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My sister in law writes recipes. She has a recipe column in a newspaper and wrote a few high quality recipe books. I saw them in a bookstore. So she's reasonabl

My sister in law writes recipes. She has a recipe column in a newspaper and wrote a few high quality recipe books. I saw them in a bookstore. So she's reasonable successful. Her pieces are charming, her recipes inspiring. 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.

rutierut 3y ago
Maybe this is just my experience, but I've almost never seen a recipe book where the recipes are not accompanied by pictures of the result?
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  I think the thing here might be "of the results". 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.
  - rwmj 3y ago
    I know a food stylist and a food photographer (both work / have worked for major UK newspapers) and this is nonsense. They cook and photograph every recipe.
- OJFord 3y ago
  Even in Delia's course - she has a good reputation for testing & refining etc. over time, not a TV personality with questionable time/skill in kitchen - the photos & making of those dishes to photograph are credited to someone else. (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.)
- LukeShu 3y ago
  I've almost never seen a recipe book that didn't have at least one recipe where some aspect of the picture didn't blatantly contradict the recipe; i.e. it was just a stock photo.
  - mediascreen 3y ago
    You should probably try buying better quality cookbooks? I don't think I have ever seen a stock image in a cookbook.
- ibz 3y ago
  AI generated photos would probably look good enough for the book to be successful.
- jaclaz 3y ago
  Cannot say for recipe books, but for illustrations for ads and/or for restaurant posters, the "traditional" way was to not use food at all, or use only partially actual food, the rest being artificial. 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-use-to-make-food-look-delicious/ https://petapixel.com/2018/11/30/tricks-food-photographers-u...
  - cperciva 3y ago
    I'm inclined to give food photographers a pass on the "non-food ingredients" thing. Most of these fall into the category of "make something which looks like food but lasts longer" -- fake ice cream which doesn't melt, fake milk which doesn't soak into cereal, fake syrup which doesn't soak into pancakes, et cetera. It's not a matter of making something which looks better than real food -- it's just that photoshoots have a unique need when it comes to how long the food lasts. If you're eating pancakes, they should never stay on your plate for the amount of time a professional photographer would want to spend with them.
    - jaclaz 3y ago
      Sure, nothing against the practice, food photographers do what is needed to do to obtain a good result, it was only to explain why often times what you actually cook looks quite different from the photos, a part is to be attributed to (less) capabilities of the cook, but a part comes from the sheer fact that the photo does not represent the actual output of the recipe.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    I know someone who was a cook for a food photographer. they always made 10x what was called for. For one salad in the photo she made 10 so they could choose the best looking one, then a lot of time was spent adjusting exactly where each tomato was. Likewise make 10 pies, take a slice our of each, then the artist uses a rubber scrapper to put the right lines in the side of each slice, then choose the best to photograph. It was all real food. I'm not saying that they don't also do fake food, but a lot of real food is used as well.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  The Leith’s books don’t have many photos, great recipes though as you’d expect from a genuine cooking school.
- topaz0 3y ago
  That's a pretty modern development. Older cookbooks, including classics that are just as good or better than anything being written now, don't have photos, and rarely have illustrations.
plufz 3y ago
This is a little frustrating to hear. Since that is exactly the feeling I often have. Proportions and time seems incorrect and you question what you are going wrong. I have a few cookbooks like the ones from Yotam Ottolenghi where the recipe is actually correct. It is so much more fun to use. Nothing wrong with improvising in the kitchen, but trying to fix incorrect salt balance, being stressed over longer cooking time than expected, etc. is not much fun.
- maccard 3y ago
  I'm a decent cook, and occasionally I've been in the middle of a recipe and noticed something is off. 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
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > that is exactly the feeling I often have. Proportions and time seems incorrect and you question what you are going wrong. I have a few cookbooks like the ones from Yotam Ottolenghi where the recipe is actually correct. It is so much more fun to use. I wonder what you would think of Ethiopia: Recipes and Traditions from the Horn of Africa ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/1623719631/ 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.
echelon 3y ago
> [...] reasonable successful. Maybe edit some details out? That might impact said person's career.
pickledshrimp 3y ago
Surely that can’t be true. Even semi professional chefs need to figure out what flavour combinations need to go together, amounts of each item, etc. Plus every modern recipe has pictures to show what the result should look like. I just don’t believe she would get anything approximating a good result from this.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Plus every modern recipe has pictures to show what the result should look like. 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.)
