How to (Actually) Follow a Recipe | Techniquely with Lan Lam

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When we say our recipes work, it’s because we have a rigorous recipe development process to ensure they work for real home cooks. Cook’s Illustrated’s Lan Lam shows you how to follow a recipe for failproof results.

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ABOUT US: The mission of America’s Test Kitchen (ATK) is to empower and inspire confidence, community, and creativity in the kitchen. Founded in 1992, the company is the leading multimedia cooking resource serving millions of fans with TV shows (America’s Test Kitchen, Cook’s Country, and America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation), magazines (Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country), cookbooks, a podcast (Proof), FAST channels, short-form video series, and the ATK All-Access subscription for digital content. Based in a state-of-the-art 15,000-square-foot test kitchen in Boston’s Seaport District, ATK has earned the trust of home cooks and culinary experts alike thanks to its one-of-a-kind processes and best-in-class techniques. Fifty full-time (admittedly very meticulous) test cooks, editors, and product testers spend their days tweaking every variable to find the very best recipes, equipment, ingredients, and techniques. Learn more at

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38 Comments

  1. How crucial it is, when judging the differences in nuances of a “complex dish”, at a moment when my body is yearning for food; when I am not yearning for food? Could one’s taste buds “become tired and overwhelmed” when detecting the different subtle nuances of texture and balanced flavour present in a “complex dish”? How should one prepare the taste buds so that one’s rating counts as objective in a taste panel?

    Mrs Lam, WHAT is “molecular gastronomy”? Lord…

  5. Bravo Lan ! You are so methodical like a real teacher in front of a class ! All the chemistry of the ingredients in the recipe are explained.
    Tks a lot
    Can I request you to introduce some recipes for induction oven, which of course cannot rival with our old wok and the Maillard flavour point .Following you from Mauritius

  6. We love you Lam at our home!! You make our weekends filled with experiments at the kitchen!
    My mom is currently writing our family recipes, Could you please also share how you write recipes? What are the best practices which you follow, etc.

  11. Great explanation! I test ATK recipes and I have a couple small pet peeves. When the ingredients list lemon zest and juice together as one item. To me those are 2 different items even if they're from the same lemon so why not list them separately. I'm good at the "divided" items but one thing I run into with ATK recipes is that sometimes they put too many steps into one large paragraph. Frequently the 2nd half of the divided item is buried in this very wordy instruction. I copy recipes into my Paprika app and break down those big paragraphs into smaller bits, so it's easier to see the multiple steps that were jammed together.

  19. I had always questioned things like “what defines a “medium” onion?”, so I was glad she touched on that by mentioning that a well written recipe will give a measurement when it’s necessary for proper balance vs when the exact amount is less important to the end result.

  26. I tend to rewrite my recipes into a format that makes sense for me.

    Ingredients are listed in the left column

    Instructions are in the right column.

    All ingredients that are required for a step are listed beside each other.

    Each set of instructions has a title indicating what the end result is: rue, dry ingredients, sauce, etc.

    If one portion of ingredients is dumped into another, I’ll draw an arrow from one to the other listing how they are to be combined. (Whisk, blend, layer…)

    It ends up being part list, part table, and part pictogram. This is something I can easily read while gathering, prepping, and cooking my recipe.

    Unfortunately, no one else understands my system! So I do always include the original source recipe name and location.

  27. Another set of “visual” cues to join your list would be the tactile ones. Examples:
    – Fry onions until limp
    – stir fry veggies until their color changes throughout, but are still crisp
    – boil potatoes until fork tender
    – bake cake until center still jiggles slowly when you bump the pan
    – bake cookies until edges are crisp

  30. When a recipe gives me a life story before they give me the ingredients I immediately go to another site. Like wtffff no one cares. You give me amounts, times, ingredients etc. and I will give you foot traffic and ad revenue. That’s how this works.

  32. I laugh when you come across a michilin recipe. They seem to enjoy driving everyone nuts in switching up the dry goods with cups and spoons to ounces. Also, they always omit if the spices or herbs measurements are fresh, freeze dried or sealed. Even though a michilin recipe always uses fresh foods, spices and herbs, on occasion they will use freeze dried. To help you with these prankster chefs, check out other chefs recipes.

  35. An issue i see is asking for 1 tablespoon of X or Y, minced/coarse ground. If garlic can be different sizes why not ask for 2 GRAMS of coarse ground peppercornsm or 10 grams of garlic, wont the ingredient benefit on accuracy of weight more than a volume?

  36. Some recipes have their entire life stories in them and the actual ingredient list and recipe is poorly written and basically a tiny little paragraph at the end of the page you get to by scrolling through hours and hours of lifetime movie scripts. It's infuriating.

  37. Fantastic. You share in great detail. This is the content I've been searching for my new project. It's genuinely helpful for me. I hope you'll release more engaging content in the future. Thank you so much. Wishing you and your channel continued growth.

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