Why Recipe Blogs Always Seem To Lie About Times
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Ever try a recipe you found online, only to discover it took way longer to make than the blogger promised? Whenever that happens, it feels like recipe blogs are lying about prep and cook times, doesn't it? Well, as the founder of recipe blog Modern Asian Baking and the author of three cookbooks, I can assure you that it's usually not deception but more about how subjective time in the kitchen really is.
More often than not, it is unintentional when the times on recipe blogs are inaccurate. For example, I am highly organized in the kitchen, so while it may take me less than five minutes to peel and dice onions like Gordon Ramsay, it can take others a bit longer. In that case, I might list the prep time as five minutes, which could feel like I'm lying when it actually takes a reader closer to 10. Or let's say I'm baking cookies, like my Asian cowboy cookies in my cookbook 108 Asian Cookies, and it takes me 10 minutes to soften butter on my counter before I cream it with sugar. If I listed the ingredient as 'butter, softened' in the recipe, I wouldn't include those 10 minutes in the prep time.
Cooking and baking times are so subjective that inaccuracies are often unintentional
Additionally, the equipment we use in our kitchens will always vary. For example, while it might take my oven 30 minutes to preheat, yours may be ready in just 10. That's why, whenever a recipe of mine requires oven usage, I ask readers to preheat their ovens about 30 minutes before baking or roasting. I don't include those 30 minutes in the prep time, but sometimes I'll list them under inactive time. When I was testing hundreds of cookie recipes, I found that the dough always mixed up faster in a larger mixer than in my smaller one.
What bloggers and recipe developers may also leave out of recipe times are the minutes spent on mise en place, or the pre-cooking ritual Anthony Bourdain always completed, and then the cleanup that comes afterward. I usually tend to add a few more minutes to my prep times in this case, to account for set up and clean up. In the end, there are no hard-and-fast rules for recipe bloggers or cookbook authors to follow when it comes to listing prep, cook, inactive, active, or total times for a dish. We are working with a system that is quite subjective. That's why it is important to give recipe developers — and yourself — a little grace when it comes to cooking and baking times.