- voytec 3y ago
  > Surely that can’t be true (...) every modern recipe has pictures to show what the result should look like 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-use-to-make-food-look-delicious/ https://petapixel.com/2018/11/30/tricks-food-photographers-u...
  - mmkos 3y ago
    I hate that we do this in so many domains of our lives.. create unrealistic expectations via fake representation and then wonder why so many people are unhappy.
- geocar 3y ago
  > Even semi professional chefs need to figure out what flavour combinations need to go together, amounts of each item, etc. 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..."
palotasb 3y ago
> she claims that virtually all recipe books are made like this Most recipe books have pictures, how are those created then?
- kevsim 3y ago
  Gotta say, not really looking forward to GPT generated recipes rendered by Stable Diffusion.
  - groestl 3y ago
    "Generate me a recipe with mozzarella and bacon" "Certainly! Here's a delicious recipe that combines mozzarella and bacon: Bacon-Wrapped Mozzarella Sticks" Do you want to hear the rest?
    - djxfade 3y ago
      Go on...
      - groestl 3y ago
        Never been tested once: 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 Instructions: 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.
blowski 3y ago
I imagine this is like a senior dev who says all they do is copy code from StackOverflow. There’s some amount of good social skills, humility, and expertise that forgets how simple things for them are like rocket science to others.
groestl 3y ago
> she never actually tries her recipes. Well, that makes two of us, her, and me buying too many recipe books ;)
- the_af 3y ago
  Haha I understand you. I have way too many cookbooks that are untried and untested. I like looking at the pretty photos and marvel at those kitchens and kitchenware. And the ingredients, so colorful! 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.
henrikschroder 3y ago
As if I needed more fuel on the fire of my burning hatred for recipe collections. 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.
- dmarchand90 3y ago
  Could you recommend such a "proper" cookbook
  - xupybd 3y ago
    https://www.mightyape.co.nz/product/edmonds-cookery-book-fully-revised/25457229?gclid=Cj0KCQjwyLGjBhDKARIsAFRNgW-0KFNoR7o6LR72Do4XQNZ59bGZWQ4ufnvtAQwe7kyF9yHOR_fZM3waAmnZEALw_wcB https://www.mightyape.co.nz/product/edmonds-cookery-book-ful...
  - misja111 3y ago
    I really enjoyed Cooking for Geeks: https://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Geeks-Science-Great-Hacks/dp/0596805888 https://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Geeks-Science-Great-Hacks/dp/...
    - BlackLotus89 3y ago
      This was one of the worst cookbooks I ever bought and some things were borderline wrong. 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.
jraph 3y ago
Ah ah, it's like an experienced developer committing code and releasing it without running / testing it first. It would not happen. Right? Right?
- JodieBenitez 3y ago
  I do this, sometimes. And it's fine.
- ReptileMan 3y ago
  Especially not on live ... it never happens man. It's urban legend.
- june_twenty 3y ago
  You're implying this does happen. Where does this happen? I've never experienced it.
  - andrewflnr 3y ago
    I did have a guy, supposedly experienced, push some code to master that he had obviously not run because it still had obvious syntax errors. I can only assume there was a bit of a culture mismatch, but still, shall we say I was peeved.
- Sakos 3y ago
  It's more like deploying code to production without at the very least running it once. That would be really fucking dumb. Most people don't do that. The above comment is saying that most cookbooks are hot garbage and dont have recipes that have been used once.
wonnage 3y ago
It could be the way you're interpreting, but I suspect what she means is that she didn't go through and verify the exact measurements and timings in the recipe. There are simply too many variables involved in (non-baking) recipes to produce an exactly reproducible result - your ingredients might be different sizes, your "medium" heat is probably not their medium heat, differences in produce might affect the amount of salt/sugar you need to add, etc. Also, when scaling a recipe up or down, you won't actually want to scale things linearly - it generally takes much longer to cook a large portion than it does a small one, or it feels silly to use 1/8th of an onion, etc. Most of these can be solved through measuring by weight, but that's annoying unless you're baking. 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.
denton-scratch 3y ago
> virtually all recipe books are made like this Not Delia Smith's.
eru 3y ago
That sounds convincing enough. But how do they make the pictures that come with many recipes, then?
- ibz 3y ago
  Stock photos. AI generated. There are options...
  - eru 3y ago
    AI generated would perhaps be an option these days, but not earlier.
jterrys 3y ago
I'm not really surprised. There's a youtube channel called Chef Jean Pierre. He is a retired Chef that used to run a restaurant since the 1970s, has cookbooks, was featured on PBS, etc. (Some say he has a more colorful past with his cooking school/restaurant business in Florida, but I don't know much). 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.
