How To - Online Recipes

I'm back! Last week was busy and I kept thinking about how I needed to write my blog post for the week and then the next thing I knew it was Wed again already. Eek! But, missing one week doesn't mean it's time to pack up and go home. It just means I'll strive to do better in the future.

Here we go! This week I am giving you a little peak into how my brain works. The other day I was looking for a recipe for a spicy peanut style salad dressing and as I was analyzing my options I thought to myself "Hey, if I document this, it would be good for the blog!" Cooking in general is also a great topic for the blog. It's something many of us do every day without much thought, yet it involves a lot of math and science when you stop and think about it. Ingredients combine to form something entirely different than any of the ingredients. That sure sounds like chemistry to me! And, I learned fractions from baking with my mother and then couldn't understand why many kids were confused when we learned them in school. Cooking also involves a lot of intuition and creativity making it a great for involving your whole brain. Also it's fun and when you're done you get to eat (hopefully) delicious food. yum!

Today's post, however, is more about analyzing and processing recipes than actual cooking itself. You could easily apply this thought process to things other than cooking. It just happens to be really useful for getting the most delicious food possible out of the chaos of the internet. There are a lot of sites out there with a whole lot of recipes and it can be more than a little overwhelming. Which one do you use? How do you know it will be good? Etc. etc. etc. So, I present to you the 5 C's of getting the most out of online recipe sites.

Collect
Cut
Categorize
Compare
Consolidate

1) Collect:
Search for what you want. Try a few different terms or combination of terms. Sometimes I have 2 or 3 ingredients that I want to use and think/feel will work well together so I just type those items into the search and see if anything comes up. In this case I searched "peanut dressing" and "peanut butter dressing" and a few other things. There are a few sites that I know and trust (like food network and recipes.com) and I am more inclined to open those options. Generally, however, in this step I just open a LOT of tabs in my browser.

2) Cut:
Close the tabs for options that don't pass the initial screening. There's a decent amount of experience/intuition in this phase but also some practical evaluations. Do I have all the ingredients in the house and if not am I willing to run to the store before I start? Are the reviews good? How long will it take and/or how complicated are the instructions? Are there any ingredients included that make me go "Whaaaaat?" or is it lacking ingredients that seem critical to the end product? With experience you'll start to be able to recognize when the listed ingredients will give you what you want or not. Also, often less is more in terms of ingredients lists. With all that in mind, close a bunch of the tabs. Keep the ones you like. Sometimes I will keep a tab open for only 1 specific reason or ingredient because I like it and want to make sure it makes it into the final product. However, you need to get this down to only a handful of options. 5 starts to get unmanageable so cut cut cut!

3) Categorize:
This is really just a pre-step for comparing. Sometimes it isn't even necessary. However, often you'll have to lump things into groups like "acids" and "sweeteners" in order to properly compare the options. The peanut butter dressing example below shows how this is useful. I typically do this in my head, but in this example I actually needed to write stuff down to keep track of it.

4) Compare:
Flip between tabs and look at the differences and similarities. Decide which options are best. You also have to pay attention to ratios. First, get a sense of basic ratios of the key ingredients and see if there are trends. Also, look for hidden duplicates of the same recipe. There have been a few times where I was comparing two recipes only to discover that one was just 2X the other. This is sometimes harder to recognize than you might think because recipes will use different measurements. For example, one might say 2 tablespoons and the other calls for 1/4 cup (which is 4 tablespoons.) Eventually you'll start to memorize common conversions for cooking volumes. Until then, the internet can help.

Now that I think about it, it's kinda impressive how much math I do in my head when researching recipes.

5) Consolidate:
In this step, I pick and choose what I like best from each option. Again, there's a decent amount of experience at play in selecting which options are best. There is also a lot of personal preference in terms of what ingredients you like and dislike. I often end up with one "leader" that I make small adjustments to based on the other recipes I've found and my preference. Jot down your new consolidated recipe and get cooking!

Below is a table I made when comparing peanut salad dressings. This is a case where I didn't really have one "leader" recipe. I've also included some comments so you get an idea of what I was thinking when I made decisions. Enjoy!

Click to make larger.

It may seem like this is a long and difficult process but it works for me. Based on my explanation, you're probably thinking that I spend days researching a recipe before I make something but that's not true. Usually I'll spend about 10-20 mins looking stuff up before I get started on actually making food. Often there are only a few options that pass all the screenings and then it's easy to compare, pick a "leader" and say "except I'll do X, Y, and Z." Occasionally I'll end up with an actual "winner" and just follow that one recipe. Again, experience helps. 

If you don't have a lot of experience with cooking, the only way to get it is to try things. Start with recipes as written in order to learn the basics. Then, start making small tweaks like adding more garlic. Always add more garlic. Eventually it all just starts to make sense and you'll find yourself throwing things together with no recipe at all. At first, many of these concoctions will fail, some of them epically. I went through this phase about a year ago (shortly after we started eating very low carb.) The ITH will corroborate that we had a few meals that were simply inedible. Don't get discouraged by this. Learn from it. Soon enough you'll be throwing things together that are super tasty, but you'll be a little sad because you really have no idea what you just did to create it and will never be able to do it again. It's all part of the fun.