Recipe for Disaster is Slate’s column about the things recipes get wrong—and how to fix them. If you’ve noticed a recipe annoyance, absurdity, or outright lie, file your complaint here and we will investigate!
Have you ever made a recipe and thought, Why the hell does this taste so bland? You might be tempted to victim-blame and assume it’s your fault. But hold up—maybe the person responsible for that dull, lifeless, weak-in-flavor “one pot” dish is actually … the recipe developer. After all, aren’t most recipes written for the masses? Aren’t they, at their core, a sort of one-size-fits-all culinary script that can’t conceivably account for all the wild variations in human taste? This time, we examine another jaded reader’s gripe: that many recipes, as written and followed, are just far too basic.
I find nearly all savory recipes lacking in flavor when I follow the seasoning instructions per the recipe. I assume the recipes are written to create a basic dish, which can be adapted to the taste of the individual cook. Why can’t specific details be written into the recipe (double seasoning amounts to increase flavor, triple the oregano, add twice the salt, etc.)? I feel that when I’ve prepared the dish, I’m often adding salt at the last minute to enhance the flavor, while fearing it will just become salty.
Reader, it sounds as if you have a pretty aggressive palate, and I dig it. After years of working in restaurants, writing about restaurants, reviewing them, and engaging in enthusiastic home cooking, I too find myself requiring a forceful amount of flavor. I need salt, umami, tang (the more vinegar and citrus the better), and excitement. So when you say that you’ve noticed nearly all savory recipes to be lacking in flavor, I do feel your pain. It’s why I prefer intuitive cooking (in which I just kind of trust myself to freestyle dishes as much as possible) rather than following a recipe pedantically and to the letter.
However, I thought your initial assumption, that recipes might be purposefully written as basic outlines, with individual elaboration a given, was intriguing enough to warrant an investigation. So I reached out to Daniel Gritzer, culinary director at Serious Eats—a site that is about as reputable and consistent as they come in the space of developing recipes—about your question. “No, at Serious Eats we do not write recipes with the idea that it’s a kind of baseline, ‘basic’ version that needs to be further embellished,” Gritzer told me by email. “As published, [the recipe] is one we believe is delicious (and we cross-test recipes and do tastings to confirm that).”
So! While I understand the reasoning behind this query, the top-line answer is an emphatic nah. However, that doesn’t mean that recipes aren’t written to account for varying tastes. In fact, they often are. Apropos of the Thanksgiving holiday, check out this recipe for Gooey Apple Pie, written by Kenji López-Alt. Scroll down to the notes section, where you’ll read:
I like to use Golden Delicious or Braeburn apples for pies. (For what to expect from other apple varieties, see the results of my experiments here.)
I prefer using half a cup of sugar in my apple pie, though some folks prefer the extra sweetness that three-quarters of a cup brings. Adjust according to your sweet tooth.
You usually have to read down further, but many recipes actually include something like this: season more if needed, add more sugar if desired, etc., etc. I also really appreciate that López-Alt links to another article detailing the different flavor opportunities within various apple varieties. (If you haven’t heard, there’s a lot of apples out there.)
It should also be said that any well-respected cookery website or book goes through an arduous process of proving that a recipe is worthy of publishing. But despite all the testing, cross-testing, and tastings, many factors in a recipe remain imprecise. This gets to the next part of the question: Why can’t specific modification options be written into the recipe? Let’s start with Serious Eats, for which you might notice a glaring tenet as you peruse its catalog of recipes: More often than not, salt is not measured.
Salt, the biggest taste enhancer of all, through which every great dish achieves maximum flavor, is often given on an inexact, wobbly, to-taste basis. How utterly strange and seemingly counterintuitive to leave such a powerful ingredient up to the individual. But there’s good reason for that. “For most recipes on Serious Eats, we instruct cooks to salt to taste, leaving the decision in the hands of home cooks,” Gritzer says. “On the one hand, there’s a real risk they will under-salt (many people do) and then complain the dish is bland. But on the other, if we give a measured amount, we risk them complaining that it’s not right, either because their tastes don’t match ours, or because they measured a different salt than we did by volume, and ended up putting a different amount of salt in the food. That, to me, is worse, since the fault would appear to lie more with us and our specified quantity, even if the truth is more complicated.”
Gritzer cites some examples for which measuring salt exactly is necessary, like his recipe for meatballs, for which cooks can’t exactly taste the meatball mixture to tell if it’s seasoned correctly. (I mean, you could try a spoonful of raw meatball mush, but you could also blindfold yourself while driving and see what happens too.) For things like steak, salt isn’t measured either, because it’s more likely the user will season the steak with that same measuring spoon, clumping the salt unevenly on the meat, instead of evenly distributing from the preferred and patented “high-up” distance.