- atdrummond 3y ago
  I’ve cooked with him a few times (he gave classes at our family’s cookery shop) and he’s the real deal. Colourful doesn’t begin to describe his actual background, though.
- Agentlien 3y ago
  I'm an amateur who enjoys cooking and does it once a day in order to feed my family. 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.
  - mindentropy 3y ago
    Exactly what I have experienced. Even whatever time is mentioned in the cookbooks, I was never able to beat it. It takes a minimum of 45 minutes to prepare a decent dish for me. I too am an amateur and I measure my time with my mother's time and I see a difference but not so much. I do not do multitasking if I have something on the stove which requires constant stirring or moving around. Also I found that slow cooking brings out the best flavours and aroma.
Lutger 3y ago
This is probably why I often just browse the ingredients of a recipe for inspiration and sometimes even don't read the instructions. Most recipe books are not very good. Not trying your own recipes is, respectfully, just fraud and I would not call those books high quality. 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'.
senectus1 3y ago
This does not surprise me in the slightest. 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 :-$
frereubu 3y ago
I remember a conversation in my 20s with a friend who said "Jamie Oliver's recipes all work" and I was nonplussed by it - I figured that all the recipes in recipe books had been tried and tested, but boy was I naïve. The ones I know which always work are: any Jamie Oliver, any Anna Jones, Ottolenghi's Simple, River Cafe Easy, and The Intolerant Gourmet (a great book of recipes even if you don't have food intolerances). Leith's Cookery Bible is also good - there's a particulaly good one for boned stuffed chicken - although some of the recipes are a little dated now.
eyko 3y ago
My favourite on Indian cuisine is the Dishoom cookbook: it comes with recipes for most of their most famous dishes from their restaurant. I've tried most and, whilst the recipes might need a little tweaking to match your kitchen equipment, they are generally spot on. In fact, as far as cookbooks go, it's one of my favourites because it actually gets you close enough that you can figure out what to tweak. 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.
- iainmerrick 3y ago
  Restaurant cookbooks are often very good, if they give you the actual recipes they use in the restaurant. 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
jtc331 3y ago
This is why I find America’s Test Kitchen so helpful: they’ve tried everything repeatedly, and because of that it’s rare to find one of their recipes that doesn’t work.
- scary-size 3y ago
  I feel the same. That‘s a subscription that really pays off. Also one of the few newslettery messages I let in my inbox.
rightbyte 3y ago
The 'shittification' is almost universal. I have suspected many internet recipes are never tried, but books too ... 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.
- r_hoods_ghost 3y ago
  Except a lot of recipe books from the 1950s to 1970s involve tins of mushroom soup, condensed milk, and jelly rather than real ingredients.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  To that end there's a Canadian guy on youtube that puts out cooking videos using vintage (typically early 20th century) cookbooks every Sunday.
- astura 3y ago
  I picked up a cookbook from the 70s in a second hand shop. It's got okay content for the most part but some recipes are incredibly unappealing for modern tastes, stuff like savory jello.
otikik 3y ago
I only get recipes from YouTube, were I can see a person actually doing it. They can still “fake it” or lie but it’s less likely.
cout 3y ago
Most recipe blogs these days include pictures of the dish as it is being prepared. I think it would be hard to generate those pictures without actually cooking the dish (though as AI image generation improves that will change).
dgroshev 3y ago
Yes. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between. 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.
- Marsymars 3y ago
  > The best example I've seen so far were David Lebovitz's recipes. 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.
mongol 3y ago
This is what I long have suspected to be the case. At least for cookbooks of the very common kind. Perhaps the most well known ones do it differently. But cookbooks are a dime a dozen, and probably most commonly bought as gifts. Quality is not a priority. As for quality, I expect a bread recipe printed on a flour package to have better chances of having been verified.
Eumenes 3y ago
I notice this in alot of recipes. See very highly rated reviews, lots of reviews, scroll down to reviews, 'omg i can't wait to try this' = 5 stars ... hmm
- kunley 3y ago
  That's about reviews for anything. 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.
vishnugupta 3y ago
This is why I follow YouTube videos and not recipe books. They turn out just fine.
Chyzwar 3y ago
That why I like to watch youtube chiefs like Joshua Weissman or Guga. They try to test at least some recipies.
sanitycheck 3y ago
...and here's an example of someone whose job can be replaced with ChatGPT. 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.
- jorvi 3y ago
  YouTuber home cooks make it “live”, so I generally trust those. Same for Gordon Ramsey, Marco Pierre White, Heston Blumenthal etc. 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.
mgaunard 3y ago
That's why you should only follow recipes from reputable sources. 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.
