Have you ever followed a recipe “to a T” only to have it end up a complete disaster? Yeah, you’re not alone. It’s happened to all of us… maybe even multiple times. ;) No matter how clearly a recipe is written, there will always be variables that can’t be accounted for and plenty of room for error. But don’t let that scare you! Cooking is a skill that must be learned and honed over time. That’s why we’re not all cooking like Julia Child after following our first recipe. After spending years troubleshooting recipes and answering questions from new cooks, I’ve compiled these 10 Tips for Recipe Success to help you navigate the unknown and hopefully prevent recipe disasters as you build your skills.
But if you do have a recipe disaster, learn from the experience! I like to think of recipe disasters a little like bad relationships. They may have felt like a total waste of your time and energy, but you’re bound to have learned something valuable along the way. ;)
1. Read the Recipes from Beginning to End Before you Begin
Even if it’s a recipe you’ve cooked 10 times before, read through the entire recipe before beginning. This is probably the most overlooked step and one that even I admit to forgetting from time to time (and it ALWAYS ends up in an “oh crap!” moment). Giving a recipe a quick read-through helps prevent surprises, forgotten ingredients, and can help you form a mental game plan of how you’ll execute the recipe. On my site, I also suggest browsing through the step by step photos before beginning to cook, for an extra bit of disaster insurance.
2. Google Unfamiliar Words
We’re so lucky to have the internet and all of its information at our fingertips! If you come across a word in a recipe that you’re unfamiliar with, take a second to look it up. If it’s a cooking technique, chances are you’ll probably even be able to find a short tutorial video showing you exactly how it’s done and that’s like having a free, on the spot cooking class!
3. Pay Attention to How Ingredients are Listed
One thing that often trips people up is the term “divided,” as in “1/2 cup chopped nuts, divided.” When you see “divided” listed after an ingredient, this means the amount listed is the total amount used in the recipe, but you’ll use a portion of that amount in one step, and the rest later on. You can find out how much to use and when by reading the instructions (see tip #1!). For instance, with the chopped nuts example, the recipe may require you to stir 1/4 cup of the chopped nuts into a muffin batter and use the remaining 1/4 cup to sprinkle on top later. Another important designation is the placement of words like “chopped” or “diced.” If an ingredient is listed as “1 cup chopped walnuts” that means you measure one cup of nuts that are already chopped. If it is listed as “1 cup walnuts, chopped” this means that you measure 1 cup of whole walnuts, then chop them after measuring.
4. Read Reviews First
Almost every recipe website and blog has reviews, which can be extremely helpful. Always take reviews with a grain of salt, but look for trends like “this turned out too dry” or “I had to bake for an extra 15 minutes” so you can know which parts of the recipe to approach with caution, or decide if a recipe is too risky all together. I especially encourage this with blog recipes, which may not get the same rigorous testing as recipes from major food magazines or cookbooks. You don’t need to read them all, but at least browse through a few to get a feel for how the recipe performs “in the real world.”
5. Prep Before you Cook
When you’re first learning to cook, it can be helpful to use a technique called “mise en place.” This French phrase simply means to gather all your ingredients and have them prepared (measured, peeled, diced, chopped, etc.) before you begin cooking. This method can take longer than prepping as you cook, but its a great way to make sure no details are missed and it can greatly reduce the stress of multi-tasking. With all your ingredients prepared ahead of time, all of your attention can stay on the hot food in the skillet/pot/oven as you cook so you can avoid burning, boiling over, or any other hiccup.
6. Start Small
If you’re new to cooking, try something simple first and work your way up. Don’t shoot for the stars on your first go. As I mentioned before, the process of cooking is full of all sorts of nuances and requires a great deal of intuition that you have to learn and build over time. If all you know how to do is boil water, start with a simple pasta dish. Try not to choose a recipe that has multiple techniques and ingredients that you’ve never used before. Try one new technique or ingredient at a time.
7. Test Recipes Before Special Occasions
There are an infinite number of variables involved with cooking and you want to avoid surprises, so it’s always good to give recipes a test run before big occasions or cooking for guests. It’s not unusual for a recipe to need slight tweaking for your unique mix of equipment and ingredients. Plus, you may just find that you don’t like a recipe as much as you expected from it’s description! :)
8. Use All Your Senses
Most recipes suggest cooking times and temperatures for each step, but it’s always wise to use your senses to tell you whether you need to increase heat, decrease heat, or move on to the next step. If a recipe says to sauté for five minutes, but you see and smell it beginning to burn sooner, STOP. Remove it from the heat and reassess the situation. I try to include sensory cues in my instructions when possible, to help you build your cooking intuition. A good example of sensory cues is when you toast rice in a skillet with a little bit of oil or butter, you’ll begin to smell a nutty aroma, the individual grains will begin to look translucent, and you’ll even hear a popping or crackling noise. I could simply tell you to toast the rice in a skillet with oil for 5 minutes, but if your range top runs hotter than mine or your cookware is thinner, this can change the timing. I can tell you to boil potatoes for ten minutes, but the only way to truly know they’re done is to test the texture by piercing them with a fork. Using your senses helps you really understand what is happening as you cook, and will build your intuition.
