Retesting Recipes – It Can Drive Me Crazy

January 2008

I am constantly retesting recipes that I’ve developed for the book. I want to make sure the weights and measurements are correct and that the recipes are reproducible. I also need to make sure they taste as great as I remember when I first developed them. Sometimes that’s not always the case.

After developing recipes all day long, day in and day out for up to 18 hours a day, my taste buds sometimes trick me or I can’t read my own notes. And let me tell you, I hate it when that happens because then the development process starts all over again.

That’s happened already twice this week. Two simple recipes turned into a nightmare until I got them right. Making the red cabbage coleslaw and zucchini soup over again was like something out of a bad movie. I had grated red cabbage and carrots everywhere and let me tell you those anthocyanins (the purple color of the cabbage) and beta-carotenes (orange color of the carrots) stain if you don’t clean up the mess soon enough. I’m not thinking about the benefits of their vitamin content at a time like that! Before long, I was up to my elbows in zucchini puree and covered with red cabbage coleslaw all because the recipes didn’t taste quite like I remembered. I made batch after batch until I finally got the taste right – a small victory for me!