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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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I'm not disagreeing with you, but there's substance to what the sister-in-law is claiming. I've had a few (not many, but frequent enough) mistakes from very highly produced books, from high-profile celebrity chefs - case in point Thomas Keller. As I was measuring out the ingredients I thought no way this could be right, I'm an experienced home cook and baker. Went with the recipe against my instincts anyway and it turned out quite bad. Especially when the recipe is adapted from a pro kitchen, they make gargantuan portions of stuff, and when reduced for the home cook, the portion and ratio don't necessarily get tested. There are also egregious substitution advice blithely thrown in, for example the Bouchon Bakery cookbook tells you to heat river rocks (but not sedimentary rocks! lol wut?) in your oven and throw water on them to create steam. If you follow this advice you're likely to ruin your oven when one of these rocks explodes. The pros use steam-injected ovens, the test kitchen uses steel chains, but this "use river rock" thing was probably thrown in there by a non-baking intern and I can promise you they never tested this.

Except for rare pockets, the state of Internet recipes is utter garbage. Get a good foundational cookbook, cook and learn from your experience, which no shortcut can substitute. The people who do test their recipes as far as I know, are Cooks' Illustrated and America's Test Kitchens (they're the same company I think).

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.

> 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.

When the pandemic lockdowns hit and the Bon Appetit test kitchen people all started filming from their home kitchens there was a marked shift in what they cooked and how over time. One of the things Carla Music noted was that having to do her own dishes completely changed her approach to designing recipes because she realized how much of a hassle it is to be pulling out all kinds of specialized pots and pans and multiple spoons and such.

Yes! Exactly the sort of detail I look for when evaluating recipes.

Rather, I assume, they probably think that since they earned that experience now, they may as well profit. These "actually realistic recipes" are apparently an unexplored market after all.

Are there any specific markers you for books that can be trusted?

All these comments are making me think that I should never trust any proportions in a cookbook again. I guess that leaves experimentation and keeping notes, which I already do -- but curious if there are existing published recipes tested in home kitchens that I can rely upon a little more.

I don't usually consider a book trusted until I've cooked a few recipes from it. There are chefs & authors I know from experience or reputation that take home cooking of their recipes seriously but even then if they change publisher or go a while without a book I'll be cautious with recommending the new one.

The things I look for in recipes are unfortunately not things that are easy to share as advice to look for, mostly intuition based on long experience. I just sit down and mentally "cook" the recipe, visualizing each ingredient and step and seeing if it makes sense and the directions are realistic.

One simple thing you can definitely look for is count how many pans, bowls, measuring cups a recipe calls for. If it's several of each that recipe was certainly written for an environment with professional dishwashers and likely not tested for home cooking. Might not be a bad recipe either, but it's more likely to leave out some details because it was originally written for a professional audience where you could assume familiarity with the techniques.

Another thing to look for is check the measurements and see where they came from, especially now that metric measures are becoming more common. If all the metric measurements are too precise it probably wasn't written or tested in metric. No one is measuring 118ml that's a half cup that was converted on paper. Or like 75mg of egg isn't one egg or two eggs, so that recipe was scaled down from a much larger one and probably not tested at this volume. Again though a red flag not a condemnation.

America's Test Kitchen tests all their recipes, multiple times with different variations, so I tend to trust them.

We share the same sentiments!

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.

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