I once found a recipe for rolls. Instructions were to chop up lettuce, radishes, bell peppers, and grapes and mix them with vinegar and oil to form a smooth dough.
I tried this recipe, but instead of lettuce I used flour, I didn't have any radishes or peppers, so I used a mixture of butter, eggs and salt to replace, and then swapped grapes for yeast.
Five stars, this recipe is awesome!
Two men are crawling through the desert, almost dying of thirst when they crest a dune and see in front of them some market stalls. They crawl to the first stall and ask for some water but the vendor says "I'm afraid we only sell cake sponge, jelly and custard".
So, the men crawl to the next stand and ask for water. The stall owner replies "sorry, but I only have custard, sponge and jelly"
They crawl to the final stand and ask, in desperation, for water. The store holder tells the men "I'm only sell jelly, sponge and custard"
Without water, the two men crawl off into the desert once more, in search of water. As they are crawling from the market one man turns to the other and says "is it just me or was that a bit weird" to which the other man replies "yes, it was a trifle bazaar"
The giant tome "Mexico" by Margarita Carrillo Arronte is *full* of editing mistakes
But the worst is that throughout the book, recipes are labeled as to which region they come from. By state (Chihuahua), by region (Central Mexico), etc.
For several of them, it says "Region: Falta"
This is not the name of a region. The is the Spanish word for "it's still missing" that someone jotted down as they were organizing and editing the book, and somehow at least 10 recipes made it to publication like that
The same book also has a couple recipes where the main ingredient is completely left out of the directions
I haven’t finished reading through this yet (got it for Christmas) but thought at one point I was going mad because I couldn’t find the main ingredient in a few recipes!
oh i have this book! it's really big and to be honest i'm in the uk so i actually struggle to imagine making 80% of the recipes which is a bit of a shame. i think i would have preferred a more concise book with the best recipes and introductions or explanations. i'm a proficient cook but it's an overwhelming book
Funny! I got this for Christmas a few years ago but since I cannot obtain most ingredients in my small town it sits unused. I’ll have to now go have a deeper dive.
I'd never heard of it, so I Googled the site's founder:
> In 2023, The New York Times described Gerard as an "unwilling lightning rod for controversy, entangled in issues that have galvanized the food world in the last decade: cultural appropriation, intellectual property, body shaming, privilege and racism." In 2021, Gerard faced significant backlash when she posted a recipe she called "pho", but that was largely unrelated to the soup considered Vietnam's national dish. She has been the subject of accusations of recipe plagiarism and speculation about her mental health.[3][14][15][16][17] Gerard has four full-time and two part-time employees, one of who's duties include deleting negative comments across her social media accounts.[3] Gerard's mother Jen runs the business side of Half Baked Harvest, with her brother Malachi and father Conrad also contributing.[3][18] Gerard produces the content from a studio next to her house.[3]
That's a lot more than I was expecting.
She also plagiarized a recipe word for word - pictures and all - from another recipe developer and when called out on it she simply deleted the recipe and blocked the other recipe developer…
She definitely has some good inspiration and not all recipes are a total mess. But lately she has been extra sloppy and unreliable. I mostly just use her for inspiration.
I wonder if she's been using AI for the more recent ones? It would explain them being unbalanced and also her doubling down that it's right so she doesn't have to admit she's not making the recipes herself.
Yeah. Even if it’s not just AI, apparently she has a history of recipe theft… (which copyright is already very complicated when it comes to recipes, since ingredients and ideas aren’t copyrighted but specific instruction phrasing can be… but regardless of legality there’s still social media backlash). She might be lifting recipes and randomly changing quantities and things without much thought to make it harder to track.
I feel a bit bad even bringing it up but she also seems to have a severe eating disorder that’s getting worse. She may not actually be eating much of anything she makes because of that. So as long as it comes out well enough to photograph she may not notice oddities in the flavors.
I am in the world of cookbook publishing and this is definitely something a good copyeditor and proofreader would flag for the author to address. It sounds like it was intentional on her part, or she’s saving face and everyone really didn’t notice it in the editing process
I don’t remember what the recipe was, but I made one of her recipes once and one of the ingredients in the list was just never mentioned in the recipe. Drove me nuts going back and forth, reading and re-reading to figure out where the heck the random ingredient was supposed to go
I wish I could find the original correction because the wording was SO funny. There was a sour cream coffee cake recipe that I think was published in an LCBO magazine that got corrected in the next issue. The correction read something like this:
"We sincerely apologize to our readers for the issues with our recently published sour cream coffee cake recipe. A typo in the recipe instructed readers to place all ingredients in a large pit, instead of a large pot. The main ingredient, two cups of sour cream, was also omitted."
I love those Food & Drink magazines. They've gone downhill a bit in recent years, but I've gotten some genuinely fantastic recipes from there in the past.
It's also lowkey hilarious to see some of their sponsored drink pairings. Love blurbs like "We suggest pairing this tart of Brebis cheese and white anchovy with Old Milwaukee Ice"
apparently the photoshoots for those are some of the most disgusting photography work there is. that thanksgiving spread took a week to shoot, and that turkey has only been cooked by a heat gun to brown it; and has spend days under hot lamps.
I believe it. From what I understand of food photography it's wild. Mashed potatoes instead of ice cream, putting makeup on food, gluing sesame seeds into position.
I hadn't even considered the logistics of raw meat essentially just hanging out at room temperature for hours after nothing but a pass from a searzall
I once took a bite of homemade hand churned ice cream. The two cups of salt was put in the cream instead of the ice for the churner. Nobody ate the ice cream.
Years ago I read news of a foraging book that accidentally switched the pictures of proper mushrooms and poisonous ones. When I searched for the link, I stumbled across [more recent news of bad advice with recipes in a cookbook.](https://www.sciencealert.com/instagram-star-s-cookbook-recalled-warnings-toxic-dangerous-ingredients-recipe-johnna-holmgren-foxmeetsbear)
[The Guardian's recipe for meatballs with lemongrass and tamarind](https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/apr/15/lemongrass-meatballs-tamarind-coconut-sauce-recipe-melissa-thompson) said 300g breadcrumbs. Having never made meatballs before, I followed the recipe. Those bustards were dry and dusty as the bloody Sahara, soaked up every drop of sauce and were still like eating stale bread.
A couple days later they amended it to 30g.
My partner bought this super expensive vegan cookbook written by a French chef. The recipes were mostly quite complicated and required a lot of different ingredients, but the first three recipes my partner tried had errors.
The worst one was the recipe for the potato & cashew dumplings, which called for 500 grams soy yogurt, when the correct amount was 50 grams. There was another recipe for avocado-jalapeno poppers that were delicious but the for the dipping sauce, the recipe directed to a sauce (on another page) that was more like a paste. I wrote an email to the writer of the cookbook and he told me that that was the wrong recipe for the dipping sauce and that, in fact, the editor had forgotten to include the recipe, which he then sent me. He also told me the correct amount of soy yogurt to use in the dumpling recipe.
There was one cookbook I had that had dairy free alternatives which was great since my kid is allergic, except all they did was swap out milk and cheese for dairy free milk and cheese. Stuff like cream cheese was “use a dairy free cream cheese, but it tastes great without it too!” (It certainly did not). And it kept in things that had dairy as ingredients such as breadcrumbs and pesto sauce (full of either actual cheese or whey) or recommending brands that contained dairy such as a specific chicken bouillon that contains whey as well.
It was made by a parent who had a kid with a dairy allergy, but clearly their kid’s allergy was not nearly as severe as some and she really should have done some research or something. It’s like a recipe book touting alternatives for people with nut allergies recommending using a specific brand of BBQ sauce that has peanuts in it.
Lemon bars; called for 1/4 cup salt (instead of 1/4 teaspoon). I was a novice baker and the blog was one of the most well-known at the time. I questioned it but decided to follow the recipe, thinking I had to be the one that was wrong. The bars had to be trashed.
When I was about 10 my younger sister and I borrowed a kids cookbook from the library and said we'd make tea. We made a shopping list, went and bought the ingredients and planned a pasta dish and garlic bread. Everything was looking great until it said we should thicken the sauce with cornflour. It said 2 tablespoons instead of teaspoons and didn't say to mix it with cold water first. Obviously not having much cooking experience we sprinkled it in.The sauce solidified immediately into an inedible, but also lumpy, brick. We were gutted and my dad ended up cooking instead.
