When you read a recipe...

[Steve Kroll]

On this recipe (mid page) for the fry sauce. It calls for 6 cups of mayonnaise and it makes 2/3 cup of sauce.

I was surprised yahoo didn't fix this recipe.

That's definitely a typo.

I believe the intent may have been to say 6 TABLESPOONS of mayo, but, regardless, here is the actual recipe, if you are interested (you'll have to scroll down a bit):

A Kitchen Science Savant Shares His Secrets In 'The Food Lab' : The Salt : NPR

 

[Mad Cook]

I spend a lot of time reviewing recipes. I am pretty good at picking out where there is an Oops! missed a step or this is not going to work. In another life, I kept a file of bad sentences (when I was an editor). I now have a collection of bad recipes/techniques. My current fav is a recipe for a rice pilaf with fresh asparagus tips. The instructions had the tios being cooked with the rice for 20 minutes. Yuck-I didn't need to cook that to know the asparagus would be worse than canned (I think I likened the asparagus tips to worse than baby Sh*t when I sent my comments back W/out having to make the recipe). I often review recipes with a flat flavour profile where the mid and high notes are missing.

Wondering what red flags others pick up on when reading recipes? I have a lot more "not gonna work recipes," but asparagus tip pilaf is one of my favs. What are some of your favs?

No names, no pack drill, but whilst I like many of the recipes demo'd by a certain very glamorous English cookery writer, I read her recipes very carefully!

I find that you have to be careful with re-prints, too. When one of my very well used books final gave up the ghost and collapsed in a pile of waste paper on the kitchen floor, I bought a re-print produced by a different publisher. Where an original recipe requested one teaspoon of salt (in modern UK cooking parlance, 5gr) the re-print stated one tablespoon (ie 15gr)!!!! Obviously the proof-reader wasn't a cook.

 

[CharlieD]

I'm no editor, so I'm probably not good at picking the wrongs of a recipe, I guess I never even tried to look at a recipe that way. But I do always know if I would or wouldn't like the end result.


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