You have probably noticed that most recipes are hot garbage. I’m not just talking about those recipes that contain more story than method, or recipes that underestimate cooking times, temperatures, and ingredients, or recipes that are so poorly formatted that they’re difficult to read. I’m talking more about recipes that have no clear idea about what they are or why. And failing any semblance of self-awareness, most recipes fail to teach you much about the how either.
Zero to carbonara
For example, it’s okay that there are all sorts of paths to make something like carbonara. Where most recipes fail is in not knowing where they sit on the scale of zero to carbonara — how far a given version strays from the traditional technique — and which techniques are needed for each variation. Traditional carbonara gets its creaminess from the starches in the pasta water, the aged cheese, and eggs. It’s okay to make an approximation or another version of carbonara with heavy cream or creamed cashews too, but it’s a different dish, and a recipe should be able to talk about the reasons for the approach.
When a recipe doesn’t include that little bit of context, it forces the reader to think and fill in the gaps themselves. I remember when I was learning to cook that I wasn’t even aware that there were distinct styles or variations of a type of recipe, nor of the differing techniques needed. Low-quality recipes didn’t help me learn technique or style, and often resulted in more failures than necessary (things like broken sauces, undercooked or overcooked elements, and so on).
Ideally a recipe can give you a tiny bit of background on what sort of thing it is (e.g., this is a creamy, vegan carbonara-style pasta), and then help you as a cook to understand the techniques and tools required to make it. Armed with some knowledge, you can then research and practice the techniques, and understand if it’s the style of dish you had in mind.
A recipe with some context communicates so much more to a cook, and makes their life easier. Knowing that a recipe starts with a dark roux or a soffritto tells me how it will go together. These hints are solid building blocks for learning to understand, execute, and adapt recipes. As shortcuts, these hints make it easier to memorize recipes, which gives you more time to focus on technique (rather than reading and re-reading the instructions).
If you’re making a vegan version of carbonara, for example, you’ll need to know how to stabilize a nut cream, and how to build a savoury base that no longer comes from cured pork.
Or if you’re making a simple North American-style carbonara, you will need to know how to work with cream in a sauce, and that bacon as a substitute can be pretty salty.
Various styles of a carbonara-style dish can be well worth making, but the sequence of ingredients and techniques is both subtly and not-so-subtly different from a more authentic or simplified version. Your expectations of the results can also differ with a bit of understanding about the what and why. A better understanding of a recipe makes it easier to understand if you’ll like it, and more importantly, how you can adapt or improve it.
The jerk marinade hunt
Many years ago I remember my frustration when I was trying to recreate a jerk marinade. A friend regularly made a recipe handed down through generations; it was the perfect balance of savoury, sweet, and spicy. Combined with a long, slow cook time, it resulted in the most memorable chicken I’ve had. I tested dozens of recipes, dozens of times in those early years of cooking. And while the chicken I made was edible and often delicious, it fell short of the ideal I had in mind.
As I’ve learned more about cooking, I’ve realized that you can take a recipe like jerk marinade and make it thousands of different ways. A roadside jerk shack, a high-end restaurant, and a home cook in North America will likely need different styles of recipes based on equipment, skill levels, and availability of ingredients.
It’s surprising how good some of the alternative approaches to a dish can be, even when they’re not traditional. I’ve tasted excellent jerk marinades that use the traditional Scotch bonnet peppers (which are a bit sweet, and very hot), but I’ve also tasted marinades that were just as good using ground cayenne or other peppers instead. Using something like cayenne vastly simplifies your prep (and it’s easier to get and store), making it appealing to restaurants and home cooks too.
The hunt is on
When I am researching a recipe, I read (and watch) hundreds of recipes, which means I don’t have time to read most of them properly. So I skim: past the ads, past the paragraphs about someone’s grandmother’s kitchen, until I can verify the recipe as rational, interesting, and correct — sound ratios, techniques I recognize or want to learn, ingredients I can actually find. Long, SEO-tuned recipes exist partly because length sells more ad space than a clean recipe card does, and a story that never touches technique is just there to hold that space. Serious Eats is the exception: I read their stories in full, because the story is usually the investigation, the reason a ratio works, not a detour around it. That’s the test I actually apply: is this story doing the what/why/how work the recipe needs, or is it just filling space?
Once a recipe clears that bar, I ask myself a bunch of other questions, things like:
- How authentic is it? If it isn’t authentic, why is it different? What is the style of the variation?
- Does it have any ingredients that my guests or I can’t eat? Or does it have any ingredients that I don’t have access to?
- What style of techniques does it imply? Do I know how to pull it off?
- Will it work with the equipment I have?
- Can I prep some or all of it ahead of time? Will it freeze and reheat nicely?
- How closely does the recipe match what I have in mind?
Building the diary
Once I’ve got a stack of recipes that clear the noise filter, I run them through something like a diary: I lay a batch out together, side by side, and classify and rank them. Are the ratios sound? Are the units rational? Does the ingredient list respect quality, or does it cut a corner I’d rather not cut? Doing this across ten versions of stroganoff at once teaches me more about stroganoff than reading any one of them closely ever could.
The classifying sorts recipes into a few buckets: authentic and regional variations, cultural variations and related dishes, and something else entirely, versions tied to a specific decade. That last one isn’t about correctness at all. When I go looking for a 1950s cottage pie, I’m not hunting for the most authentic technique; I’m hunting for simple ingredients, chuck roast, diced carrots, the kind of thing that predates the pantry-convenience style that shows up by the 1970s, with its canned soup and frozen vegetables standing in for what used to be fresh. Nostalgia by decade feeds a different need than authenticity does: sometimes what I want isn’t the correct version of a dish, it’s the version my parents made, or the version my grandparents or great-grandparents made.
Two kinds of hunt
That’s the real split underneath all of this. Carbonara and jerk marinade are both technique hunts: I’m chasing the right ratio, the right method, the thing that makes the dish work the way it’s supposed to. Cottage pie is a comfort hunt: I already know which decade I’m chasing, and the recipe just has to get me there. The good ones make that plain enough that you don’t have to guess.