donohoe 3y ago
My wife is a professional recipe writer for magazines, books, restaurants, meal-kit services, and companies. 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.
- tiems 3y ago
  Just to echo this, recipe tester is a profession in and of itself. There are publishers where recipes are not tested, but more established and trusted ones absolutely do.
lr4444lr 3y ago
How do you get a gig like that?
femto 3y ago
The Australian Women's Weekly's recipe tagline is "Triple Tested", meaning their recipes are cooked at least three times in their test kitchen. The kitchen has been at it for around 100 years and their recipes are highly trusted and well known in Australia (for good reason). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Australian_Women%27s_Weekly#Recipes_and_cookbooks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Australian_Women%27s_Weekl... Edit: byline -> tagline
yyyk 3y ago
>...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. If she's experienced I guess that means she does (did?) cook something. So what does she cook when she does cook?
yellowstuff 3y ago
My wife has written cookbooks and worked as a recipe tester for cookbooks, blogs, and even the little recipes on the back of bags of flour and stuff. I’m sure not every published recipe was tested, but a lot of them were. Some by me, an inexperienced cook nervously testing recipes for my wife’s book as she watched me like a hawk. At least 2 people tested every recipe in her books.
vachina 3y ago
Ok so if they don’t try their own recipes, then how did they make the pictures that accompany the recipes?
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  If it’s a fairly common dish, stock photos.
nunuvit 3y ago
Recipe writers are the original large language models, making up superfically plausible bullshit to waste our time on.
silverlake 3y ago
From what I’ve read and seen, many cookbook authors test their recipes repeatedly in home kitchens. Most have testers or volunteers to ensure they make sense and work. By contrast I have some books that are restaurant recipes they purposely did not modify for home use. They are ridiculously complex and interesting. For example, here America’s Test Kitchen: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/5237-join-our-community-of-recipe-testers https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/5237-join-our-c...
- donohoe 3y ago
  Yes, most do! If you want a fortress of well-tested recipes I highly recommend Smitten Kitchen. Everything tested to great depths... https://smittenkitchen.com/ https://smittenkitchen.com/
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    https://www.seriouseats.com/ https://www.seriouseats.com/ takes a similar approach (and tends to attract folks from Cooks Illustrated / America's Test Kitchen).
hk1337 3y ago
I am convinced they add red and yellow bell peppers strictly because they think the dish needs more color. 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.
- _fat_santa 3y ago
  For what it's worth, I found the best way to make them is to cut them into very thin slices. My rule is bell peppers have to always be "bite sized" because of how tough they are. If you make the pieces to big, you will have to "bite into" the pepper rather than eating it whole and I think that's where they get a bad rap since they can be very tough to bite into.
  - hk1337 3y ago
    While not preferred, I could tolerate slices. I could pick them out a lot easier than diced up small.
zebraflask 3y ago
Aha, I've often vaguely suspected as much with certain well-known food columns. I wrote it off to incompetent cooks, but it makes more sense that they were just making it up as they went along. 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.
pteraspidomorph 3y ago
My tricks: - 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.
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
> What is worse, she claims that virtually all recipe books are made like this. 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.
- vidarh 3y ago
  You seem to be projecting assumption here. The comment you replied to says she's written books they've seen in a book store. 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.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  I have extensive cooking experience both professional and at home, and have written published recipes and also been a tester for published recipes. 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.
nyjah 3y ago
This seems about right to me from watching Kenji cook on his YouTube channel. He was promoting his wok book and everything he cooked he would say, “I think it says to do it this other way in my book, but you can do it this way or your own way and it will be fine”.- which I appreciate. I’ve noticed the cooking channels I watch on YouTube are technique based more than specific recipes. So I’m wondering if some people read a recipe thinking “this is the exact way” and other look at it as just a rough template
nailer 3y ago
I dated an editor for a travel writer for a well known travel book company. He'd update his old books to include his 'visits' to new places, sourcing the content from other publications without actually going there.
isaacremuant 3y ago
Top comment of something that is probably a lie or a misrepresentation. 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.
samstave 3y ago
My grandmother was friends with both Martin Yan and Julia Child. 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)... - 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" - 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. :-)

