How restaurant kitchens write recipes anyone can follow, and how to borrow those habits for your food blog.
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Professional kitchens run on written recipes. Not the romantic kind in a grandmother’s notebook, but specs: exact, tested, and written so a cook who has never made the dish can make it right on the first try, during a Friday rush.
Your readers are that cook. They are tired, a little distracted, and standing at the stove with your recipe on their phone. Here’s how kitchens write recipes that work, and how to borrow the habits for your blog.
Kitchens call it mise en place: everything in its place before the heat goes on. When your ingredient list follows the order of the steps, readers can set up their counter top to bottom and never hunt for the next thing.
“A cup of flour” can vary a lot depending on how you scoop it. For baking, give grams alongside cups. For everything else, be specific: “1 medium onion, diced”, “2 tbsp soy sauce”. If an amount is truly to taste, say so, and give a starting point.
A marinade, a sauce and a garnish are three jobs. Group ingredients under short headings like “Marinade” and “To serve”. It’s how prep lists are written, and it makes a 20-ingredient recipe feel manageable.
Chef’s note: if a cook has to read a step twice, the step is written wrong. Short steps, one action each.
“Brown the beef, drain the fat, add the onions and cook until soft, then stir in the spices and tomatoes and simmer for 20 minutes” is four steps pretending to be one. Break it up. Readers lose their place in long steps, especially with messy hands.
Stoves vary, pans vary, altitude varies. A time tells readers roughly how long, and a visual cue tells them when it’s actually done: “3 to 4 minutes, until golden at the edges”, “until a toothpick comes out with a few moist crumbs”. Give both.
“A 9×13 inch baking dish”, “a large skillet over medium-high heat”, “375°F (190°C)”. Small details, big difference. Kitchens never leave them out.
Every kitchen recipe has a yield. “Serves 4”, “Makes 24 cookies”, “About 1 quart”. It sets expectations, and it lets readers scale the recipe up or down with confidence.
Substitutions, make-ahead tips, storage and freezing all belong in a notes section, not tangled into the steps. Keep the steps clean and the extras in one place.
Make the recipe from your own written version, exactly as written, before you publish. You’ll find the missing step or the forgotten ingredient every time.
Scrumptious is built around these habits: ingredients one per line with groups, one step per line, prep and cook times, yield with servings scaling, and a notes section. Write your recipe the way you normally would, paste it in, and Scrumptious sorts it into the right places. Readers get US/metric conversion, cook mode for the stove, and a clean print view.
See the help articles on ingredients and instructions for tips on getting the most from each section.
