writing good recipes
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why waste time, say lot word when few word do trick?
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people on the internet often complain that all the recipes you find
are too wordy, bloated with backstory and crammed with keywords to
help them show up higher in search results.
this is obviously true and i don't have a lot to add - maybe this is
an area where large language models might actually be helpful by
cutting out the fluff and just
telling me how to make the damn casserole.
this is part of why i maintain a small recipe archive with
some of my family's favorite recipes - i can strip out all the extra
nonsense and just keep the important struff.
while pruning prose is a valuable step i've found
reformatting and editing the recipes to be almost as important.
what follows is a list of common issues i've found with
the recipes i add to my archive. hopefully recipe writers of the
future will find this blog post and incorporate these ideas into
their work to save future cooks a lot of annoyance and mistakes.
put the steps in the right order
you'd think this one would go without saying but i still find a lot of
recipes that fail to mention important steps up front. preheating the
oven, for example, is something i need to do before i start ANYTHING
else so tell me to do that as the first step.
more common is a situation where a component can be made ahead but
this isn't mentioned inside the recipe itself. tell me this up front
so i can decide if i want to make something ahead before i
make it, otherwise don't bother.
group ingredients by component
i notice a lot of recipes will group ingredients
"shopping list style" where each kind of ingredient is
together (all the produce is together, then all the dairy, etc.).
while this is helpful when i'm shopping for ingredients,
it can be very unhelpful when actually preparing food.
instead, i find it more useful to group together
ingredients that will be used together.
if a recipe has a sauce, list the ingredients in that sauce
next to each other.
if there's a marinade, put the marinade ingredients together.
if there are sub-steps where ingredients are added with other steps
in between, group them based on those steps.
for example, this is a chili recipe i have in my archive as it
appears in its original form:
Ingredients
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 large onion, chopped
3 large cloves garlic, crushed
2.5 lb ground beef
2 tbsp tomato paste
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tbsp BBQ sauce
2 tbsp chili powder
1 tbsp brown sugar (packed)
1 tbsp soy sauce
2 tsp celery salt
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp seasoned salt
1 tsp minced onion
1 tsp minced garlic
Dash red cayenne pepper
1 15 oz. can crushed tomatoes
¾ cup drained and rinsed red kidney beans (~½ 16 oz. can)
1 4 oz. jar pimentos, coarsely chopped, with liquid
1 medium green pepper
¼ cup diced celery
Directions
Heat oil in 5 quart saucepot over medium-high heat. Add onion and
crushed garlic; cook 5 minutes, stirring frequently until softened.
Add ground beef; cook about 6 minutes, stirring frequently until meat
is browned.
Meanwhile, in a small bowl, combine tomato paste, Worcestershire
sauce, BBQ sauce, chili powder, brown sugar, soy sauce, celery salt,
cumin, black pepper, seasoned salt, minced onion, minced garlic, and
ground red pepper; stir well to mix.
Drain fat off browned beef and stir in seasoning mixture. Bring to
simmer over medium heat. Cook, stirring, for 5 minutes. Add tomatoes
and kidney beans, reduce heat to low. Cook, covered, 15 minutes,
uncovering occasionally to stir. Add pimentos with liquid, green
pepper, and celery; cook uncovered for 5 minutes, stirring
occasionally.
now, here's the same recipe with the ingredients organized by
component instead of like a shopping list:
Ingredients
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 large onion, chopped
3 large cloves garlic, crushed
2.5 lb ground beef
For the seasoning mixture:
2 tbsp tomato paste
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tbsp BBQ sauce
2 tbsp chili powder
1 tbsp brown sugar (packed)
1 tbsp soy sauce
2 tsp celery salt
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp seasoned salt
1 tsp minced onion
1 tsp minced garlic
Dash red cayenne pepper
1 15 oz. can crushed tomatoes
¾ cup drained and rinsed red kidney beans (~½ 16 oz. can)
1 4 oz. jar pimentos, coarsely chopped, with liquid
1 medium green pepper
¼ cup diced celery
Directions
Heat oil in 5 quart saucepot over medium-high heat. Add onion and
crushed garlic; cook 5 minutes, stirring frequently until softened.
Add ground beef; cook about 6 minutes, stirring frequently until meat
is browned.
Meanwhile, combine the seasoning mixture ingredients in a small bowl
and stir well to mix.
Drain fat off browned beef and stir in seasoning mixture. Bring to
simmer over medium heat. Cook, stirring, for 5 minutes. Add tomatoes
and kidney beans, reduce heat to low. Cook, covered, 15 minutes,
uncovering occasionally to stir. Add pimentos with liquid, green
pepper, and celery; cook uncovered for 5 minutes, stirring
occasionally.
all i did was add some line breaks and a heading but to me that makes
the recipe so much easier to follow. now i can just read down that
list and throw stuff in a bowl instead of going back and forth
between two lists and risking forgetting something.
explain why
this can be hard to do if you didn't develop a recipe yourself but
one of my favorite parts of cooking is when you've made something a
few times and start to understand why certain choices were made and
you can start to improvise a little bit.
this is what happened with the macaroni and cheese recipe on that
list; the recipe itself is really simple, it's pretty much just
noodles and sauce Mornay but i also wrote down a bunch of
little things i've learned over the years as i've made this for
different audiences.
part of this is to remind myself which improvisations work and which
ones don't but it's also really nice for anyone who's making it for
the first time since they can tailor it to their own tastes more
easily without worrying about altering load-bearing components.
i like to improvise and try stuff out so i wish more recipes were
written this way; tell me what's important and where there's room for
me to play around. if you insist on writing pages and pages of prose
to go along with your recipe you could at least make it relevant.
anyway, hopefully this will help you write better recipes or fix up
the ones you want to save for yourself.
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written by peter beard on 2025-12-19, last updated 2025-12-19
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