rutierut 3y ago

Maybe this is just my experience, but I've almost never seen a recipe book where the recipes are not accompanied by pictures of the result?

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
I think the thing here might be "of the results". 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.
- rwmj 3y ago
  I know a food stylist and a food photographer (both work / have worked for major UK newspapers) and this is nonsense. They cook and photograph every recipe.
OJFord 3y ago
Even in Delia's course - she has a good reputation for testing & refining etc. over time, not a TV personality with questionable time/skill in kitchen - the photos & making of those dishes to photograph are credited to someone else. (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.)
LukeShu 3y ago
I've almost never seen a recipe book that didn't have at least one recipe where some aspect of the picture didn't blatantly contradict the recipe; i.e. it was just a stock photo.
- mediascreen 3y ago
  You should probably try buying better quality cookbooks? I don't think I have ever seen a stock image in a cookbook.
ibz 3y ago
AI generated photos would probably look good enough for the book to be successful.
jaclaz 3y ago
Cannot say for recipe books, but for illustrations for ads and/or for restaurant posters, the "traditional" way was to not use food at all, or use only partially actual food, the rest being artificial. 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-use-to-make-food-look-delicious/ https://petapixel.com/2018/11/30/tricks-food-photographers-u...
- cperciva 3y ago
  I'm inclined to give food photographers a pass on the "non-food ingredients" thing. Most of these fall into the category of "make something which looks like food but lasts longer" -- fake ice cream which doesn't melt, fake milk which doesn't soak into cereal, fake syrup which doesn't soak into pancakes, et cetera. It's not a matter of making something which looks better than real food -- it's just that photoshoots have a unique need when it comes to how long the food lasts. If you're eating pancakes, they should never stay on your plate for the amount of time a professional photographer would want to spend with them.
  - jaclaz 3y ago
    Sure, nothing against the practice, food photographers do what is needed to do to obtain a good result, it was only to explain why often times what you actually cook looks quite different from the photos, a part is to be attributed to (less) capabilities of the cook, but a part comes from the sheer fact that the photo does not represent the actual output of the recipe.
- bluGill 3y ago
  I know someone who was a cook for a food photographer. they always made 10x what was called for. For one salad in the photo she made 10 so they could choose the best looking one, then a lot of time was spent adjusting exactly where each tomato was. Likewise make 10 pies, take a slice our of each, then the artist uses a rubber scrapper to put the right lines in the side of each slice, then choose the best to photograph. It was all real food. I'm not saying that they don't also do fake food, but a lot of real food is used as well.
iamacyborg 3y ago
The Leith’s books don’t have many photos, great recipes though as you’d expect from a genuine cooking school.
topaz0 3y ago
That's a pretty modern development. Older cookbooks, including classics that are just as good or better than anything being written now, don't have photos, and rarely have illustrations.

plufz 3y ago

This is a little frustrating to hear. Since that is exactly the feeling I often have. Proportions and time seems incorrect and you question what you are going wrong. I have a few cookbooks like the ones from Yotam Ottolenghi where the recipe is actually correct. It is so much more fun to use. Nothing wrong with improvising in the kitchen, but trying to fix incorrect salt balance, being stressed over longer cooking time than expected, etc. is not much fun.

maccard 3y ago
I'm a decent cook, and occasionally I've been in the middle of a recipe and noticed something is off. 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
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> that is exactly the feeling I often have. Proportions and time seems incorrect and you question what you are going wrong. I have a few cookbooks like the ones from Yotam Ottolenghi where the recipe is actually correct. It is so much more fun to use. I wonder what you would think of Ethiopia: Recipes and Traditions from the Horn of Africa ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/1623719631/ 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.

echelon 3y ago

> [...] reasonable successful. Maybe edit some details out? That might impact said person's career.

pickledshrimp 3y ago

Surely that can’t be true. Even semi professional chefs need to figure out what flavour combinations need to go together, amounts of each item, etc. Plus every modern recipe has pictures to show what the result should look like. I just don’t believe she would get anything approximating a good result from this.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> Plus every modern recipe has pictures to show what the result should look like. 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.)
voytec 3y ago
> Surely that can’t be true (...) every modern recipe has pictures to show what the result should look like 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-use-to-make-food-look-delicious/ https://petapixel.com/2018/11/30/tricks-food-photographers-u...
- mmkos 3y ago
  I hate that we do this in so many domains of our lives.. create unrealistic expectations via fake representation and then wonder why so many people are unhappy.
geocar 3y ago
> Even semi professional chefs need to figure out what flavour combinations need to go together, amounts of each item, etc. 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..."

