I think).
If this story is true, she absolutely cooks it once. She might not consider the right quantities and such but sounds off.
> What is worse, she claims that virtually all recipe books are made like this.
This is demonstrably bullshit.
One way I made time to spend with her in a meaningful way was to have her teach me recipes that she learned from them (she never traveled with Julia, but she did travel with Martin on several trips to asia (on one trip she then took the Orient Express)...
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One thing that I learned from her was that recipes (not baking/pastries) were good guidlines - but every time I asked "how much" to put in of a certain spice/ingredient she would shrug her shoulders and wave her hand and say "whatever you feel is right"
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My best girl-friend has been at the french laundry for years - and I learn a lot of information from her regarding ingredients, wine pairings etc.
But at the end of the day - worry about your own palette prefs - but follow a recipe, and as youre eating it, determine what you would change to make it more to you/your families/friends tastes and follow your gut. :-)
The thing is. At a birthday party when I was talking to her, she confessed to me that she never actually tries her recipes. When it's time to do a new piece, she sits down at her computer and makes up a recipe. She is experienced and knowledgeable she it usually turns out ok. But if you make her recipe you may well be the first one to do it. What is worse, she claims that virtually all recipe books are made like this.
So if you cook from a recipe you'll have to adjust to realities and modify it were needed, because the recipe writer sure as hell didn't do it for you.