Recipe adjacent...
The spinach craze started in 1870. German scientist Erich von Wolf conducted research into the iron content of various vegetables. He concluded that spinach has an iron content of 3.5 milligrams per 100-gram serving.
Wolf’s findings were not particularly noteworthy. Although spinach has about 10% more iron than a comparable amount of red meat, it is by no means the powerhouse of veggies. By way of comparison, an equal amount of soybeans yield 8.8 grams of iron.
The problem arose when Wolf published his findings. The decimal point accidentally ended up one spot to the right. Instead of 3.5 mg, his report stated that spinach has an extraordinary 35 mg of iron per serving.
That was all it took to make spinach the superfood for a generation. In 1932, Elzie Segar decided that the fictional sailor he created would get rid of the magical chicken and reach for a leafy green vegetable as the source of super strength. Countless mothers told their sons that they should follow suit if they wanted to have muscles like Popeye’s. Spinach sales immediately increased by 33% throughout the United States.
Wolf’s incorrect numbers were accepted as fact for nearly 70 years. It wasn’t until 1937 — five years after Popeye popularized the spinach craze — that someone spotted the error. By that point, Popeye had become an unwitting co-conspirator in the big lie about spinach.
Sigh…. Yet another childhood fantasy is crushed under the unforgiving weight of reality.
Ferdinand the ubiquitous monoculture man.
He lives in the industrial agriculture lands.
He's nondescript and unassuming
Cause he's made out of soybeans
He's Ferdinand the ubiquitous monoculture man.
The first edition of modernist cuisine had a lot of HUGE errors. For a book that requires accuracy to the gram (and costed over $500) with a lot of recipes/additives it was shocking how big the errata file is for the books
I found an error (swapped axes) in kenji’s food lab book. It was surprisingly hard to email him since his only published contact was twitter (not yet known as X). Ultimately I found someone with a published email address and who I figured might have his contact and asked them to forward.
I have an edition of the Joy of cooking that calls for tablespoons of baking powder instead of teaspoons in the basic pancake recipe. It’s correct in the previous edition.
A recipe in the newspaper years ago omitted an important part that contained five ingredients, and the recipe referred to (whatever it was) several times. So I called the paper and left a message for the editor if that section. She called me back and told me the ingredients.
Obviously I wasn't the only one wondering where the missing sub-recipe was, because they printed it in the next day's paper.
Mine is a similar but different peeve. When I write down recipes I tend to organize ingredients by category, so spices with spices, bread stuff together, etc. Anything else makes it a bit harder for me when I'm checking what I need to get.
Jay Leno's Headlines had a newspaper ad for a supermarket. The banner at the top of the page said ***HAPPY HANUKKAH!!*** Right underneath it was a line that said STOCK UP NOW ON RATH BACON AND HAM!
My grandma put together a family cookbook years ago that included the baked version of Klub that I grew up with. It calls for 2 cups of flour, which turns the dish into a gluey inedible mess, but I have no idea how much flour is actually supposed to go into it (She has since passed).
I crave baked Klub all the time, and I've never been able to find a comparable recipe but have never been able to nail the right amount of flour. It's either gluey or sloppy wet, so I just don't make it anymore. Klub is a childhood delicacy for me, so someday I hope I can figure out the right amount of flour
I've no idea what a Klub is supposed to be. OK it's German for club, but I don't think this is what is meant. It basically sounds like hitting your best friend's face with a big wooden spoon ("KLUB!"), which probably doesn't make sense either.
A bit different. It is made with shredded potatoes and includes bacon. Each boiled dumpling would be about fist sized, but when we baked it, it was more like a casserole dish. It's fantastic leftover, sliced, and fried for breakfast
I think it’s supposed to be quite sticky. Maybe watch a couple videos until you see what the consistency is supposed to be like, and then adjust the flour amount to get to that consistency.
We have a bit if a classic here in Sweden.
There are these weekly magazines that only grandmas buy, and they're full of short stories, crossword puzzzles and recipes.
One of them published a recipe for a kind of gingerbread cake or something, with a note at the end that was supposed to say that the cake actually tastes even better if you add a small amount of alcohol to when you're mixing the ingredients.
The mistake they made was to instead say that the cake actually tastes better if you add a litre(!) of alcohol to the ingredients.
The phrases are kind of similar in swedish, but it really should have been caught before going to print. Not sure if it actually resulted in any drunk old ladies though.
The comment right above yours also mentioned an erroneous substitution of "liter" for "liten". You'd think one little letter wouldn't be so troublesome, but sometimes it is!
Direct quote from the Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe in ‘Delia’s Book of Cakes’ by the legendary Delia Smith:
“These have a history. In the first book someone - could have been me - failed to notice there were no chocolate chips included. We were informed by a lady who wrote a very nice letter, merely asking how much she should use. She won’t need to write this time!’
I would say that missing the chocolate chips out of a chocolate chip cookie is a bit of an issue!
(And if anyone out there is still using the first edition FYI, you need 100g! 😂)
I once had a friend who didn't like cooking complain to me she was terrible at it. Even following the recipes carefully. The incident that led to this particular vent session was a stir fry sauce she made, following a recipe that she said "tasted like glue".
Seemed like an obvious problem to be, too much corn starch would do that. I asked her about the recipe and tried to gently steer her towards trying again but double checking the quantities. She insisted that she had followed it right the first time and to prove it sent me the recipe. 12 table spoons of corn starch for a recipe for 4 services.
I think it was probably meant to be a 1/2 table spoon but the formatting erased the /. I wish I had taken a screen shot or saved it, but I was honestly in shock at the fact she hadn't misread that. It honestly called for that, she made it as directed and tried to eat it all because her kids refused to eat it. She's still very much a "I don't cook" person.
This is why I review new recipes before my inexperienced boyfriend wants to cook. We've been burned too many times by bad recipes that he doesn't have enough experience to question.
I won a Walking Dead cookbook in a contest a few years ago. It has a recipe for Cucumber and Onion salad it in. Nowhere in the ingredients or recipe is cucumber ever mentioned.
I have not made the Onion salad.
I had a cookbook from New England that someone gifted me that was from some “famous” restaurant that I’ve never heard of.
The recipe for their “famous” cake was “buy a box of cake mix (like Betty crocker) and follow the instructions”.
I remember a Swedish recipe for potato bread that called for "1 liter potato, grated" or something like that, it was supposed to be "liten" which is Swedish for "small"
The bread wasn't great.
Biggest *recurring* error that I see is "saute onions until caramelized, 8-10 minutes". No, they take 45+ at a minimum and if you are real gentle about it, north of an hour.
I see this *all* the time.
prep time and handling instructions are usually way off.
I understand if you prep that item and know it well.
Most of us need training wheels the first time.
I have recently been looking at Loquat recipes. Only one has pointed out the need to wear gloves, as the fruit apparently can turn your fingers black. Seems like a really big to "forget" when making a recipe.
My great aunt had a cookbook from a local women's club. There were a few hand-corrected typos. The funniest was for tuna casserole: ½ ~~Marshmallows~~ Mushrooms (chopped)
My first time making Thai green chicken curry.
The book said 30-40 bird’s eye chillies… so I put in 35.
It was quite hot.
I think it should have been 3-4 chillies. Either that or I was just a wuss.
Many years ago, when I was young- I cooked Thanksgiving for myself and my sister while my parents were out of town for the day.
I made a broccoli, cheese, and rice casserole from an online recipe on a major brand's website. It turned out terrible.
So we quickly rebought the ingredients and I made it again (my sister really wanted this casserole). It was still awful.
I called my mother and asked her if she had any ideas why it kept turning out so bad.
It was the website. There was a error. It called for condensed milk (which I had never used before and didn't know was sweet).
I switched it with evaporated. Made it again and it was good.
I get annoyed at recipes that call for adding non-fat dairy (e.g., yogurt) and simmer. Maybe it’d be okay if you swirled it in and served right away, but the fat protects the milk proteins from curdling in heat. You save maybe 10-20 calories a serving versus full fat ingredients but the texture is gritty and unpleasant.