palotasb 3y ago

> she claims that virtually all recipe books are made like this Most recipe books have pictures, how are those created then?

kevsim 3y ago
Gotta say, not really looking forward to GPT generated recipes rendered by Stable Diffusion.
- groestl 3y ago
  "Generate me a recipe with mozzarella and bacon" "Certainly! Here's a delicious recipe that combines mozzarella and bacon: Bacon-Wrapped Mozzarella Sticks" Do you want to hear the rest?
  - djxfade 3y ago
    Go on...
    - groestl 3y ago
      Never been tested once: 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 Instructions: 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.

blowski 3y ago

I imagine this is like a senior dev who says all they do is copy code from StackOverflow. There’s some amount of good social skills, humility, and expertise that forgets how simple things for them are like rocket science to others.

groestl 3y ago

> she never actually tries her recipes. Well, that makes two of us, her, and me buying too many recipe books ;)

the_af 3y ago
Haha I understand you. I have way too many cookbooks that are untried and untested. I like looking at the pretty photos and marvel at those kitchens and kitchenware. And the ingredients, so colorful! 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.

henrikschroder 3y ago

As if I needed more fuel on the fire of my burning hatred for recipe collections. 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.

dmarchand90 3y ago
Could you recommend such a "proper" cookbook
- xupybd 3y ago
  https://www.mightyape.co.nz/product/edmonds-cookery-book-fully-revised/25457229?gclid=Cj0KCQjwyLGjBhDKARIsAFRNgW-0KFNoR7o6LR72Do4XQNZ59bGZWQ4ufnvtAQwe7kyF9yHOR_fZM3waAmnZEALw_wcB https://www.mightyape.co.nz/product/edmonds-cookery-book-ful...
- misja111 3y ago
  I really enjoyed Cooking for Geeks: https://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Geeks-Science-Great-Hacks/dp/0596805888 https://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Geeks-Science-Great-Hacks/dp/...
  - BlackLotus89 3y ago
    This was one of the worst cookbooks I ever bought and some things were borderline wrong. 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.

jraph 3y ago

Ah ah, it's like an experienced developer committing code and releasing it without running / testing it first. It would not happen. Right? Right?

JodieBenitez 3y ago
I do this, sometimes. And it's fine.
ReptileMan 3y ago
Especially not on live ... it never happens man. It's urban legend.
june_twenty 3y ago
You're implying this does happen. Where does this happen? I've never experienced it.
- andrewflnr 3y ago
  I did have a guy, supposedly experienced, push some code to master that he had obviously not run because it still had obvious syntax errors. I can only assume there was a bit of a culture mismatch, but still, shall we say I was peeved.
Sakos 3y ago
It's more like deploying code to production without at the very least running it once. That would be really fucking dumb. Most people don't do that. The above comment is saying that most cookbooks are hot garbage and dont have recipes that have been used once.

wonnage 3y ago

It could be the way you're interpreting, but I suspect what she means is that she didn't go through and verify the exact measurements and timings in the recipe. There are simply too many variables involved in (non-baking) recipes to produce an exactly reproducible result - your ingredients might be different sizes, your "medium" heat is probably not their medium heat, differences in produce might affect the amount of salt/sugar you need to add, etc. Also, when scaling a recipe up or down, you won't actually want to scale things linearly - it generally takes much longer to cook a large portion than it does a small one, or it feels silly to use 1/8th of an onion, etc. Most of these can be solved through measuring by weight, but that's annoying unless you're baking. 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.

denton-scratch 3y ago

> virtually all recipe books are made like this Not Delia Smith's.

eru 3y ago

That sounds convincing enough. But how do they make the pictures that come with many recipes, then?

ibz 3y ago
Stock photos. AI generated. There are options...
- eru 3y ago
  AI generated would perhaps be an option these days, but not earlier.

jterrys 3y ago

I'm not really surprised. There's a youtube channel called Chef Jean Pierre. He is a retired Chef that used to run a restaurant since the 1970s, has cookbooks, was featured on PBS, etc. (Some say he has a more colorful past with his cooking school/restaurant business in Florida, but I don't know much). 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.

