Introducing The Sporkful | Is Your Recipe Lying To You?

Hi, it's Willa.

We have a treat for you today, an episode of The Sporkful, hosted by Dan Pashman.

The Sporkful is a show about food that I think Dakota Ring listeners will really like if they don't already.

It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.

And Dan also digs deep into culinary topics, some of them hiding in plain sight, that can tell us more about people and the world we live in.

Some recent episodes I think might be up your alley include the story of Hydrox cookies.

Lots of people think Hydrox cookies ripped off Oreos, but that's exactly backwards.

And the story of how that happened includes one of the most bitter rivalries in the snack food business.

Dan has also looked into the story of the humble colachi, a pastry that went from Central Europe to West Texas and is now slowly making its way to Brooklyn.

But the episode we have for you today is about a pressing question all its own.

Is your recipe lying to you?

In this episode, Dan talks to an intrepid journalist right here at Slate who exposed the big fib about how long it takes to caramelize onions.

Dan then gets the inside scoop on why there's a disconnect between what a recipe says will happen, how long it will take, how hard it will be, and what really does.

I think you'll really enjoy it.

I know I did.

Here's Dan Pashman.

Over the course of your career, you've written about a wide range of topics.

I have.

I've written about weather modification in China.

I've written about sports.

I've written about politics, media, and also food.

And yet, after all your years and years of a distinguished writing career covering such a wide range of topics and a wide range of impressive publications, there seems to be one piece that stands out above all the rest, at least in terms of capturing the most public interest.

Nothing I've written has had as sort of a long-lasting effect as the piece I wrote for Slate about how long it takes to caramelize onions.

This is the sporkful.

It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.

I'm Dan Pashman.

Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.

To get things rolling this week, we're going to jump right into a story from Tom Skoka, who you just heard at the top.

Tom has been a journalist for decades.

He got his start at alt weeklies in Baltimore and D.C., then moved to New York, where he worked at scrappy, edgy websites like Gawker and The All.

He's always been a bit of a rabble-rouser.

He loves writing stories that call out big media when they get things wrong, usually in their coverage of politics or current events.

But in the spring of 2012, a different kind of story caught his eye.

I can remember it pretty clearly.

I was in my living room reading the New York Times, and there was a recipe for scones with caramelized onions.

It was like savory scones.

Savory scones.

Savory scones.

And it said, put the onions in a pan and cook them for 10 or 15 minutes until they were golden brown and caramelized.

Now, I should mention, Tom's not just an accomplished journalist.

He's also an experienced home cook.

He has a wife and two kids and at the time his kids were little and he made dinner for the family every night.

So Tom sees this instruction to cook onions for 10 or 15 minutes until caramelized.

And you feel that that is not how long it takes to caramelize onions.

I know that is not how long it takes to caramelize onions.

Now, I should add, this wasn't the first time Tom had seen this.

He'd come across recipes in cookbooks, newspapers, and magazines again and again saying, cook an onion for 10 or 15 minutes, at which point it will be golden brown and caramelized.

This one in the New York Times, it was the last straw.

I snapped.

I went on Twitter.

I was like, stop lying.

Why do recipe writers lie?

I think I was using all caps.

I reserved all caps for when I was heated.

It felt good to get it off his chest, but Tom wasn't satisfied.

I was like,

I'm still mad.

I haven't discharged my frustration and anger yet.

And

at the time, I had a blog on Slate, and so I just decided decided I got to blog this.

Tom didn't know it at the time, but he was about to hit a nerve in the world of recipe writing and create a space for home cooks to vent about something that had been building up for a long time.

That recipes might be deceiving us.

If you look at any list of best-selling cookbooks, there are certain words you see over and over again in the titles.

Quick, easy, fast, effortless.

These books are essentially promising the same thing as that savory Scone recipe.

Deliciousness in no time.

But is it too good to be true?

Today on the show, we ask, is your recipe lying to you?

After firing off an all-caps tweet, Tom set out to write a more in-depth story.

And like the consummate journalist he is, he approached the question objectively.

I'm going to wipe my mind clear of my previous assumptions and experience that tells me how long it takes to caramelize onions.

and ask myself, okay, if I'm in a huge hurry and I really want to make these scones and I want to believe that they're telling me the truth how fast can i do it tom had seen online that sweet onions would caramelize faster so he bought one of those added half to a pan and cranked up the heat to high i'll just stand over here stirring it like crazy 10 minutes later the onions were burnt so he tried another method this one was a tip from the recipe in the new york times start the onions in a dry pan stir until they darken then add oil and salt and saute until they caramelize you gotta be on top of the stove and the stove has to be roaring and it's you know a huge amount of effort After 10 minutes, the onions were still pale.

At 15 minutes, they had darkened a little.

20 minutes, they were getting dark, but not caramelized.

With all that effort, I think I got it down to like just under half an hour.

Now, the way I know to caramelize onions is you cook them at a low or medium-low heat for at least like 40 minutes.

It's a slow process, but you can also leave them alone and go prep other ingredients.

If you're cranking up the heat to get them done faster, then you're going to be constantly washing the stove so the onions onions don't burn.

So maybe you'll be done a little faster, but it would be a lot more stressful and you couldn't do anything else during that time except stir the onions.

You're certainly not rolling out and measuring any like scone ingredients on the side while you're doing this.

And even then, it still took you 28 minutes, which was a lot longer than what the recipe said it would take.

Right.

So Tom writes up his story, and in May 2012, it goes live on Slate with the headline, Layers of Deceit.

Why do recipe writers lie and lie and lie about how long it takes to caramelize onions?

