How to Write a Recipe, Part 2: Instructions
(f you haven’t yet, read How to Write a recipe, Part 1: Ingredients before reading this post. And if you have a specific question, record a message for the Everything Cookbooks podcast here and we will answer it in upcoming episodes. You can subscribe to the podcast wherever you get podcasts.
When learning how to write recipes, it can take a bit of time to get into the style of how to say what you want to tell people to do. It should be easy: boil the water! Dump in the greens! Cook until done, then drain! But, we know, it isn’t. The key is balancing getting out of the way of the end-user (using as few words as possible) as well as giving them head’s up on info they need.
If you’re new to the format, the most important thing to remember is collecting data points. If you miss a cook/bake time (“for 20 to 25 minutes or until the cake pulls away from the sides and is golden brown on top ”), you will have to redo the recipe to capture the time. Sounds obvious, but it can be far from it, especially if you’ve reset your timer 5 times because the cake wasn’t ready yet and you can’t remember if you baked it an extra 10 or 20 minutes. As long as you have all the info, you can smooth out the instructions later, or work with an editor to get the words in the right order.
3 Tips for Writing Recipe Instructions
Start with anything the reader may have to do before they can roast/bake/fry the dish. If it takes 30 minutes to make a cake batter, ensure you preheat the oven and tell someone to line the baking pan before telling them how to make the batter.
If, however, a pastry needs to be refrigerated, don’t include a step for heating the oven until the pastry is well-chilled. In this case, the pre-heating step might be the second-to-last instruction.
If you add a bunch of ingredients at the same time, include them in the same step. So “Stir in the paprika, cumin, and red pepper flakes and bring to a simmer….” Not: “Add the paprika. Add the cumin. Add the red pepper flakes. Bring to a simmer.” Just make sure the order in which you add the ingredients matches the order in the ingredient list.
There are a lot of other things to say about the specifics in writing instructions, but here are the basics:
note the time it takes to bake, simmer, puree, whisk, etc. to give readers specific guides on what they should expect to do. If, for instance, you only want someone to pulse chickpeas in a food processor until crumbly, tell them “in a food processor, pulse the chickpeas for a few seconds until they are crumbly.” This way the reader avoids pureeing the chickpeas if this is not what you want them to do.
when you note the time, also indicate what the food should look like at that step. Everyone’s stove and oven is a little different. If you want someone to cook onions until the edges of the onion starts to become brown, don’t just say “cook the onions for 5 minutes.” Say “cook the onions, stirring occasionally, until they are starting to brown around the edges but are still pale in color, about 5 minutes.”
note the size of the pot/pan to use. On page 9 of Andrea Nguyen’s book Vietnamese Food Any Day, she has a chart on standard cooking vessel sizes. Take a look if you’re curious. Or look at the guides in Cook’s Illustrated, which also spell out what they consider to be standard cookware. IN other words, an 8-inch skillet is a small skillet, a 10-inch skillet is a medium skillet, a 12-inch skillet is a large skillet. If you call for a large skillet, ensure you mean a 12-inch one and not a 10-inch one.
get specific about any other aspect of the prep. If it’s important to use a paring knife to trim the tops off baby carrots, say so. “Using a paring knife, scrape any grit or dirt from the top of the carrots but leave the greens in tact.”
Add a step about discarding something that you don’t want to eat in the finished dish. If you use bay leaf in a braise but don’t want to eat the bay leaf, add a “discard the bay leaf” instruction before serving.
Extras: You can have notes about components of the recipe that can be made ahead, like a pie crust that needs to chill for a while before being rolled out and baked. You can provide nutrition information for recipes if you have the capacity to do so, you can add prep times and cook times (always overestimate rather than underestimate the time involved)
The takeaway: In the first draft, get down more details than you will need. When redrafting, think about consistency. If you have several recipes that have the same instructional step—cooking pasta, say—ensure that you write them in more or less the same way.
But even if the recipe isn’t written perfectly, an editor can help you edit much easier if you have instructions that include cook times, temperatures, and cookware/bakeware needed.