How we develop recipes

Being straightforward about this matters more to us than looking effortless, so here is how a recipe gets made.

Research and drafting

We start from a written, versioned brief that sets out the technique, measurements and structure we want, and every recipe records which version of that brief it was drafted against. A draft is a starting point, never the published article.

Cooking and testing

A recipe can be published here before we have cooked it, and when that is the case the page says so at the top: drafted, not yet cooked in our kitchen. Once it has been cooked the same line carries the date, and how many times if it is more than one. You never have to guess which of the two you are reading.

Cooking is what turns a draft into a recipe. Timings, quantities and heat levels are corrected against what actually happened at the stove, and the doneness cues — what to look for, smell for and listen for — are written from that session rather than from the draft. A drafted recipe has been researched and written with care; it has not been through that yet, and saying which is which is the whole point of the line at the top.

Where a cook goes wrong and we learn something from it, that goes on the recipe as a kitchen note — usually the most useful part of the page. Notes can only come from cooking, so they appear on recipes we have cooked, and a recipe we have cooked without incident carries none.

Photography

The cooking and the pictures are two different claims, and we would rather you could tell them apart than have us blur them. Each is labelled where it appears: the top of the recipe says whether we have cooked it and when, and a caption under a generated picture says that it was generated.

The picture at the top is usually a photograph of that cooking. Sometimes it is a generated illustration instead, when the dish was cooked and eaten before it was photographed, and then it carries a caption under it saying exactly that. We never pass one off as the other, and we do not use stock photography. A generated picture is also kept out of the structured data search engines read, so it cannot be indexed as a photograph of the dish.

Step-by-step pictures lag behind the cooking in the same way. Where a step has not been photographed yet, a placeholder stands in it and says so underneath; it is not a picture of that step and should not be read as one. Both kinds are replaced by the real photograph as the shooting catches up.

Facts and sourcing

Any factual claim about an ingredient or a dish carries a source, and our build refuses to publish one that does not. Where we cannot verify an origin story or a regional attribution, we leave it out rather than guess — food writing is full of confident claims that turn out to be invented.

We describe traditional uses of ingredients where they are part of the cooking, but we do not make health claims and nothing here is medical advice.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, or a recipe did not work for you, please tell us — we would rather fix it than defend it.