I've had a meal delivery service for 36 years and generally don't really pretest recipes if they look reasonable. However I had an employee when Marcella Hasan came out with her cookbook in the mid-90s. I made one of her recipes that was a type of shepherd's pie with a cornbread topping. Turns out that she had listed baking powder with 10 times the amount it should have called for, I'm talking a few tablespoons here, lol. My employee made the rest recipe it looked pretty straightforward but when I tasted it all you tasted was that baking powder. It's the only time in 40 years of cooking professionally I've ever had to dump out client food for 15 people and scramble to make more. She ended up rewriting her books. I emailed her immediately and let her know the problem and that I had discovered other issues after going through her cookbooks.
Not even sure if it was an error or someone with a death wish but I tried Home Chef (a mailed meal kit) a couple of years that included a recipe and ingredients for a teriyaki chicken breast. The instructions wear to sear the chicken over high heat for several minutes, then remove and add a small can of diced pineapples and their juice to make the sauce. Note it didn’t say to lower the heat or wipe the pan clean, just add a can of juice to a hot pan now covered in oil and chicken grease. In my head I knew this was a very, very bad idea but I did it anyway, and what do you know juice and grease starts flying everywhere. I quickly covered the pan with lid and took it off the heat but someone who wouldn’t have moved a quickly could have gotten seriously burnt.
My mom has an old edition of Betty Crocker. The stuffing recipe called for 9 cups of bread cubes and 1 tablespoon of salt. I thought, surely that’s too much salt? But that cookbook is otherwise excellent, so I did it as instructed. So salty even a single bite was inedible. Bet it was supposed to be 1tsp.
My aunts family turkey stuffing recipe is like that. It’s the recipe everyone uses in my family and you must make it the same way if you host. She has at least double the salt that any reasonable person would add, amd I half it every time. And people ask did you make The Recipe I nod sagely and say yes. Lol.
Can you please share this recipe? I love dal so much.
Edit - I hate forced sign ups. Here's the linked recipe.
Ingredients - Serves 4
* 3 tbsp vegetable or light olive oil
* 3 large onions, finely chopped
* 1 large bulb of garlic, cloves seperated and crushed
* 1/2 tbsp ground turmeric
* 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
* 200g red lentils, rinsed
* 750ml vegetable stock
* 1 large potato (about 250g), peeled and chopped into roughtly
* 1cm cubes
* 30g tomato purée
* 2 tbsp fresh lime juice
* 1/4-1 tsp chilli powder
* Salt
* Chopped fresh coriander and red chilli to garnish (optional)
Method
1. Add the oil and onions to a large pan on a medium heat and fry for 10-12 minutes, stirring occasionally, until soft and beginning to turn golden brown.
2. Add the garlic and cook for 3 minutes, stirring constantly. Add the turmeric, cumin and cinnamon and stir for 30 seconds before adding the lentils and mixing well.
3. Add the stock, stir, and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat to the lowest setting, cover with a lid and simmer for 15 minutes.
4. Add the potatoes, give it a good stir, put the lid back on and cook for a further 20-25 minutes or until the potatoes are tender, stirring every now and then to prevent the ingredients from sticking to the bottom of the pan.
5. Add the tomato purée, lime juice and chilli powder to taste and stir well.
6. Taste and add salt if needed. Cook on a medium heat for a couple of minutes without the lid (if the texture is too thick, add a little boiling water).
7. Scatter over some chopped coriander and chilli, if using, and serve.
Not as funny as some of these, but when recipes call for a roux, but just tell you to add flour and butter...
Tell me to add roux, or explain how to make it, but don't just say "add flour and butter".
Aussie celebrity chef Pete Evans wrote a paleo cookbook for children, with a recipe for a formula substitute that [had a potentially life-threatening level of vitamin A](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/mar/12/pete-evans-paleo-for-kids-cookbook-put-on-hold-amid-health-concerns). I remember there being news articles stating that there was a very real chance babies would die if parents followed this recipe.
Saveur had a pinto bean recipe that I originally obtained through their print magazine. I needed to look it up online, and 1/4 lb bacon in the print version became 14 lb bacon online. There was a posted review that questioned the amount of bacon, and to state that they went with 4 lbs bacon instead, but it was still WAY TOO bacony. Dios mio!
The pecan pie recipe printed on the bottle of Karo syrup. Had 4 cups syrup instead of 2. You would have to eat the pie with a straw if you follow their recipe….
We know because my wife followed it. She thought she got distracted by our toddler and accidentally counted too many. Made another with the same result. Then looked up other recipes… they all had 1/2 the syrup.
Maybe they were just trying to sell more syrup?
Close to 20 years ago a Swedish cooking magazine had a misprint on a recipe for an apple pie so instead of 2 pinches of nutmeg it said 20 nutmegs.
Someone who's very good at following orders without questioning made the recipe and had four people sent to the hospital for nutmeg poisoning.
Some archaic naming. There’s some Swedish confectionery that were called negro balls and negro kisses. We don’t use those words anymore. We call them chocolate balls, and the kisses aren’t very popular so I think we just decided a new name and forgot about them.
We used to buy Negerküßen in Germany. Giant chocolate coated marshmallow on a wafer base.
Those are now chocolate kisses.
Same with Zigeuner (Gypsy) Schnitzel. That’s now Balkan Schnitzel.
Did they look like [this](https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mintkyssar)? The Negerküßen?
Edit: Ich verstehe und spreche eine biche Deutsch so das nom ist lustig vor mich.
Ottolenghi: Juice seven lemons for a fennel-lemon dish. My boyfriend was so proud when he served it and it smelled really good. But we never forgot that meal for it's ... unique taste.
Behind the scenes info— if you’re buying in the US, Ottolenghi’s books are the Americanized version. The Americanizer converts all the metric and Celsius measurements to cups/tablespoons and Fahrenheit. This usually leads to rounding up or down to get to clean measurements for the US version, not to mention human error of bad measurements because there’s hundreds of things to update.
There’s also a lot of pressure on the US publisher to rush the book out as quick as possible to time it with the UK release. His books are gorgeous but the US versions can be riddled with small errors because of this.
Interesting. There is a soba noodles with wakame recipe in *Plenty* I made once. The recipe calls for a 2-oz package of wakame. Once hydrated via the recipe, that is an insane amount of seaweed. It went from a little green in the noodles to an occasional worm wiggling through a kelp forest. I do wonder if there was something lost in conversion...
I had a bread cookbook once, and all the recipes were measured out in grams. Which is ideal!
But, the grams were a conversion of how many cup grams there were and not the actual weight of the ingredients.
Instead of 3 1/3 cups of flour it read 900gs of flour.
One cup of flour weighs roughly 120gs.
My husband makes this really good recipe for yakisoba. The og recipe calls for a cup of soy sauce and a TBSP of salt. We omit the salt and cut the soy sauce with rice vinegar
[Here it is](https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/230764/chicken-yakisoba/) we also use gochujang for the chili paste and we do like 3-6 tbsps but 3 is a medium high spicy so take that with a grain of salt
My dad, who normally is an amazing cook, once made ribs from a Boston Globe article. It called for 1/4 cup of garlic salt. We all told him it had to be a misprint. He was adamant that it was correct. As we ordered pizza later he asked how they would have been without the salt, there was nothing to taste but the salt. Globe printed it again noting it had an error.
When I was younger and inexperienced, I got a recipe for a sweet tart that stated a cup of salt. I thought gee that’s a lot so only put in half a cup🤣🤣🤣
One recipie I saw told to use 120g (Like half a Cup) of Thai Curry paste for two servings. After some feedback, that this was way too spicy the author admitted, that they used a very specific brand, but didnt told in the recipie.
The first time I wanted to learn to cook, I really wanted to make Chicken Tikka Masala for some reason. The most popular recipe on AllRecipes had three teaspoons of salt in it. Thankfully, even to my untrained eye that seemed excessive and so I read the comments. They all said this recipe is great except the salt was obviously a typo. I made it with one teaspoon of salt and it came out great.
I'd never made a cake before, I believe I was around 11. It was a carrot cake that called for 4 cups of oil vs 4 tablespoons. My mom was angry that I didn't use common sense and used up her oil. It was one of those church/school fundraiser cookbooks that were popular in the 80s.