9. Taste As You Go
Speaking of using your senses, it’s very important to taste as you go. The one thing that varies the most in the cooking process is the taste buds of the individual, sensitivity to salt in particular. Try to taste the food as you go (avoiding raw meat and eggs) to make sure the food is seasoned to your palate. Tasting as you go will also help you learn how the flavor of herbs and spices change throughout the cooking process, allowing you to understand how and when to add them to customize recipes in the future.
10. Experiment With Caution
Every time you swap out an ingredient, no matter how small, it will change the flavor, texture, or both of the final recipe. Make sure you’re familiar with a recipe or cooking technique before you attempt to substitute ingredients. Read through those reviews to see if anyone else has already attempted the same substitution. Be aware that changing ingredients may also change the time or temperature needed to cook the dish. Making a recipe your own is a wonderful thing and I fully support customizing recipes to fit your needs, but make sure you do it with caution and with the knowledge that the outcome will be different from the original.
What are your favorite cautionary tips that you’d share with a new cook? Or something you’d tell yourself if you could go back in time to your first recipe? Share your wisdom in the comments below!
Many great suggestions above! I would add: clean as you go. It’s not directly cooking related but it makes the whole process so much more fun, relaxed and less daunting. Taking natural pauses while cooking a meal to rinse prep dishes and put them in the dishwasher, wipe up spills, return excess ingredients to the fridge/pantry, and discard packaging and produce scraps means you have less mess in your way while you cook and less to clean up later. Much pleasanter to cook in a tidy (ish) kitchen than in one that looks like a bomb went off!
Especially in a small kitchen with limited counter space.
My favorite tip is to annotate all of your cookbooks, physical or digital. When you try a new recipe, mark the date and what your eaters thought of the recipe, and then note any substitutions or changes you made. Then, when you go to make that birthday cake two years later, you can find it again (p. 537 in Joy of Cooking? or was it p. 137 in the BHG cookbook?) and remember how it turned out (oh, the meringue didn’t set up right– I used more cream of tartar than the recipe called for).
Or you can highly instructions that are REALLY important, or note things that didn’t really matter.
Buy a oven thermometer to check heat. Had a oven that was lower heat and had to set temperature different!!! Know your oven!!!
Yes!
I really like my cooking thermometer with the extension. I monitor my bread or meat while cooking and have it programmed to beep when the correct temp is achieved. It means I can walk away from the oven (or stove top) and come back when it is perfectly done.
When I make a recipe I usually tweak it until I get exactly what I want. I also write down everything I put in it on a note with the recipe and if I decide to change some of it or add something I just make another note. I’m not as young as I once was and I forget things fairly easily. Then I have it in black and white and won’t forget anything.
Hi Beth,
Thanks so much for posting recipes that are within my technical skills and my budget as well as being yummy!
Just a heads up that the ads on your site have changed recently and every single time I visit I repeatedly see the same SPAM…… “FANTASTIC!! This is not a joke! 1,000,000th visitor. Our random winners selection system could choose you to win AN APPLE PRODUCT. CLICK HERE.”
The is obviously SPAM and I don’t appreciate it it, as I’m sure other visitors don’t either. In my opinion, it makes your website look unprofessional, which doesn’t gel with your overall vibe.
Anyways, keep up the great recipes and I look forward to your new creations!
Cheers,
Dandy
Thanks for letting me know, Dandy! We have filters set up to block those ads, but sometimes they get through. We don’t want those ads at all, but they can be very difficult to track and block. So, if you see one again, please take a screen shot and send it to me at beth@budgetbytes.com Thank you so much!
I love all these tips. I’ve been cooking just for myself this year and it is often such a struggle. Thank you so much for the tips.
One tip that I found out the hard way: if you don’t like how it smells, you won’t like how it tastes. This plays into tip number 8, “Use All Your Senses.” If something smells unappealing to you, it will not magically become appealing after you cook with it. I found this out by making a huge pot of soup with smoked paprika. The smoked paprika in the jar didn’t smell appealing, but I put it in anyway. The final soup was inedible to me. Now I know that I don’t care for smoked spices, but I wish I would have followed my nose and avoided ruining my soup! If something calls for smoked paprika, I just use regular paprika or leave it out altogether.
