Summer Sampler: Cooking the Books
Note: This is the first in an ongoing series on food & nutrition perspectives that I pick up from my focused reading this summer. Today: Why you can’t always trust what you read. Next up: Why you may not be as fat as you think.
I’m not a foodie. Foodies don’t combine fried hot dogs with Kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner in a pinch. Nor do they consider how the Two-Buck Chuck at Trader Joe’s might pair with saltines and Easy Cheese spread.
But I do devour recipes and television cooking shows and magazines and food blogs and then try to emulate my favorites when time permits. No processed food ingredients. Everything from scratch. Newfangled kitchen appliances a must. Why, I get such a high that sometimes I even clean up my own mess.
But my confidence stumbles every time a recipe flops. Granted, sometimes it’s my ingredient substitutions or measurement misreading. But sometimes I’m stumped. After reading the latest issue of SmartMoney magazine, I think I know why my masterpieces occasionally look and taste like mud. According to the article, celebrity chefs in particular have a habit of not testing their recipes before publication. Not only that, they don’t even write them.
Consider this passage from the August issue:
The piece by Neil Parmar goes on to say the errors aren’t grave, such as leading to food poisoning, but that can be embarrassing. He also notes that “fewer and fewer chefs and teachers take the bestsellers seriously.” (I’d link to the article but it isn’t online.)
Some of the culinary experts the journalist interviewed offered the following tips:
• Try compilations from food magazines and newspapers because they tend to more carefully test recipes, lest they incur the wrath of readers.
• Be wary of cooking times since a chef’s equipment may different from yours.
• Classics like The Joy of Cooking have a good track record.
• Consider online sites such as SimplyRecipes.com and 101Cookbooks.com.
I’m not a foodie. Foodies don’t combine fried hot dogs with Kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner in a pinch. Nor do they consider how the Two-Buck Chuck at Trader Joe’s might pair with saltines and Easy Cheese spread.
But I do devour recipes and television cooking shows and magazines and food blogs and then try to emulate my favorites when time permits. No processed food ingredients. Everything from scratch. Newfangled kitchen appliances a must. Why, I get such a high that sometimes I even clean up my own mess.
But my confidence stumbles every time a recipe flops. Granted, sometimes it’s my ingredient substitutions or measurement misreading. But sometimes I’m stumped. After reading the latest issue of SmartMoney magazine, I think I know why my masterpieces occasionally look and taste like mud. According to the article, celebrity chefs in particular have a habit of not testing their recipes before publication. Not only that, they don’t even write them.
Consider this passage from the August issue:
Some recipes in traditional cookbooks are tested as many as 30 times before publication, but today’s bestsellers are likely to be checked no more than twice. Many of those recipes are vetted by chefs using restaurant-grade equipment – yielding results that often differ sharply from what an amateur can expect at home. And many cookbooks lose something in translation because they’re farmed out to ghostwriters, who write and test the recipes with little or no involvement from the chef receiving author credit.
The piece by Neil Parmar goes on to say the errors aren’t grave, such as leading to food poisoning, but that can be embarrassing. He also notes that “fewer and fewer chefs and teachers take the bestsellers seriously.” (I’d link to the article but it isn’t online.)
Some of the culinary experts the journalist interviewed offered the following tips:
• Try compilations from food magazines and newspapers because they tend to more carefully test recipes, lest they incur the wrath of readers.
• Be wary of cooking times since a chef’s equipment may different from yours.
• Classics like The Joy of Cooking have a good track record.
• Consider online sites such as SimplyRecipes.com and 101Cookbooks.com.
