Three Important Reasons You Can Change a Recipe
It’s okay to make a recipe fit your needs, you’re the one who has to eat it.
Use this recipe as a guide. Adjust measurements and ingredients as necessary. — Andrea Bemis, Dishing up the Dirt
One of my favorite farm-chef bloggers finishes each recipe with these words. And I love her even more for them. The acknowledgment that recipes are meant to be changed to suit your needs is not talked about enough.
On a lazy coronavirus Saturday, watching cooking shows on our local PBS station, America’s Test Kitchen aired a Tomato Gratin recipe in that week’s episode. With a garden full of tomatoes, and always a need for new recipes, I was excited to test out the recipe and share it in my weekly newsletter for our fresh-picked produce boxes.
But halfway through making the recipe, I diverted from the original directions.
America’s Test Kitchen goes to great lengths to make sure that their recipes are well tested and optimized for home cooks to recreate on their own.
I thought that if I was going to make changes to a recipe from a source, like that, I should be able to justify my reasoning for the difference.
But why?