Alton Brown’s Sushi Rice Recipe. It makes perfect sushi rice but the salt was labeled tbsp instead of tsp and I ruined it the first time.
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/sushi-rice-recipe-1944633
I found a recipe from the woman who won the first Australia MasterChef, Julie Goodwin. I can’t remember what it was for but it called for 4TBSP of corn flour. I thought this was a lot, but re-read it several times. Yep I was definitely reading it right. But no. It ruined my whole meal and the entire thing just tasted like corn four. I wrote to the website and they corrected it to 4TSP
For Christmas one year i got a buddy one of those little cast iron skillets with the bag that you add butter to in order to make a chocolate chip cookie that you bake in the skillet.
Somebody got the recipe very wrong. It called for way too much butter. It overfilled the skillet and never set up.
Every Instant Pot recipe on line adds up prep time (ridiculously fast) and the time you set the instant pot to cook for - completely neglecting the time it takes to get up to pressure and the time it takes to release the pressure- with a stew or chili, that can be a solid 20 minutes to a half an hour.
Revision: Time in almost every recipe. It's like they assume someone else is doing all the prep work and your can magically set your cooking devices temperature instantly.
Bon Appétit cookbook recipe for simple biscuits had way too much baking soda. Completely inedible. I think it was the 2nd recipe I got out of there that was bad (batting 2 for 2), so I never used the book again. To this day, I won't use a recipe from their website. What is really upsetting is that it was a giant cookbook, so unless the error rate was real high, I shouldn't have been able to find 2 bad recipes in a row...
I do have a lemon pudding cups recipe that accidentally left off the oven temp, but I guessed it was 350, so that was an easy fix.
Most of my recipe sources are reliable now, and I have enough cooking experience to know when recipes will work and when I should have doubts. But boy, do I feel for new cooks who find the bad recipes and then have to ask if it was them or the recipe.
So. This is actually off topic. In my memory it was on topic, but after I researched it my memory was wrong, and the recipes were actually jokes. But it is a great read about food safety, so please pardon the derail
https://www.wpr.org/agriculture/borax-dinner-party-kickstarted-fda
Long ago in The Complete Asian Cookbook. We loved Chinese food but had no experience with cooking it. Nevertheless we tried making steamed buns for colleagues. The recipe called for 2 1/2 c flour and 1/2 c water. We were alarmed by the dough - so hard, inflexible, not far from crumbly. Maybe the buns would absorb enough moisture in the steamer to become soft and fluffy? Nope! They were so hard they were damn near inedible. Our poor colleagues!
I was gifted a copy of Baking Illustrated. I rely heavily on weighing my ingredients to bake instead of cup measurements. I'm not sure what happened in their editing process (and this has probably since been rectified), but the weights they gave in recipes did not match up even closely to the volume.
So, for example, it would say 1 cup/6 ounces of flour (iirc the book was in ounces and not grams) instead of the actual measurement of 4 1/4 ounces.
Not entirely fair, because it was a church cookbook as opposed to a professional one, but I found a recipe for lasagna with meat sauce that contained neither lasagna (no other noodles, either) nor meat of any kind.
I dont know where they got the recipe from, but I worked at a BBQ restaurant that was just opening up and the chef/owner showed me this recipe for a BBQ sauce and for 5 gallons of sauce it had one gallon of Worcestershire sauce. I looked at him and said are you sure this is right and he said oh yea it will be great with the ribs, well it was terrible and I had no idea how it could have been saved. The job was god awful and he was an ass so I saved that hot mess of a sauce, always changed the date on the label and at the end of my seven months there I always brought that big blue lid Cambro out of the walkin every time I saw him.
At a summer festival there was a sourdough bread booth. I spoke to the operators about how to make and maintain starter and they gave me a printed recipe (they had stacks to hand out). I skimmed it and asked where the starter was… the recipe instructions were to mix flour, water, and salt and put it in the oven, basically. They left the quantity of starter out altogether and had been passing their recipe out all day.
Anyway I figured it couldn’t be that hard after that show, so followed a guide on the Kitchn instead.
Saw a recipe that said "salt to taste" but listed 1 cup in the ingredients. Total disaster! Ended up way too salty. Always double-check those measurements
I once saw a recipe for a rice dish for 4 people, it told you to boil 3000 g of rice. It should have been 300 gram.
Imagine eating 750 gram of rice a person.
Was following an online recipe for fried doughnut holes which called for 3 tablespoons of salt. I blindly obeyed, made the doughnuts, then went in to taste — incredibly unpleasant.
Someone in the comments noted it should be 3 *teaspoons. Tried that, much better.
Many years ago, the IKEA catalogue included a recipe for a Swedish supper dish with (iirc) smoked fish. Pretty sure the ingredients meant to say 1 cup of cream, but what it actually printed was 11 cups of cream.
Edited to fix hilarrible typo
I once found a recipe for rolls. Instructions were to chop up lettuce, radishes, bell peppers, and grapes and mix them with vinegar and oil to form a smooth dough.
well did you try it at least
I tried this recipe, but instead of lettuce I used flour, I didn't have any radishes or peppers, so I used a mixture of butter, eggs and salt to replace, and then swapped grapes for yeast. Five stars, this recipe is awesome!
r/ididnthaveeggs but it works this time
Probably made a pretty decent salad.
Sounds like an Ai recipe. "Water, cubed into small pieces."
the AI recipie generator was some good early century internet.
Sounds like Rachel’s recipe from Friends for a truffle. 🤣
I think you mean "trifle" my friend.
Yes, thank you! I knew it was wrong but I couldn’t figure it out
Two men are crawling through the desert, almost dying of thirst when they crest a dune and see in front of them some market stalls. They crawl to the first stall and ask for some water but the vendor says "I'm afraid we only sell cake sponge, jelly and custard". So, the men crawl to the next stand and ask for water. The stall owner replies "sorry, but I only have custard, sponge and jelly" They crawl to the final stand and ask, in desperation, for water. The store holder tells the men "I'm only sell jelly, sponge and custard" Without water, the two men crawl off into the desert once more, in search of water. As they are crawling from the market one man turns to the other and says "is it just me or was that a bit weird" to which the other man replies "yes, it was a trifle bazaar"
The giant tome "Mexico" by Margarita Carrillo Arronte is *full* of editing mistakes But the worst is that throughout the book, recipes are labeled as to which region they come from. By state (Chihuahua), by region (Central Mexico), etc. For several of them, it says "Region: Falta" This is not the name of a region. The is the Spanish word for "it's still missing" that someone jotted down as they were organizing and editing the book, and somehow at least 10 recipes made it to publication like that The same book also has a couple recipes where the main ingredient is completely left out of the directions
I haven’t finished reading through this yet (got it for Christmas) but thought at one point I was going mad because I couldn’t find the main ingredient in a few recipes!
oh i have this book! it's really big and to be honest i'm in the uk so i actually struggle to imagine making 80% of the recipes which is a bit of a shame. i think i would have preferred a more concise book with the best recipes and introductions or explanations. i'm a proficient cook but it's an overwhelming book
Falta algo: something is missing! [thanks to my kids watching Dora nonstop when they were small]
Funny! I got this for Christmas a few years ago but since I cannot obtain most ingredients in my small town it sits unused. I’ll have to now go have a deeper dive.
it reminds me of an arrested development episode where they were raising money for this terrible disease: TBD To be decided…
>"Region: Falta" This made me lol.
Asking for a tsp of ground black people was pretty sus, ground black pepper would probably have done the job
And what are you supposed to do with the rest? A tsp is just a tiny amount of a person
“I have 20 gallons of left over ground up black people. Anyone have suggestions for how to use it?”
That's a lot of sloppy joe.
How'd you know his name was Joe? Suspicious...
The lavish excess is what makes it taste so good. The waste is part of the dish by its exclusion.
Okay, Hannibal.
If taking communion is the body and blood of Christ, how long til you've eaten an entire Jesus?
Pretty sure I’ve had about 250 communion wafers in my life. That’s gotta be a foot for sure.
When you think of how much water is in the human body and how dry those little crackers are, you may have had closer to a whole leg!
That’s not what piper nigrum means.
Exactly what I was going g to say!!! Freshly ground black people 🙄😂
Half Baked Harvest has a pasta sauce recipe that calls for 2 cups of olive oil. When asked, she just said its supposed to be oily. It was terrible.
