What are your pet peeves with published recipes?

[Anonymous]

I hate when a recipe that involves quick-cooked protein (shrimp, steak, chicken pieces) has you cook the meat first, THEN do everything else -- caramelize onions/peppers or cook the pasta/rice.

Meanwhile, your par cooked shrimp is continuing to cook in a pool of its own juices. Just a recipe for rubber shrimp. Cook the shrimp LAST.

[Anonymous]

Assuming I know absolutely anything. "saute until ready"?? WTF does that MEAN? I don't know how to saute and I don' tknow when it's ready. If you're going to write a recipe assume the reader knows absolutely nothing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have two.

1) The recipe states 10 minutes prep, 20 minutes cooking. But the recipe includes an enormous amount of pre-chopped vegetables and/or meat and all that chopping isn’t counted in the “prep” time. I have a food processor which helps but realistically the prep ends up being double the time.

2) A recipe states it serves four as an entree but that is with ridiculously small portions. A NYT shrimp recipe I made recently called for a 1/2 lb of shrimp for four. And it was just shrimp with a bit of cheese on it, so not part of a larger thing.

I use NYT recipes and always double them and have leftovers if not eaten.

[Anonymous]

OP here - I feel seen! I cook a lot and the scrolling back and forth between instructions and ingredients is maddening, plus the ads and narrative and the weight vs. quantity. Thanks for making me feel less alone in my aggravation!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I read most recipes from a device online. I wish they would say something like, "add 1/2 cup of flour" in the instruction part, rather than just saying "add flour," so I don't have to scroll back up to the top to see how much they mean.

I agree with this! And with all the ads scrolling up and down often also entails clicking out of some awful pop up.

[Anonymous]

my pet peeve is all the poor, hyped assemblages out there. I have a few standards (epicurious, Milk Street, NY Times, Martha Stewart, Ina Garten) and use those for benchmarks. Some of Smitten Kitchen and Pioneer Woman and can be quite good. But there's so much crap out there to sift through.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:my pet peeve is all the poor, hyped assemblages out there. I have a few standards (epicurious, Milk Street, NY Times, Martha Stewart, Ina Garten) and use those for benchmarks. Some of Smitten Kitchen and Pioneer Woman and can be quite good. But there's so much crap out there to sift through.

Same for me. Some of the lesser known blogs have useless comments. Like "Looks good! Can't wait to try it" when I'm looking for the comments of people who have actually made the recipe and have feedback like too much salt, add more or less of something, bake longer, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:my pet peeve is all the poor, hyped assemblages out there. I have a few standards (epicurious, Milk Street, NY Times, Martha Stewart, Ina Garten) and use those for benchmarks. Some of Smitten Kitchen and Pioneer Woman and can be quite good. But there's so much crap out there to sift through.

Same for me. Some of the lesser known blogs have useless comments. Like "Looks good! Can't wait to try it" when I'm looking for the comments of people who have actually made the recipe and have feedback like too much salt, add more or less of something, bake longer, etc.

Hate that! If you haven't made it, don't comment!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:my pet peeve is all the poor, hyped assemblages out there. I have a few standards (epicurious, Milk Street, NY Times, Martha Stewart, Ina Garten) and use those for benchmarks. Some of Smitten Kitchen and Pioneer Woman and can be quite good. But there's so much crap out there to sift through.

Same for me. Some of the lesser known blogs have useless comments. Like "Looks good! Can't wait to try it" when I'm looking for the comments of people who have actually made the recipe and have feedback like too much salt, add more or less of something, bake longer, etc.

Hate that! If you haven't made it, don't comment!

Then there's the "I made a few changes. I used almond flour instead of wheat flour because gluten free. And subbed agave syrup and mashed banana for sugar, and left out the cinnamon because my family doesn't like that. Also used applesauce instead of eggs and halved the salt. It was only ok. Won't make again."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:my pet peeve is all the poor, hyped assemblages out there. I have a few standards (epicurious, Milk Street, NY Times, Martha Stewart, Ina Garten) and use those for benchmarks. Some of Smitten Kitchen and Pioneer Woman and can be quite good. But there's so much crap out there to sift through.

Same for me. Some of the lesser known blogs have useless comments. Like "Looks good! Can't wait to try it" when I'm looking for the comments of people who have actually made the recipe and have feedback like too much salt, add more or less of something, bake longer, etc.

Hate that! If you haven't made it, don't comment!

Then there's the "I made a few changes. I used almond flour instead of wheat flour because gluten free. And subbed agave syrup and mashed banana for sugar, and left out the cinnamon because my family doesn't like that. Also used applesauce instead of eggs and halved the salt. It was only ok. Won't make again."

This made me lol for real

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Recipes that call for half an onion. What the heck am I supposed to do with the other half of the onion? It dries up in the fridge. And is it half a large onion or medium onion or small onion?

For things like onions, it just doesn’t have to be that precise. I buy bags of onions that have a variety of sizes in it. If it says “half an onion” I pull out a small small one and use that. If all I have is a slightly bigger one, I put it all in. If all I have is a huge one, then I chop the whole thing and put half in a container in the fridge because odds are really good I will cook something else in the next day that needs onion or I could add onion to.

For garlic, I have moved on to those frozen Dorot cubes (so much better than jarlic) and never looked back.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I hate NYT recipes and that you HAVE to read the comments (which are admittedly great) for it to turn out well. It just seems so lazy. "Here's this recipe. If you follow it, it will be trash, but see what our readers do to salvage it." Why?

YES. I love the comments too and wonder if the recipes ever get revised due to the feedback. If everyone is saying “You need to double the amount of sauce” does the chef/recipe writer ever do that? So curious.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Besides the fact that almost all recipes are practically unreadable with huge prefaces about life history of the publisher and ads covering most of the content, I wish there would be some explanation to why some unusual ingredients are used and acceptable substitutions. Often, because of how hard it is to read through the list of ingredients because of being bombarded by ads, I miss this or that ingredient and then have no idea what to do.

Cook’s Illustrated is really good about explaining why they use unusual ingredients (nd substitutions).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Recipes that pretend you can caramelize onions in 10 minutes

This is exactly what I was about to write but you got there first!

[Anonymous]

A lot of recipes just tell you to cook meat X number of minutes, which doesn't take into the account different sizes and thicknesses and could lead a very literal person to undercook their meat. What they should tell you to do is to cook meat until it reaches X temperature.