Gritzer goes on about the perils of writing recipes with specific salt measurements: Because of variations in gram size, different brands of salt measure differently by volume due. According to him, a tablespoon of Diamond Crystal kosher salt has roughly half as much actual salt in it as the same tablespoon of table salt or Morton’s kosher salt. Diamond Crystal has smaller, flakier grains than Morton’s, so it is less dense and packs the tablespoon measure more lightly. “How does a recipe writer account for all that?”
Let’s zoom in on that last statement just a bit—how does a recipe writer at least try for the impossible goal of accounting for every individual person? It’s tricky territory, but as mentioned, plenty of other recipes offer possibilities. Posts at the Kitchn (another website for which developers actually test each recipe, a theme you should take note of) often instruct adding “more salt as needed” and include a notes section, where deviations and freestyling are encouraged. And Alison Roman, in her new book on pantry cooking, is happy to provide little tips and deviations in each recipe’s notes section, like swapping Dijon mustard for whole-grain mustard in a salad dressing, keeping Parmesan cheese out of pesto and using it as a topping (for a “fresher” pesto), and adding chopped fennel, brown sausage, and garlic to her linguine and clams with spicy breadcrumbs. Each recipe in Something From Nothing also features an “Eat With” section, in which Roman recommends different things to pair with the dish, another opportunity for enhanced flavor.
Turning back to our reader’s question, I do wish recipes suggested more flavor tweaks like those, though I don’t think “double the salt” or “triple the oregano” would be particularly helpful. If the recipe writer wanted an oregano-forward dish, it would simply be reflected in the instructions. More useful are notes that, if taken, might push a dish in a direction that the creator already suspects some cooks might enjoy. For example, at the Kitchn, you will often find ingredients listed as optional, like the extra splash of sherry vinegar and minced herbs in this recipe for turkey gravy. Or, when I write recipes (occasionally I dabble in disaster myself!), I try to leave multiple paths to flavor, like the option to add Castelvetrano olives and crusty bread for this Chicken Marengo, and the addition of parsley in moussaka, which I feel provides another layer of herby depth.
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Sometimes, though, tweaks won’t be enough. Gritzer agrees with the reader’s assessment that a lot of recipes are, well, bland. “There are a lot of bad recipes out there,” he says. “Recipe writing is not easy; it takes skill and knowledge to do it well, and most people who write recipes (I can tell you from years of experience as an editor) do not do it well.” That’s a dang mic drop from one of the more accomplished and trusted recipe writers working! And this is where Gritzer and I agree wholeheartedly: If you find that the recipes you’re cooking are bland, perhaps you need to find a better source for recipes.
Tons of cookbooks (remember those? They’re useful!) and great websites like Serious Eats and America’s Test Kitchen take the business of scribbling recipes seriously (oh, dang, I just got Serious Eats now). A good recipe will have survived rounds of testing, tasting, tinkering, side-by-side comparisons, lab experiments, and adjustments. This is the business of recipe writing. It’s not haphazard blogs rife with spelling errors, odd font choices, platitudes, boring personal anecdotes, and superlatives. (There are currently 11,367 recipes for the “best” mashed potatoes out there.) To find the recipe that you’re looking for, you just have to follow the right folks. To start, get off any “bloggy” website that makes you scroll longer than four times to get to the actual recipe.
I would also say, hey, maybe ease up on the recipe writers a little bit. So much of cooking is left up to the individual—the failures, successes, experience, and rhythm of cooking that you simply can’t convey via the written word. “Even in a well-written recipe, there’s a hard-to-account-for gap between what’s written and what the home cook actually does,” Gritzer says. “I can’t tell you the number of times someone has sworn to me they followed a recipe exactly as written, only to discover that they used a different ingredient than the one called for or stuck to an estimated time instead of prioritizing the doneness cues a good recipe will always give.”
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But even a craftsman like Gritzer recognizes that, at the end of the day, recipes have to leave some room for variation if that’s what the cook wants. “Anyone with the skill, confidence, or just plain daring to improvise on what’s written should feel empowered to do so—that’s a big part of what makes cooking both fun and personal, and developing the ability to do that well is a big step towards becoming a more intuitive and skillful cook,” he says. “If things go wrong, just … don’t blame the recipe, ok?”
Hear, hear. Reader, it sounds as if you have great instincts, and that you’re also afraid to fully trust the recipe. It also sounds as if you want more salt, more herbs, and overall more seasoning. So it’s my prescription that you start trusting yourself more. You’re not wrong—recipes could stand to feature more notes, more variations in seasoning, and more detailed opportunities to enhance flavor. But those are instincts that you possess too. Those specific details and “additional notes” you seek? They’ve actually been inside you all along. It’s time to start seasoning with your heart, and not according to the page. We can keep blaming the recipe developer, but in the end, we’re the ones holding the saltshakers.
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