atdrummond 3y ago
I’ve cooked with him a few times (he gave classes at our family’s cookery shop) and he’s the real deal. Colourful doesn’t begin to describe his actual background, though.
Agentlien 3y ago
I'm an amateur who enjoys cooking and does it once a day in order to feed my family. 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.
- mindentropy 3y ago
  Exactly what I have experienced. Even whatever time is mentioned in the cookbooks, I was never able to beat it. It takes a minimum of 45 minutes to prepare a decent dish for me. I too am an amateur and I measure my time with my mother's time and I see a difference but not so much. I do not do multitasking if I have something on the stove which requires constant stirring or moving around. Also I found that slow cooking brings out the best flavours and aroma.

Lutger 3y ago

This is probably why I often just browse the ingredients of a recipe for inspiration and sometimes even don't read the instructions. Most recipe books are not very good. Not trying your own recipes is, respectfully, just fraud and I would not call those books high quality. 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'.

senectus1 3y ago

This does not surprise me in the slightest. 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 :-$

frereubu 3y ago

I remember a conversation in my 20s with a friend who said "Jamie Oliver's recipes all work" and I was nonplussed by it - I figured that all the recipes in recipe books had been tried and tested, but boy was I naïve. The ones I know which always work are: any Jamie Oliver, any Anna Jones, Ottolenghi's Simple, River Cafe Easy, and The Intolerant Gourmet (a great book of recipes even if you don't have food intolerances). Leith's Cookery Bible is also good - there's a particulaly good one for boned stuffed chicken - although some of the recipes are a little dated now.

eyko 3y ago

My favourite on Indian cuisine is the Dishoom cookbook: it comes with recipes for most of their most famous dishes from their restaurant. I've tried most and, whilst the recipes might need a little tweaking to match your kitchen equipment, they are generally spot on. In fact, as far as cookbooks go, it's one of my favourites because it actually gets you close enough that you can figure out what to tweak. 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.

iainmerrick 3y ago
Restaurant cookbooks are often very good, if they give you the actual recipes they use in the restaurant. 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

jtc331 3y ago

This is why I find America’s Test Kitchen so helpful: they’ve tried everything repeatedly, and because of that it’s rare to find one of their recipes that doesn’t work.

scary-size 3y ago
I feel the same. That‘s a subscription that really pays off. Also one of the few newslettery messages I let in my inbox.

rightbyte 3y ago

The 'shittification' is almost universal. I have suspected many internet recipes are never tried, but books too ... 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.

r_hoods_ghost 3y ago
Except a lot of recipe books from the 1950s to 1970s involve tins of mushroom soup, condensed milk, and jelly rather than real ingredients.
inferiorhuman 3y ago
To that end there's a Canadian guy on youtube that puts out cooking videos using vintage (typically early 20th century) cookbooks every Sunday.
astura 3y ago
I picked up a cookbook from the 70s in a second hand shop. It's got okay content for the most part but some recipes are incredibly unappealing for modern tastes, stuff like savory jello.

otikik 3y ago

I only get recipes from YouTube, were I can see a person actually doing it. They can still “fake it” or lie but it’s less likely.

cout 3y ago

Most recipe blogs these days include pictures of the dish as it is being prepared. I think it would be hard to generate those pictures without actually cooking the dish (though as AI image generation improves that will change).

dgroshev 3y ago

Yes. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between. 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.

Marsymars 3y ago
> The best example I've seen so far were David Lebovitz's recipes. 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.

mongol 3y ago

This is what I long have suspected to be the case. At least for cookbooks of the very common kind. Perhaps the most well known ones do it differently. But cookbooks are a dime a dozen, and probably most commonly bought as gifts. Quality is not a priority. As for quality, I expect a bread recipe printed on a flour package to have better chances of having been verified.

Eumenes 3y ago

I notice this in alot of recipes. See very highly rated reviews, lots of reviews, scroll down to reviews, 'omg i can't wait to try this' = 5 stars ... hmm

kunley 3y ago
That's about reviews for anything. 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.

vishnugupta 3y ago

This is why I follow YouTube videos and not recipe books. They turn out just fine.

