This is growing from a minor irritation to a full blown pet peeve. On many occasions I find new dishes by searching the internets for recipes. There are scads of recipe sites, and no better way to cook up chicken, lima beans, and pasta than to plug thos 3 ingredients into Google and see what comes up. Many sites have a space for posting reviews. Find and dandy - EXCEPT, the reviewers never seem to actually follow the recipe. So they actually provide no useful information about what the actual recipe tastes like. For example - looking at allrecipes.com’s Beef and Mushroom Stroganoff Aussie style one can read stuff like this:
“Made exactly as recipe’d…except didn’t have Shitakes, so doubled up on the button white, fresh sliced.”
“I really enjoyed this-I did add a bit of sour cream, used half and half, and used all fresh mushrooms and it turned out great.”
“I added a can of cream of mushroom soup to make a little more sauce, and then used 3/4 cup of cream and 3/4 cup of sour cream. Also, I used potatoes instead of noodles.”
“Used all fresh sliced crimini mushrooms, half n half instead of heavy cream, and added a few shallots.”
These “reveiws” actually leave me with the impression that the recipe as printed must taste horrible as the only folks who seemed to like it had to improve it in various ways.
See, what I hate is the folks who leave reviews like: This cake was awful! It didn’t rise at all, and the flavor was bland. I did substitute Splenda for sugar, and I only had one egg instead of the 2 it called for. Still, this sucked.
Maybe it’s because not everybody is an anal perfectionist. They probably followed the basic recipe and got the same flavor profiles as if they had followed it to a tee, but additions and subtractions for preference and taste never hurt. Even if someone does follow a recipe exactly, no two people are ever going to make it exactly the same let alone one person making it the same way twice, because of variables in kitchen hardware and slight fluctuations in heat sources and time flux.
Recipes and cooking techniques aren’t written in stone and they shouldn’t be, they are organic evolving structures. Alton Brown and America’s Test Kitchen are the worst offenders of this unrealistic and annoying cooking style. They have made the art of cooking into an anal fixation. It should be an oral art… like a good kiss.
Yeah–I don’t mind if someone tells me how they changed the recipe and it was great. That can be useful to me, sort of like when cookbooks give a variation on a recipe. But the folks who make significant changes to the recipe and then rate it poorly just come across as idiots.
Someone once told me that cooking is an art, and baking is a science. Meaning that for things like Beef and Mushroom Stroganoff Aussie style, you’re supposed to do things your own way. If you like a certain kind of mushrooms, throw those suckers in there.
I’ve never found anyone whose tastes in food, movies, music, women, anything, are the same as mine. I read reviews and learn something from them, but my opinion will be mine alone. Even if someone followed the recipe to the letter and loved it, that doesn’t mean I will. If they made some changes, it doesn’t tell me anything less, and maybe I’ll get some ideas.
I do appreciate the reviews by people who try the recipe as written and then list what they did to improve it on later tries. I tried a recipe last Sunday that was reviewed by three people who all noted that it was dry as written and each had a different fix for the problem, so I incorporated several of the suggestions and ended up with a dish that we all liked.
Don’t ever post a “homemade” recipe that requires a can of Campbell’s Cream Mushroom Soup. Bitches. It ain’t homemade and I don’t have a Campbell’s Cream Mushroom Soup tree growing in my backyard.
I like the reviews as well. I use allrecpies.com frequently and always read the reviews to see the modifications that others have found improve the recipe. Makes my life easier.
Alton Brown and America’s Test Kitchen are some of the very few recipe publishers out there whose recipes almost always work. Call it anal if you want or wax poetic about cooking being an art, but most people just want a set of directions that if followed correctly, ends with good food.
I’m not saying that people can’t experiment or that every recipe must be followed exactly every time. But recognize experiments as just that - experiments. Experiments can fail, and they often do. Some cooking techniques can be customized to your own tastes; others are there for a reason. If you experiment and want the dish to turn out, make sure you know what your doing. Or be OK with eating whatever it turns out as.
