When Creating Your Own Recipe, Don't Forget This Vital But Often-Ignored Piece Of Info

Creating an original recipe to share with friends and family or to post online is a fun way to spread joy to fellow foodies. However, it's important to be precise to make it possible for someone else to recreate your dish. One detail that is commonly left out of home cooks' recipes that makes them confusing to follow is the type of kitchen equipment required. Fortunately, Chowhound received exclusive tips from an expert on how to best convey the cooking and baking tools needed to prepare a recipe. 

Nisha Vora, vegan recipe developer and NYT best-selling author, says, "Specifying required and recommended equipment is one of many things you can do to help your reader successfully make the recipe." Besides listing the type of equipment, it's important to avoid being vague in your description. Vora provides a perfect example of why. The creator of cooking blog Rainbow Plant Life says, "If your pan-seared tofu works great in a large nonstick frying pan but sticks in a stainless steel pan or overcrowds in a medium frying pan, it's important to specify 'large nonstick frying pan' or '12-inch nonstick frying pan' in the recipe." 

While you can mention the equipment within the instructions, it's helpful to list less common tools needed in the recipe headnote. Vora says, "If a recipe requires specialty equipment in order to work well, the reader should know this before they start cooking. It's not a great user experience to realize halfway through cooking that you need a mortar and pestle when you don't have one."

While details are important in a recipe, some things are simply too obvious to be written down. Recipe developer Nisha Vora says that obvious equipment, like using a knife to cut carrots, doesn't need to be mentioned in the list of required tools. Similarly, if a dish can be made in a pan made of any material, it's not necessary to be more specific. However, if the recipe warrants a tool that is interchangeable, you may want to mention the alternate equipment. For example, if you specify using a mandoline slicer to cut cabbage, mention that a chef's knife will also work if you don't have one. 

On the other hand, there are times when the size, type, and material of a kitchen tool can have a significant impact on the outcome of the recipe. For example, dishes made in a cast iron skillet could come out differently than those made in a stainless steel sauté pan due to the difference in heat retention and searing capability. According to Vora, "If a recipe has a fair amount of liquid, specifying a sauté pan with deep sides or a Dutch oven is helpful so readers don't pick a frying pan with flat sides and end up overfilling the pan." For baking recipes, the dimensions of the pan and material is particularly important to indicate since there is more room for error, she says. Instead of writing "square pan," be more specific and list, "8 x 8-inch square glass dish."