Carla Lalli Music is the author of cookbooks Where Cooking Begins and That Sounds So Good.Charissa Fay/Supplied
Is there a more annoying and inescapable question we face than, “What should I make for dinner?” In theory, answering it should be easy. We’ve never had more access to recipes on websites, TikTok and through AI chatbots – to mention just a few resources. However, a lot of the results are duds.
In a new monthly column, Recipe Lab, I’ll be trying out recipes – mostly from cookbooks, but also other sources – in an effort to decode what makes a good one. I’ll walk readers through the process of cooking: the hiccups, the modifications and the results. I’ve never attended culinary school, or worked in a kitchen, I’m just a home cook addicted to Instagram cooking reels with an above-average interest in learning new techniques, trying new flavours and experimenting with unfamiliar ingredients in the kitchen.
To prepare for this assignment, I spoke to Carla Lalli Music, the author of Where Cooking Begins and That Sounds So Good. Drawing on her experience as a cookbook author, recipe tester and former food director at Bon Appétit, Lalli Music lifted the curtain on how recipes are tested and explained when it’s okay to go off-script.
How do you develop a recipe?
What I like to do is visualize how I’m going to cook the recipe. I will make a list of ingredients in the order that I think I’m going to use them and then I just start cooking. Sometimes I’m spontaneous and write things down as I go. My process involves a lot of measuring cups and tablespoons, multiple timers and the acceptance that the first or second draft is probably not going to be great.
Tell me about the testing.
Your standard cookbook contract says you’re going to deliver recipes that have been tested. That means someone who is not you takes your written document and cooks the recipe exactly as you’ve written it. From the most basic level, they are double-checking all of your ingredient measurements and your timing and the process and that it came out looking like it’s supposed to. But they’ll also check things like ingredients missing from either the ingredient list, or the method. If I was testing a recipe that said “mix the batter,” I would flag it and say: “Am I using a stand mixer? Am I mixing with a spoon? Is it a spatula? Is it a whisk?”
Can we trust that every cookbook has been cross-tested?
No, because it is time-consuming and costly. Good recipe testers charge anywhere from US$150 to US$250 per recipe (for a book with 100 recipes, that’s US$15,000). Groceries would be additional.
This has been something that I’ve cut corners on myself. I’ve given friends and family the recipes and a recipe tester checklist and basically tried to train people to become recipe testers. I’ve paid for the groceries, and they’ve given me the notes.
Most people have not come up through an editorial kind of job history (like working at Bon Appétit), and because of that, they don’t cross-test recipes. There are very few test kitchens in existence now, and a lot of recipe developers are working on their own and that safety net is gone for all of us.
Lalli Music has friends and family that act as recipe testers, but not all cookbook authors use testers.Laura Murray/Supplied
Are there certain recipes or cookbooks you trust less than others?
I actually don’t trust chef cookbooks at all. I worked with a chef, we did two books together, and I saw that process intimately. It’s really, really difficult to scale from restaurant portion to human portion. And in restaurants, most dishes come off of multiple stations: one cook is responsible for the steak, somebody else does the sauce and somebody else does the veg. At Bon Appétit, we worked with a lot of great chefs with amazing restaurants, but translating what they would send in was usually a huge lift.
And then there are websites that are community sourced, or you just have no idea where these recipes are coming from – I’ve never made something from AllRecipes.com. I don’t know what this is, and I don’t trust them.
It’s worth looking at reviews online. You will get a pretty good sense of whether the recipes are solid from reader feedback.
When can you safely deviate from the recipe a bit?
Both of my cookbooks have a section called “Spin it,” where for as many ingredients as I could in every recipe, I give all the alternatives. If it says penne and you don’t have penne, you just have to think, “What’s a shape with a hole?” If you don’t have celery, what acts like celery? Fennel, radish, even carrot. If I don’t have soy sauce, I use Worcestershire, Tamari or fish sauce. Think about texture and flavour and how ingredients behave in a recipe to make those swaps.
In general, half a teaspoon of any spice you’re not going to notice if it’s not there, unless it’s something like nutmeg.
What are the places you shouldn’t deviate?
Baking. You can’t even switch brown sugar to white sugar because it changes the moisture content in a recipe. Leaveners can’t really be substituted. Even using wheat flour instead of all-purpose can completely change the texture of a cake. With baking, I become a scared cooking student and I just do exactly what it says.
This interview has been edited and condensed.