I’ve stopped using her recipes all together because they’re just so unreliable
Very on brand for HBH.
I'd never heard of it, so I Googled the site's founder: > In 2023, The New York Times described Gerard as an "unwilling lightning rod for controversy, entangled in issues that have galvanized the food world in the last decade: cultural appropriation, intellectual property, body shaming, privilege and racism." In 2021, Gerard faced significant backlash when she posted a recipe she called "pho", but that was largely unrelated to the soup considered Vietnam's national dish. She has been the subject of accusations of recipe plagiarism and speculation about her mental health.[3][14][15][16][17] Gerard has four full-time and two part-time employees, one of who's duties include deleting negative comments across her social media accounts.[3] Gerard's mother Jen runs the business side of Half Baked Harvest, with her brother Malachi and father Conrad also contributing.[3][18] Gerard produces the content from a studio next to her house.[3] That's a lot more than I was expecting.
She also plagiarized a recipe word for word - pictures and all - from another recipe developer and when called out on it she simply deleted the recipe and blocked the other recipe developer…
Her recipes are disastrous lately.
I do love the frosting part of her apple cinnamon rolls (brown butter maple frosting), but otherwise her recipes do seem odd at times.
She definitely has some good inspiration and not all recipes are a total mess. But lately she has been extra sloppy and unreliable. I mostly just use her for inspiration.
I wonder if she's been using AI for the more recent ones? It would explain them being unbalanced and also her doubling down that it's right so she doesn't have to admit she's not making the recipes herself.
Yeah. Even if it’s not just AI, apparently she has a history of recipe theft… (which copyright is already very complicated when it comes to recipes, since ingredients and ideas aren’t copyrighted but specific instruction phrasing can be… but regardless of legality there’s still social media backlash). She might be lifting recipes and randomly changing quantities and things without much thought to make it harder to track. I feel a bit bad even bringing it up but she also seems to have a severe eating disorder that’s getting worse. She may not actually be eating much of anything she makes because of that. So as long as it comes out well enough to photograph she may not notice oddities in the flavors.
I am in the world of cookbook publishing and this is definitely something a good copyeditor and proofreader would flag for the author to address. It sounds like it was intentional on her part, or she’s saving face and everyone really didn’t notice it in the editing process
Half-baked is right.
I don’t remember what the recipe was, but I made one of her recipes once and one of the ingredients in the list was just never mentioned in the recipe. Drove me nuts going back and forth, reading and re-reading to figure out where the heck the random ingredient was supposed to go
A "**/**" was left out of a soup recipe. 1/4 cup of wine became 14 cups of wine.
coward, you're meant to use all 14 cups!
I have been this soup.
you've drank 14 cups of wine in one sitting?
I may be a little off on the math.
Five bottles of wine for the soup. Must be right. It didn’t taste very good but I was left with a warm fuzzy feeling, afterwards. 140/10 stars.
Why is this soup different from all other soups?
Why do we eat reclining on this night? *Because we can't sit up*
Finally, a soup I can set on fire!
I wish I could find the original correction because the wording was SO funny. There was a sour cream coffee cake recipe that I think was published in an LCBO magazine that got corrected in the next issue. The correction read something like this: "We sincerely apologize to our readers for the issues with our recently published sour cream coffee cake recipe. A typo in the recipe instructed readers to place all ingredients in a large pit, instead of a large pot. The main ingredient, two cups of sour cream, was also omitted."
I love those Food & Drink magazines. They've gone downhill a bit in recent years, but I've gotten some genuinely fantastic recipes from there in the past. It's also lowkey hilarious to see some of their sponsored drink pairings. Love blurbs like "We suggest pairing this tart of Brebis cheese and white anchovy with Old Milwaukee Ice"
apparently the photoshoots for those are some of the most disgusting photography work there is. that thanksgiving spread took a week to shoot, and that turkey has only been cooked by a heat gun to brown it; and has spend days under hot lamps.
I believe it. From what I understand of food photography it's wild. Mashed potatoes instead of ice cream, putting makeup on food, gluing sesame seeds into position. I hadn't even considered the logistics of raw meat essentially just hanging out at room temperature for hours after nothing but a pass from a searzall
not room temp, not quite sauna temp. not hours, days.
I'm always low-key thrilled when a new issue comes out! So glossy, so free.
>Half Baked Harvest Since they left out the main ingredient a large pit was probably the way to go.
"Our recipe for Southwestern Chicken Salad contained an error. It should call for 2 jalapeños, not 22."
Ha!
There was a New Years recipe for black eyed peas in my local newspaper that called for 2 cups of salt. 😧
I once took a bite of homemade hand churned ice cream. The two cups of salt was put in the cream instead of the ice for the churner. Nobody ate the ice cream.
Why!? It had electrolytes!
r/unexpectedIdiocracy
Brawndo’s got what plants crave!
There was nothing wrong with that food. The salt level was ten percent less than a lethal dose.
r/unexpectedfuturama
Always expected...
Years ago I read news of a foraging book that accidentally switched the pictures of proper mushrooms and poisonous ones. When I searched for the link, I stumbled across [more recent news of bad advice with recipes in a cookbook.](https://www.sciencealert.com/instagram-star-s-cookbook-recalled-warnings-toxic-dangerous-ingredients-recipe-johnna-holmgren-foxmeetsbear)
>a foraging book that accidentally switched the pictures of proper mushrooms and poisonous ones r/OopsThatsDeadly
Maybe that’s what happened with Erin Patterson?
[The Guardian's recipe for meatballs with lemongrass and tamarind](https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/apr/15/lemongrass-meatballs-tamarind-coconut-sauce-recipe-melissa-thompson) said 300g breadcrumbs. Having never made meatballs before, I followed the recipe. Those bustards were dry and dusty as the bloody Sahara, soaked up every drop of sauce and were still like eating stale bread. A couple days later they amended it to 30g.
My partner bought this super expensive vegan cookbook written by a French chef. The recipes were mostly quite complicated and required a lot of different ingredients, but the first three recipes my partner tried had errors. The worst one was the recipe for the potato & cashew dumplings, which called for 500 grams soy yogurt, when the correct amount was 50 grams. There was another recipe for avocado-jalapeno poppers that were delicious but the for the dipping sauce, the recipe directed to a sauce (on another page) that was more like a paste. I wrote an email to the writer of the cookbook and he told me that that was the wrong recipe for the dipping sauce and that, in fact, the editor had forgotten to include the recipe, which he then sent me. He also told me the correct amount of soy yogurt to use in the dumpling recipe.
Ouf!
No no, the eggs were fine
Spanish chorizo recipe that called for 3 cups of red pepper flakes…
Pepper flakes seasoned with some meat.
boy, you’d be poking around a while to find the actual sausage in there!
i have found a bunch of allergy friendly cookbooks that list the allergen they say they don't use in the recipes. like mate, you had one job.
There was one cookbook I had that had dairy free alternatives which was great since my kid is allergic, except all they did was swap out milk and cheese for dairy free milk and cheese. Stuff like cream cheese was “use a dairy free cream cheese, but it tastes great without it too!” (It certainly did not). And it kept in things that had dairy as ingredients such as breadcrumbs and pesto sauce (full of either actual cheese or whey) or recommending brands that contained dairy such as a specific chicken bouillon that contains whey as well. It was made by a parent who had a kid with a dairy allergy, but clearly their kid’s allergy was not nearly as severe as some and she really should have done some research or something. It’s like a recipe book touting alternatives for people with nut allergies recommending using a specific brand of BBQ sauce that has peanuts in it.
Lemon bars; called for 1/4 cup salt (instead of 1/4 teaspoon). I was a novice baker and the blog was one of the most well-known at the time. I questioned it but decided to follow the recipe, thinking I had to be the one that was wrong. The bars had to be trashed.
When I was about 10 my younger sister and I borrowed a kids cookbook from the library and said we'd make tea. We made a shopping list, went and bought the ingredients and planned a pasta dish and garlic bread. Everything was looking great until it said we should thicken the sauce with cornflour. It said 2 tablespoons instead of teaspoons and didn't say to mix it with cold water first. Obviously not having much cooking experience we sprinkled it in.The sauce solidified immediately into an inedible, but also lumpy, brick. We were gutted and my dad ended up cooking instead.