Chyzwar 3y ago

That why I like to watch youtube chiefs like Joshua Weissman or Guga. They try to test at least some recipies.

sanitycheck 3y ago

...and here's an example of someone whose job can be replaced with ChatGPT. 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.

jorvi 3y ago
YouTuber home cooks make it “live”, so I generally trust those. Same for Gordon Ramsey, Marco Pierre White, Heston Blumenthal etc. 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.

mgaunard 3y ago

That's why you should only follow recipes from reputable sources. 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.

donohoe 3y ago

My wife is a professional recipe writer for magazines, books, restaurants, meal-kit services, and companies. 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.

tiems 3y ago
Just to echo this, recipe tester is a profession in and of itself. There are publishers where recipes are not tested, but more established and trusted ones absolutely do.

lr4444lr 3y ago

How do you get a gig like that?

femto 3y ago

The Australian Women's Weekly's recipe tagline is "Triple Tested", meaning their recipes are cooked at least three times in their test kitchen. The kitchen has been at it for around 100 years and their recipes are highly trusted and well known in Australia (for good reason). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Australian_Women%27s_Weekly#Recipes_and_cookbooks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Australian_Women%27s_Weekl... Edit: byline -> tagline

yyyk 3y ago

>...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. If she's experienced I guess that means she does (did?) cook something. So what does she cook when she does cook?

yellowstuff 3y ago

My wife has written cookbooks and worked as a recipe tester for cookbooks, blogs, and even the little recipes on the back of bags of flour and stuff. I’m sure not every published recipe was tested, but a lot of them were. Some by me, an inexperienced cook nervously testing recipes for my wife’s book as she watched me like a hawk. At least 2 people tested every recipe in her books.

vachina 3y ago

Ok so if they don’t try their own recipes, then how did they make the pictures that accompany the recipes?

ceejayoz 3y ago
If it’s a fairly common dish, stock photos.

nunuvit 3y ago

Recipe writers are the original large language models, making up superfically plausible bullshit to waste our time on.

silverlake 3y ago

From what I’ve read and seen, many cookbook authors test their recipes repeatedly in home kitchens. Most have testers or volunteers to ensure they make sense and work. By contrast I have some books that are restaurant recipes they purposely did not modify for home use. They are ridiculously complex and interesting. For example, here America’s Test Kitchen: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/5237-join-our-community-of-recipe-testers https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/5237-join-our-c...

donohoe 3y ago
Yes, most do! If you want a fortress of well-tested recipes I highly recommend Smitten Kitchen. Everything tested to great depths... https://smittenkitchen.com/ https://smittenkitchen.com/
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  https://www.seriouseats.com/ https://www.seriouseats.com/ takes a similar approach (and tends to attract folks from Cooks Illustrated / America's Test Kitchen).

hk1337 3y ago

I am convinced they add red and yellow bell peppers strictly because they think the dish needs more color. 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.

_fat_santa 3y ago
For what it's worth, I found the best way to make them is to cut them into very thin slices. My rule is bell peppers have to always be "bite sized" because of how tough they are. If you make the pieces to big, you will have to "bite into" the pepper rather than eating it whole and I think that's where they get a bad rap since they can be very tough to bite into.
- hk1337 3y ago
  While not preferred, I could tolerate slices. I could pick them out a lot easier than diced up small.

zebraflask 3y ago

Aha, I've often vaguely suspected as much with certain well-known food columns. I wrote it off to incompetent cooks, but it makes more sense that they were just making it up as they went along. 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.

pteraspidomorph 3y ago

My tricks: - 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.

PragmaticPulp 3y ago

> What is worse, she claims that virtually all recipe books are made like this. 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.

vidarh 3y ago
You seem to be projecting assumption here. The comment you replied to says she's written books they've seen in a book store. 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.
giraffe_lady 3y ago
I have extensive cooking experience both professional and at home, and have written published recipes and also been a tester for published recipes. 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.

nyjah 3y ago

This seems about right to me from watching Kenji cook on his YouTube channel. He was promoting his wok book and everything he cooked he would say, “I think it says to do it this other way in my book, but you can do it this way or your own way and it will be fine”.- which I appreciate. I’ve noticed the cooking channels I watch on YouTube are technique based more than specific recipes. So I’m wondering if some people read a recipe thinking “this is the exact way” and other look at it as just a rough template

nailer 3y ago

I dated an editor for a travel writer for a well known travel book company. He'd update his old books to include his 'visits' to new places, sourcing the content from other publications without actually going there.

isaacremuant 3y ago

Top comment of something that is probably a lie or a misrepresentation. 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.

samstave 3y ago

My grandmother was friends with both Martin Yan and Julia Child. 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)... - 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" - 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. :-)