Recipe Testing

This week I’ve spent a good amount of time developing recipes for a magazine feature. Although I’d love to tell you which magazine I’m writing for, I’m not able to disclose that information quite yet, but I will tell you that the recipes are for a vegetarian Thanksgiving feature article.

When writing for publication, I find that my patience has to be stretched further than a pull of taffy, as it often takes a year from conception to publication. For example, I first pitched this Thanksgiving idea back in August of 2007, and my work won’t be published until November of 2008.

So goes the world of magazine writing, but I’m so very excited about this feature article and have been spending my days this week brainstorming, playing and calculating in my kitchen laboratory. I thought you might be interested in hearing about how the recipe-development process works, so I’ve written out a bit of information about my creative process.

First: I must come up with an original, spectacular-sounding menu.
Since there are more cooking magazines, websites, blogs and TV shows than there are American cooks (or so it seems), coming up with innovative recipes takes some major outside-the-box thinking.

The recipes I’m currently developing are for a healthy lifestyle magazine, so I’m rethinking the idea of Thanksgiving by, first, making the menu vegetarian and, second, making it relatively healthy. This isn’t the kind of assignment where brown-sugar-glazed yams and crème fraîche mashed potatoes would go over well. I have to use fats and sugars sparingly and focus on whole foods, especially since the nutritional information will be published alongside each recipe.

Second: Are the ideas feasible—do they taste good, do they look good?
Sometimes ideas look better on paper than they taste in your mouth. Case in point: One of the recipes that I envisioned was a vegetable-fruit purée that included Asian pears. Well, when I tasted the first draft of this dish, I found that the inherent grit of the pears interfered with the smoothness of the purée, so I swapped out the pears for apples.

Another recipe I was working on was a spread made from pumpkin seeds. The flavor was just was I was looking for, but the color was a drab sandcastle gray. That wouldn’t do at all, so I added a carrot to the mix to turn the gravely color into a warm Southwestern earth tone—much more inviting.

Third: Are the directions streamlined?
Most (if not all) of the magazine’s readers will not be professional chefs, so I can’t expect the readers to spend three hours on an entrée that requires an oven, four burners, a blender, a strainer, three sauces and five garnishes. If this were the case, they’d be flipping through “The French Laundry Cookbook” or (better yet) eating at the restaurant. The recipes must be feasible in terms of time, difficulty and required equipment.

I’ll have to excuse myself now to return to my kitchen laboratory, where I’ll be cooking enough food to last Max and me an entire month. I’m thankful for freezer space, and doubly thankful that I won’t need to cook dinner once I’m finished for the day!