It’s Not Me, It’s the Recipe… Right?

How to tell when a recipe is truly bad — or when you’ve just made it worse

Ingredients laid out for a recipe (image courtesy of author)

I’m the first to admit that there are lots of bad recipes out there. I often get frustrated when I’m looking for something specific and I find all of the recipes to be sub-par. I have enough cooking and baking knowledge to fill gaps, but I’m also an obsessive cook who thinks of very little else.

And, though I am not personally a “review writer” so to speak, I don’t believe that you’re in the wrong for leaving a poor review for a similarly poor recipe.

But at what point is it you and not the recipe?

Recipe reviews can be hilarious — with people giving low ratings after having made major substitutions (see the subreddit ) or, better yet, never having made the recipe at all but simply disagreeing with an ingredient choice or technique.

These are obvious cases of the culprit for the poor meal being the cook, not the recipe writer.

However, things aren’t always as clean-cut. So what makes a bad recipe?

How to spot a bad recipe

Number one is that it is poorly written. Are there large blocks of text that make it difficult to read? Are there spelling errors…