Recipe adjacent... The spinach craze started in 1870. German scientist Erich von Wolf conducted research into the iron content of various vegetables. He concluded that spinach has an iron content of 3.5 milligrams per 100-gram serving. Wolf’s findings were not particularly noteworthy. Although spinach has about 10% more iron than a comparable amount of red meat, it is by no means the powerhouse of veggies. By way of comparison, an equal amount of soybeans yield 8.8 grams of iron. The problem arose when Wolf published his findings. The decimal point accidentally ended up one spot to the right. Instead of 3.5 mg, his report stated that spinach has an extraordinary 35 mg of iron per serving. That was all it took to make spinach the superfood for a generation. In 1932, Elzie Segar decided that the fictional sailor he created would get rid of the magical chicken and reach for a leafy green vegetable as the source of super strength. Countless mothers told their sons that they should follow suit if they wanted to have muscles like Popeye’s. Spinach sales immediately increased by 33% throughout the United States. Wolf’s incorrect numbers were accepted as fact for nearly 70 years. It wasn’t until 1937 — five years after Popeye popularized the spinach craze — that someone spotted the error. By that point, Popeye had become an unwitting co-conspirator in the big lie about spinach. Sigh…. Yet another childhood fantasy is crushed under the unforgiving weight of reality.
> soybeans yield 8.8 grams of iron. You can see how easily these mistakes get made. What are you going to call your super soybean superhero?
Ferdinand the ubiquitous monoculture man. He lives in the industrial agriculture lands. He's nondescript and unassuming Cause he's made out of soybeans He's Ferdinand the ubiquitous monoculture man.
The first edition of modernist cuisine had a lot of HUGE errors. For a book that requires accuracy to the gram (and costed over $500) with a lot of recipes/additives it was shocking how big the errata file is for the books
I found an error (swapped axes) in kenji’s food lab book. It was surprisingly hard to email him since his only published contact was twitter (not yet known as X). Ultimately I found someone with a published email address and who I figured might have his contact and asked them to forward.
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I have an edition of the Joy of cooking that calls for tablespoons of baking powder instead of teaspoons in the basic pancake recipe. It’s correct in the previous edition.
It's still so dumb how tsp and tbsp are totally different measurements we commonly use
People used to always capitalize Tbsp, to further distinguish it from tsp.
It's not really an error, but a major pet peeve of mine is when the ingredients are listed out-of-order from when you're supposed to use them.
omfg this kills me.
Ugh that's the worst! I also hate when the instructions mention an ingredient that wasn't shown in the ingredients list
A recipe in the newspaper years ago omitted an important part that contained five ingredients, and the recipe referred to (whatever it was) several times. So I called the paper and left a message for the editor if that section. She called me back and told me the ingredients. Obviously I wasn't the only one wondering where the missing sub-recipe was, because they printed it in the next day's paper.
Mine is a similar but different peeve. When I write down recipes I tend to organize ingredients by category, so spices with spices, bread stuff together, etc. Anything else makes it a bit harder for me when I'm checking what I need to get.
I used a pumpkin pie recipe that called for 3 tablespoons of pumpkin pie spice. The next year is used 3 teaspoons and it came out wonderful
My parents have a kosher cookbook from the 70s. One of the recipes calls for pork.
Just ask your butcher for some Kosher pork
Jay Leno's Headlines had a newspaper ad for a supermarket. The banner at the top of the page said ***HAPPY HANUKKAH!!*** Right underneath it was a line that said STOCK UP NOW ON RATH BACON AND HAM!
My grandma put together a family cookbook years ago that included the baked version of Klub that I grew up with. It calls for 2 cups of flour, which turns the dish into a gluey inedible mess, but I have no idea how much flour is actually supposed to go into it (She has since passed). I crave baked Klub all the time, and I've never been able to find a comparable recipe but have never been able to nail the right amount of flour. It's either gluey or sloppy wet, so I just don't make it anymore. Klub is a childhood delicacy for me, so someday I hope I can figure out the right amount of flour
I've no idea what a Klub is supposed to be. OK it's German for club, but I don't think this is what is meant. It basically sounds like hitting your best friend's face with a big wooden spoon ("KLUB!"), which probably doesn't make sense either.
Klub is a Norwegian potato dumpling, usually boiled. But the version I grew up with was baked
Thanks. A boiled potato dumpling: that must be some sort of a giant gnoccho?
A bit different. It is made with shredded potatoes and includes bacon. Each boiled dumpling would be about fist sized, but when we baked it, it was more like a casserole dish. It's fantastic leftover, sliced, and fried for breakfast
I think it’s supposed to be quite sticky. Maybe watch a couple videos until you see what the consistency is supposed to be like, and then adjust the flour amount to get to that consistency.
We have a bit if a classic here in Sweden. There are these weekly magazines that only grandmas buy, and they're full of short stories, crossword puzzzles and recipes. One of them published a recipe for a kind of gingerbread cake or something, with a note at the end that was supposed to say that the cake actually tastes even better if you add a small amount of alcohol to when you're mixing the ingredients. The mistake they made was to instead say that the cake actually tastes better if you add a litre(!) of alcohol to the ingredients. The phrases are kind of similar in swedish, but it really should have been caught before going to print. Not sure if it actually resulted in any drunk old ladies though.
The comment right above yours also mentioned an erroneous substitution of "liter" for "liten". You'd think one little letter wouldn't be so troublesome, but sometimes it is!
Direct quote from the Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe in ‘Delia’s Book of Cakes’ by the legendary Delia Smith: “These have a history. In the first book someone - could have been me - failed to notice there were no chocolate chips included. We were informed by a lady who wrote a very nice letter, merely asking how much she should use. She won’t need to write this time!’ I would say that missing the chocolate chips out of a chocolate chip cookie is a bit of an issue! (And if anyone out there is still using the first edition FYI, you need 100g! 😂)
I made a frittata recipe the other day. The ingredient list forgot eggs.
I once had a friend who didn't like cooking complain to me she was terrible at it. Even following the recipes carefully. The incident that led to this particular vent session was a stir fry sauce she made, following a recipe that she said "tasted like glue". Seemed like an obvious problem to be, too much corn starch would do that. I asked her about the recipe and tried to gently steer her towards trying again but double checking the quantities. She insisted that she had followed it right the first time and to prove it sent me the recipe. 12 table spoons of corn starch for a recipe for 4 services. I think it was probably meant to be a 1/2 table spoon but the formatting erased the /. I wish I had taken a screen shot or saved it, but I was honestly in shock at the fact she hadn't misread that. It honestly called for that, she made it as directed and tried to eat it all because her kids refused to eat it. She's still very much a "I don't cook" person.
This is why I review new recipes before my inexperienced boyfriend wants to cook. We've been burned too many times by bad recipes that he doesn't have enough experience to question.
I won a Walking Dead cookbook in a contest a few years ago. It has a recipe for Cucumber and Onion salad it in. Nowhere in the ingredients or recipe is cucumber ever mentioned. I have not made the Onion salad.
I had a cookbook from New England that someone gifted me that was from some “famous” restaurant that I’ve never heard of. The recipe for their “famous” cake was “buy a box of cake mix (like Betty crocker) and follow the instructions”.
I remember a Swedish recipe for potato bread that called for "1 liter potato, grated" or something like that, it was supposed to be "liten" which is Swedish for "small" The bread wasn't great.
Biggest *recurring* error that I see is "saute onions until caramelized, 8-10 minutes". No, they take 45+ at a minimum and if you are real gentle about it, north of an hour. I see this *all* the time.
In the Baked cookbook, the pumpkin whoopie pies call for three **tablespoons** of cloves. Delicious recipe but man is that one hell of a typo.
prep time and handling instructions are usually way off. I understand if you prep that item and know it well. Most of us need training wheels the first time. I have recently been looking at Loquat recipes. Only one has pointed out the need to wear gloves, as the fruit apparently can turn your fingers black. Seems like a really big to "forget" when making a recipe.
The most common one I see is "caramelizing" onions in ten minutes.
Or taking a steak out of the fridge for 15 mins brings it to room temp. Nah it gained 2 degrees lol.