As far as the OP - heck yeah, I agree! It’s not even just Internet recipes, I see it all the time with my own recipes. “Oh Athena, that lasagna was great! Can you give me the recipe?” Sure, I write it down. Two weeks later - “Oh Athena, I just can’t cook like you do. I made your recipe but I used tomato sauce instead of diced tomatoes, and some leftover hamburger instead of sausage, and I left out the spinach because Jo-Jo doesn’t like spinach, and I used dried herbs instead of fresh. Why doesn’t it taste like yours?!?”
I once went to a cooking “class” where the “instructor” had made most of the stuff at home the night before (so that the “demos” consisted mainly of her scooping stuff out of plastic containers and plating it up all fancy, or putting something already made into the oven), and changed the recipes based on stuff that was missing from her pantry.
So the whole class consisted of her reading to us from the recipe instructions (while we followed along on our xeroxed copies of the recipes) and stopping to say, “Oh, I didn’t have anchovies/chervil/nutmeg/rat balls, so I left that out,” all the while preaching to us about how much better it is to “make a recipe [one’s] own.”
The worst was that she had discovered, the night before, that she didn’t have any flour to make the crust for the tart recipe, so she whipped out a package of frozen puff pastry that she’d found in her freezer.
Not that puff pastry isn’t good, but dammit, that isn’t what the recipe called for! And FTR, I didn’t care for the tart (which we got to taste), but unless I want to try making it myself I won’t know if it was because of the crust (the puff pastry was a little soggy towards the middle of the tart), or what.
So I sympathize with the OP, but on sites like allrecipes, I do appreciate some of those little tips from other reviewers, especially when quite a few of them seem to agree on a certain point (too salty, too soggy, whatever), and offer ways to remedy it.
And a big fat RIGHT ON to the point made about the mushroom soup.
I (and another doper) run a cooking site (see my profile for details). I wish I had 1 cent for every time what you described has happened to me.
I love when people experiment and come back with good suggestions. The problem is when they experiment the first time they cook the dish and they blame the recipe for their failings.
I can see that being annoying - it’s not even the same recipe when they do that. It’s like reading a review from someone who thought an angelfood cake would taste like apple pie and they’re pissed when it doesn’t.
I don’t have a problem with small tweaks on a recipe and still rating it.
The mushrooms thing in the OP would still be enough for me to like to try the recipe.
I want the basic information on how to make a dish of this style. But shiitake mushrooms can be hard to get down here. So I would use all button mushrooms. I don’t like noodles so I would use potato instead. I appreciate the substitutions because then I know my own fiddling won’t ruin the recipe.
If I get a recipe that no-one has experimented with, I experiment and it fails then I know it’s me. I’ll generally then try the recipe again by the book. If it fails again, I know the basic premise is flawed and I don’t bother with that recipe. But I don’t see anything wrong with experimenting out of the box, as long as you acknowledge that the changes you make may not improve the dish.
HOWEVER, that is only for general cooking. Baking is a whole 'nother beast. Baking is more like chemistry, and I won’t fuck with a recipe there until I know I can get the base working every time.
As long as the person just wrote about the tweaks and said that what they came up with tasted good. But they aren’t fairly evaluating the recipe if they don’t follow it.
Perhaps there should be two categories - one for people who stick to the recipe who can report how easy it was to follow and what it tasted like. The second for people who use it as a base and then cook up dishes that are altered in some way.
I make the daily soup for a hotel. Often times I am desperate for a new soup idea (because you can only make chicken tortilla or minestrone so many times before it gets old), so I look up on the 'nets for ideas. I never use a recipe as it is printed. I skim the list of ingredients for the things that make that recipe unique, then incorporate them into my own method. This is how cooking should be done. It should be personal.
Using the OP as an example, you only need to follow the recipe as printed if you have never made stroganoff before. Otherwise, customize to your heart’s content. The only thing in the cited recipe that I notice is the curry powder and the lack of red wine. The exact kind of mushroom you use is not going to change the dish any noticeable amount (unless you use morels or something more exotic then the common varieties already mentioned).
So cook the way you want. The recipe is not a blue print, its just a guide.
Agreed that baking is a science, however. Don’t change baking formulas unless you know what you are doing!