Great tip!
Notable exception, however: fish sauce. Smells disgusting, makes Thai curries amazingly delicious. Distrust your nose for that one.
Hahah, agree 100% :D
Oddly enough, my tastes have changed to the point that I now like smoked paprika a lot! So, new tip: be willing to try and try again things you haven’t liked in the past. Your tastes may change!
Great tip!
Excellent tips!!!
Yea usually I’m in such a hurry I don’t take time te read the recipe completely and well we know what usually happens👎
Adding to the idea of reading the comments, I would say ask a friend! Do you have that one coworker whose lunches you always envy? Ask them where they get their favorite recipes from, or send them a link to something you’re considering cooking to ask what they think or if they’ve made something similar. I’ve got a couple friends at work who loves to cook as much as I do and we’re constantly swapping tips, substitution ideas, and results of experiments. I’ve also got a few who are just learning to cook, and I equally love sharing my experiences with them.
I’ve learned that for anything soupy, stewy, or casseroley, you don’t have to follow the amounts or even the ingredients exactly. Those types of dishes are pretty forgiving.
Thanks, these all hold true with my experience. I’ve learned from a mix of cookbooks (and now blogs), tv cooking shows, advice (mostly from my mother – often when I’ve made a mistake and need to rescue the dish!) and of course, my own trial and error.
The only other tip I’d include, which ties in well with “prep before you cook” is “be patient and give yourself as much time as you can”. This also fits in with cooking – a lot of recipes I’ve used say things like “cook until softened” but don’t give you an expectation of how long that will actually take, or give a time that often works out as far too short for me.
Sometimes reviews on recipes can be super useful and other times… ha, it’s like they did a completely different recipe! But I agree that it does usually give a good idea on how well the original recipe works.
Great article! I have cooked for years and I still get confused by some recipes. I particularly like the “experiment with caution.” I cook enough that I understand the purpose of each ingrediant so I can switch things out but for a beginner it is difficult. I get quite frustrated with reviews in which the major ingredients were changed and then the writer complains about the outcome. My mother’s caution was “follow the recipe exactly the first time you make it. If you want to make changes the next time you at least know how the recipe works.”
Hey Danis, Your mum sounds like a very astute woman! That’s my motto as well and YES!!!!!! it frustrates me so much when comments and RATINGS are poor when the reviewer has changed ingredients – one or loads!!!
I got married when I was 18 and my cooking skills consisted of browning hamburger and boiling water.
5 kids and nearly 15 years later, here are my best tips:
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
Invest in decent tools. They don’t have to be top of the line, but some good tools (particularly knives/ cutting tools and pans) make any recipe more manageable.
Read a recipe for tools as much as ingredients. Nothing worse than getting 2/3 in and realizing you don’t have an immersion blender or stand mixer or zester. Or bread machine (true story, lol).
Be skeptical of any recipe with more than 4-5 ingredients that claims to be ready in less than 30 minutes.
It’s ok to buy ingredients prepped to your level. I can’t devein a shrimp to save my life, but I can carve a whole chicken. I buy tons of pre-chopped veggies at Sam’s.
Learn how to check for meat done-ness. I still struggle with this one!
The best tool I had as a beginner was a gift I was given when I got married. It was a cookbook by Kraft called Dinner on Hand, and it had a vast index of cooking times for veggies, as well as hundreds of recipe skeletons with suggestions for filling in with meat, sauce, and veggie combos that went together. It taught me basic cooking, and invaluable lessons about exchanging ingredients, what needed precise measurements (and what did not), and how to use the same handful of skills to create a lot of different tasting recipes.
All of these are great tips. I wish I’d had that Dinner on Hand book when I first got married.
Emily’s advice about investing in good quality tools is spot-on. One needn’t break the bank spending stupid amounts of money. Do invest in quality and take good care of your tools. I have pots, pans, and knives that have been in constant use for 35 years. They don’t look new and they still work flawlessly. Also, consider this: the right tool for the job. Sure, there are different ways of accomplishing a task. And a knife won’t zest a lemon.
One other thing. A word about mistakes. Mistakes happen. To everyone. I made a chocolate mousse using a recipe I’d made many times previously. I don’t know why, but this time the chocolate seized. Panic! I managed to get the lumps down to the size of lentils and called it Chocolate Chip Chocolate Mousse. It was a huge success.
Hahaha, I love that anecdote! :D