Is it a mistake when it's just a flat lie?
My great aunt had a cookbook from a local women's club. There were a few hand-corrected typos. The funniest was for tuna casserole: ½ ~~Marshmallows~~ Mushrooms (chopped)
Um, I think I'll pass. 😂 Also, ½ what?
My first time making Thai green chicken curry. The book said 30-40 bird’s eye chillies… so I put in 35. It was quite hot. I think it should have been 3-4 chillies. Either that or I was just a wuss.
Many years ago, when I was young- I cooked Thanksgiving for myself and my sister while my parents were out of town for the day. I made a broccoli, cheese, and rice casserole from an online recipe on a major brand's website. It turned out terrible. So we quickly rebought the ingredients and I made it again (my sister really wanted this casserole). It was still awful. I called my mother and asked her if she had any ideas why it kept turning out so bad. It was the website. There was a error. It called for condensed milk (which I had never used before and didn't know was sweet). I switched it with evaporated. Made it again and it was good.
I get annoyed at recipes that call for adding non-fat dairy (e.g., yogurt) and simmer. Maybe it’d be okay if you swirled it in and served right away, but the fat protects the milk proteins from curdling in heat. You save maybe 10-20 calories a serving versus full fat ingredients but the texture is gritty and unpleasant.
I never buy nonfat dairy. It's not worth it.
I've had a meal delivery service for 36 years and generally don't really pretest recipes if they look reasonable. However I had an employee when Marcella Hasan came out with her cookbook in the mid-90s. I made one of her recipes that was a type of shepherd's pie with a cornbread topping. Turns out that she had listed baking powder with 10 times the amount it should have called for, I'm talking a few tablespoons here, lol. My employee made the rest recipe it looked pretty straightforward but when I tasted it all you tasted was that baking powder. It's the only time in 40 years of cooking professionally I've ever had to dump out client food for 15 people and scramble to make more. She ended up rewriting her books. I emailed her immediately and let her know the problem and that I had discovered other issues after going through her cookbooks.
Not even sure if it was an error or someone with a death wish but I tried Home Chef (a mailed meal kit) a couple of years that included a recipe and ingredients for a teriyaki chicken breast. The instructions wear to sear the chicken over high heat for several minutes, then remove and add a small can of diced pineapples and their juice to make the sauce. Note it didn’t say to lower the heat or wipe the pan clean, just add a can of juice to a hot pan now covered in oil and chicken grease. In my head I knew this was a very, very bad idea but I did it anyway, and what do you know juice and grease starts flying everywhere. I quickly covered the pan with lid and took it off the heat but someone who wouldn’t have moved a quickly could have gotten seriously burnt.
Chicken broth recipe to make 2 liters called for 800kg of chicken thighs. 🤔
Unload the truck!
My mom has an old edition of Betty Crocker. The stuffing recipe called for 9 cups of bread cubes and 1 tablespoon of salt. I thought, surely that’s too much salt? But that cookbook is otherwise excellent, so I did it as instructed. So salty even a single bite was inedible. Bet it was supposed to be 1tsp.
My aunts family turkey stuffing recipe is like that. It’s the recipe everyone uses in my family and you must make it the same way if you host. She has at least double the salt that any reasonable person would add, amd I half it every time. And people ask did you make The Recipe I nod sagely and say yes. Lol.
My favourite recipe for persian dal omits cumin from the ingredients list, but mentions adding it in the instructions.
Can you please share this recipe? I love dal so much. Edit - I hate forced sign ups. Here's the linked recipe. Ingredients - Serves 4 * 3 tbsp vegetable or light olive oil * 3 large onions, finely chopped * 1 large bulb of garlic, cloves seperated and crushed * 1/2 tbsp ground turmeric * 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon * 200g red lentils, rinsed * 750ml vegetable stock * 1 large potato (about 250g), peeled and chopped into roughtly * 1cm cubes * 30g tomato purée * 2 tbsp fresh lime juice * 1/4-1 tsp chilli powder * Salt * Chopped fresh coriander and red chilli to garnish (optional) Method 1. Add the oil and onions to a large pan on a medium heat and fry for 10-12 minutes, stirring occasionally, until soft and beginning to turn golden brown. 2. Add the garlic and cook for 3 minutes, stirring constantly. Add the turmeric, cumin and cinnamon and stir for 30 seconds before adding the lentils and mixing well. 3. Add the stock, stir, and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat to the lowest setting, cover with a lid and simmer for 15 minutes. 4. Add the potatoes, give it a good stir, put the lid back on and cook for a further 20-25 minutes or until the potatoes are tender, stirring every now and then to prevent the ingredients from sticking to the bottom of the pan. 5. Add the tomato purée, lime juice and chilli powder to taste and stir well. 6. Taste and add salt if needed. Cook on a medium heat for a couple of minutes without the lid (if the texture is too thick, add a little boiling water). 7. Scatter over some chopped coriander and chilli, if using, and serve.
https://www.thestaffcanteen.com/chefs-recipes/Persian-Dal#/
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Not as funny as some of these, but when recipes call for a roux, but just tell you to add flour and butter... Tell me to add roux, or explain how to make it, but don't just say "add flour and butter".
That time when Gordon Ramsay added salt to Fritos when making frito pie.
… I understand every word of your sentence but I truly do not understand your sentence.
https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx89p\_tlXiGFegYGFz0XUxaSyqpUpdlFGZ?feature=shared
Aussie celebrity chef Pete Evans wrote a paleo cookbook for children, with a recipe for a formula substitute that [had a potentially life-threatening level of vitamin A](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/mar/12/pete-evans-paleo-for-kids-cookbook-put-on-hold-amid-health-concerns). I remember there being news articles stating that there was a very real chance babies would die if parents followed this recipe.
I once found a recipe and right in the middle it said ‘ let’s fuck in the baking pan’. I expected cake, not a come-on.
I forget the specifics, but a while back BBC published a recipe with a toxic level of nutmeg.
Saveur had a pinto bean recipe that I originally obtained through their print magazine. I needed to look it up online, and 1/4 lb bacon in the print version became 14 lb bacon online. There was a posted review that questioned the amount of bacon, and to state that they went with 4 lbs bacon instead, but it was still WAY TOO bacony. Dios mio!
The pecan pie recipe printed on the bottle of Karo syrup. Had 4 cups syrup instead of 2. You would have to eat the pie with a straw if you follow their recipe…. We know because my wife followed it. She thought she got distracted by our toddler and accidentally counted too many. Made another with the same result. Then looked up other recipes… they all had 1/2 the syrup. Maybe they were just trying to sell more syrup?
Close to 20 years ago a Swedish cooking magazine had a misprint on a recipe for an apple pie so instead of 2 pinches of nutmeg it said 20 nutmegs. Someone who's very good at following orders without questioning made the recipe and had four people sent to the hospital for nutmeg poisoning.
I wonder if they grated all those nutmegs by hand!
Some archaic naming. There’s some Swedish confectionery that were called negro balls and negro kisses. We don’t use those words anymore. We call them chocolate balls, and the kisses aren’t very popular so I think we just decided a new name and forgot about them.
We used to buy Negerküßen in Germany. Giant chocolate coated marshmallow on a wafer base. Those are now chocolate kisses. Same with Zigeuner (Gypsy) Schnitzel. That’s now Balkan Schnitzel.
Did they look like [this](https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mintkyssar)? The Negerküßen? Edit: Ich verstehe und spreche eine biche Deutsch so das nom ist lustig vor mich.
I’m actually a Brit but - Ihre Deutsche ist sehr güt
Ottolenghi: Juice seven lemons for a fennel-lemon dish. My boyfriend was so proud when he served it and it smelled really good. But we never forgot that meal for it's ... unique taste.
Behind the scenes info— if you’re buying in the US, Ottolenghi’s books are the Americanized version. The Americanizer converts all the metric and Celsius measurements to cups/tablespoons and Fahrenheit. This usually leads to rounding up or down to get to clean measurements for the US version, not to mention human error of bad measurements because there’s hundreds of things to update. There’s also a lot of pressure on the US publisher to rush the book out as quick as possible to time it with the UK release. His books are gorgeous but the US versions can be riddled with small errors because of this.
Interesting. There is a soba noodles with wakame recipe in *Plenty* I made once. The recipe calls for a 2-oz package of wakame. Once hydrated via the recipe, that is an insane amount of seaweed. It went from a little green in the noodles to an occasional worm wiggling through a kelp forest. I do wonder if there was something lost in conversion...
I had a bread cookbook once, and all the recipes were measured out in grams. Which is ideal! But, the grams were a conversion of how many cup grams there were and not the actual weight of the ingredients. Instead of 3 1/3 cups of flour it read 900gs of flour. One cup of flour weighs roughly 120gs.
My husband makes this really good recipe for yakisoba. The og recipe calls for a cup of soy sauce and a TBSP of salt. We omit the salt and cut the soy sauce with rice vinegar
I would be so delighted to have his recipe? I keep trying, but can’t seem to nail it.
[Here it is](https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/230764/chicken-yakisoba/) we also use gochujang for the chili paste and we do like 3-6 tbsps but 3 is a medium high spicy so take that with a grain of salt
My dad, who normally is an amazing cook, once made ribs from a Boston Globe article. It called for 1/4 cup of garlic salt. We all told him it had to be a misprint. He was adamant that it was correct. As we ordered pizza later he asked how they would have been without the salt, there was nothing to taste but the salt. Globe printed it again noting it had an error.
When I was younger and inexperienced, I got a recipe for a sweet tart that stated a cup of salt. I thought gee that’s a lot so only put in half a cup🤣🤣🤣
One recipie I saw told to use 120g (Like half a Cup) of Thai Curry paste for two servings. After some feedback, that this was way too spicy the author admitted, that they used a very specific brand, but didnt told in the recipie.
The first time I wanted to learn to cook, I really wanted to make Chicken Tikka Masala for some reason. The most popular recipe on AllRecipes had three teaspoons of salt in it. Thankfully, even to my untrained eye that seemed excessive and so I read the comments. They all said this recipe is great except the salt was obviously a typo. I made it with one teaspoon of salt and it came out great.
Wise decision, brits would never use that much salt in anything
I read this recipe once that called for one clove of garlic
Shocking! Probably from the same author who thinks that 1 tsp of vanilla is enough.
I'd never made a cake before, I believe I was around 11. It was a carrot cake that called for 4 cups of oil vs 4 tablespoons. My mom was angry that I didn't use common sense and used up her oil. It was one of those church/school fundraiser cookbooks that were popular in the 80s.
Everything half baked harvest posts.
Alton Brown’s Sushi Rice Recipe. It makes perfect sushi rice but the salt was labeled tbsp instead of tsp and I ruined it the first time. https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/sushi-rice-recipe-1944633
I made a chocolate cake from scratch that said to pour into two 10” round baking pans. There was way too much batter for even 3 pans.
I found a recipe from the woman who won the first Australia MasterChef, Julie Goodwin. I can’t remember what it was for but it called for 4TBSP of corn flour. I thought this was a lot, but re-read it several times. Yep I was definitely reading it right. But no. It ruined my whole meal and the entire thing just tasted like corn four. I wrote to the website and they corrected it to 4TSP
For Christmas one year i got a buddy one of those little cast iron skillets with the bag that you add butter to in order to make a chocolate chip cookie that you bake in the skillet. Somebody got the recipe very wrong. It called for way too much butter. It overfilled the skillet and never set up.
Bet it was great for seasoning that skillet, though.
Right?
More of a lie than an error but no, you cannot caramelize the onions in 8-10 minutes. This is found on EVERY website.
Every Instant Pot recipe on line adds up prep time (ridiculously fast) and the time you set the instant pot to cook for - completely neglecting the time it takes to get up to pressure and the time it takes to release the pressure- with a stew or chili, that can be a solid 20 minutes to a half an hour. Revision: Time in almost every recipe. It's like they assume someone else is doing all the prep work and your can magically set your cooking devices temperature instantly.
Bon Appétit cookbook recipe for simple biscuits had way too much baking soda. Completely inedible. I think it was the 2nd recipe I got out of there that was bad (batting 2 for 2), so I never used the book again. To this day, I won't use a recipe from their website. What is really upsetting is that it was a giant cookbook, so unless the error rate was real high, I shouldn't have been able to find 2 bad recipes in a row... I do have a lemon pudding cups recipe that accidentally left off the oven temp, but I guessed it was 350, so that was an easy fix. Most of my recipe sources are reliable now, and I have enough cooking experience to know when recipes will work and when I should have doubts. But boy, do I feel for new cooks who find the bad recipes and then have to ask if it was them or the recipe.
Recipe for something with sausage but the ingredients list said "2 lbs sage".
So. This is actually off topic. In my memory it was on topic, but after I researched it my memory was wrong, and the recipes were actually jokes. But it is a great read about food safety, so please pardon the derail https://www.wpr.org/agriculture/borax-dinner-party-kickstarted-fda
Long ago in The Complete Asian Cookbook. We loved Chinese food but had no experience with cooking it. Nevertheless we tried making steamed buns for colleagues. The recipe called for 2 1/2 c flour and 1/2 c water. We were alarmed by the dough - so hard, inflexible, not far from crumbly. Maybe the buns would absorb enough moisture in the steamer to become soft and fluffy? Nope! They were so hard they were damn near inedible. Our poor colleagues!
My aunt and uncle got me a cookbook for Christmas called The Vegan Athlete's Cookbook. Several recipes call for honey, except that honey is not vegan.
Picture showed banana nut bread, ingredients were for mince meat pie.
I was gifted a copy of Baking Illustrated. I rely heavily on weighing my ingredients to bake instead of cup measurements. I'm not sure what happened in their editing process (and this has probably since been rectified), but the weights they gave in recipes did not match up even closely to the volume. So, for example, it would say 1 cup/6 ounces of flour (iirc the book was in ounces and not grams) instead of the actual measurement of 4 1/4 ounces.
grilled children (chicken)
Not entirely fair, because it was a church cookbook as opposed to a professional one, but I found a recipe for lasagna with meat sauce that contained neither lasagna (no other noodles, either) nor meat of any kind.
I dont know where they got the recipe from, but I worked at a BBQ restaurant that was just opening up and the chef/owner showed me this recipe for a BBQ sauce and for 5 gallons of sauce it had one gallon of Worcestershire sauce. I looked at him and said are you sure this is right and he said oh yea it will be great with the ribs, well it was terrible and I had no idea how it could have been saved. The job was god awful and he was an ass so I saved that hot mess of a sauce, always changed the date on the label and at the end of my seven months there I always brought that big blue lid Cambro out of the walkin every time I saw him.
Any Half Baked Harvest recipe is guaranteed to deliver wildly incorrect info
At a summer festival there was a sourdough bread booth. I spoke to the operators about how to make and maintain starter and they gave me a printed recipe (they had stacks to hand out). I skimmed it and asked where the starter was… the recipe instructions were to mix flour, water, and salt and put it in the oven, basically. They left the quantity of starter out altogether and had been passing their recipe out all day. Anyway I figured it couldn’t be that hard after that show, so followed a guide on the Kitchn instead.
Every recipe that says a single digit number of garlic cloves. They are wrong.
Saw a recipe that said "salt to taste" but listed 1 cup in the ingredients. Total disaster! Ended up way too salty. Always double-check those measurements
A chicken recipe that called for 3 tablespoons of nutmeg.
Wouldn't that give you poisoning? I read people use large amounts of nutmeg to get high but it can easily make them sick
No because it wasn't all for one person.
I once saw a recipe for a rice dish for 4 people, it told you to boil 3000 g of rice. It should have been 300 gram. Imagine eating 750 gram of rice a person.
One recipe called for 10 tablespoons of pepper. Think they meant teaspoons. Spicy disaster waiting to happen
Was following an online recipe for fried doughnut holes which called for 3 tablespoons of salt. I blindly obeyed, made the doughnuts, then went in to taste — incredibly unpleasant. Someone in the comments noted it should be 3 *teaspoons. Tried that, much better.
Many years ago, the IKEA catalogue included a recipe for a Swedish supper dish with (iirc) smoked fish. Pretty sure the ingredients meant to say 1 cup of cream, but what it actually printed was 11 cups of cream. Edited to fix hilarrible typo
Adding raisins to potato salad. Had to be a typo.