Tom figured he'd get some emails and some tweets and response, and he'd move on to the next story.

But that's not what happened.

The reaction to the piece was

a little overwhelming.

People really, really had been looking for someone to either tell them or confirm to them that what recipes were saying to them about caramelizing onions was not true.

Tom's story had a remarkably long life.

People would post it or tweet about it years after it was published.

Then, in 2016, four years after it first went live online, Tom got a bit of justice.

Sam Sifton, the founding editor of New York Times Cooking, had a weekly newsletter at the time with recipe recommendations.

Sam included an improvised dish of pasta and shrimp with caramelized onions, then wrote,

Try it, but note well the teachings of Tom Skoka.

Caramelizing onions takes a lot of time.

Victory, right?

Somewhat, but attention on on the internet can lead to unexpected consequences.

A year after that, in 2017, Google was using snippets, a pre-AI version of that thing where at the top of the search results, Google summarizes the info it finds on the web so you don't have to click through various links.

And there was an issue.

There was suddenly this discussion of how Google was pulling bad information into its snippets.

And I was like, well, one piece of bad information that I know a lot about now is

people saying that you can cook caramelized onions in a really short time.

So I was like, like, okay, so if I Google like how long it takes to cook caramelized onions, is Google going to find one of these articles out there where somebody is saying, oh, you can do this in 10 minutes?

And so, you know, I typed it in, and what I got from Google was not somebody else's article.

It was mine.

And Google was telling everybody that my article said that you could caramelize onions in 10 or 15 minutes.

So it was sort of misinterpreting what you had written.

Right.

The Google bot was searching the text, finding the part where I was describing the false claim that it could be done in 10 or 15 minutes and hooking that out and presenting it to the web searcher as the news that you could caramelize onions in 10 or 15 minutes.

So unwittingly, you were part of spreading the misinformation you were seeking to debunk.

Exactly.

I was pulled into the misinformation machinery without my knowledge, against my will.

I mean,

this is the thing they always talk about in like fighting misinformation.

Usually it's people in politics who are saying it, you know, warning you, don't repeat the false claim.

All right, I'm going to run a test right now, Tom.

I'm tabbing it into Google.

How long does it take to caramelize onions?

Oh, all right.

Progress.

Caramelizing onions can take at least 45 minutes and often over an hour, depending on the stove and the quantity of onions.

The natural sugars in the onions need time to caramelize over low heat.

Who are they linking to for that first bit of information?

A caramelized onions recipe from Love and Lemons.

So they're not going to give you that, Tom.

There was a time, there was a time when I was cited in Wikipedia in the Caramelizing Onions article, but I think someone objected to my lack of credentials, and that got pulled.

All right, I'm looking up

Caramelizing Onions Wikipedia.

Onions require 30 to 45 minutes of cooking to caramelize.

That's citing, let's see, footnotes number six and seven.

Footnote number six, Tom Skoka.

I'm back.

Amazing.

There's a little internet justice for you, Tom.

Yeah, someone will probably hear this and take me off again.

Today, more than a decade after Tom's original piece was published, he thinks there's an important lesson in all this.

I had caramelized so many onions that I knew how long it took to caramelize onions.

And so when I read a recipe that said it took 10 minutes, I said, this recipe is lying to me.

I will adjust accordingly.

But lots and lots of people would end up with a pan of slightly softened white onions and think they had done it wrong.

You know, what I heard from people was that they just thought they were bad cooks, that there was some quality of being a cook that would make your onions turn brown in 10 minutes, and they just didn't have it.

They believed the recipe.

That was what really sort of shook me when I started hearing from people telling me that, that somebody is going to look at a pan of lightly cooked onions and think it's their fault.

But do you think that people who are underestimating how long it takes to caramelize onions in the recipes that they write, are they doing it on purpose?

Like, are they writing it knowing that it's not true?

I do not know how you can write a recipe telling somebody to spend 10 minutes caramelizing onions if you are someone who cooks and writes recipes and not know that

you're lying.

I think that it was somehow

an acceptable fib, that it was just sort of like, if everybody's saying it takes 10 minutes, then everybody's cook times are going to sort of reflect everyone else's cook times there's like an industry standard it just happens that the industry standard is false

nowadays when you look for recipes for caramelized onions in the times you'll get ones with 40 minute cook times not 10 or 15.

we asked sam sifton if this story affected the way they write recipes in the times and he said that no they didn't make any changes because of the story but nevertheless he loved tom's piece when it came out and he references it as often as he can i believe him because a few weeks ago in his newsletter sam wrote quote yes it takes a long time to caramelize the onions, longer than most folks care to admit.

And despite this progress of the times, you can still find recipes on many top websites for 15-minute caramelized onions.

The myth does persist.

And Tom thinks this myth is just the tip of the iceberg, that there are plenty of other acceptable fibs in recipes.

I decided I wanted to try to find out if he's right.

If I'm going to go forth from here, Tom, and talk to some recipe writers and recipe developers,

Should I like shine a spotlight in their face and say, Tom Skoka says you're a liar?

That might be a little bit too confrontational.

I don't know if you want to like patch me in and have me call him a liar.

I have one particular person in mind to talk to, a recipe developer who's been in the business for decades.

But will he open up and give me some real answers?

We'll find out after the break.

Stick around.

Welcome back to the Sporkful.

I'm Dan Pashman.

This week we're focusing on recipe writing gone wrong.

But if you want to hear more about the stories behind great recipe writing, tune in next week where we talk about one of the best-selling cookbooks of all time, which uses a totally different recipe style from just about everyone else.

I'm talking about the joy of cooking.

Megan Scott and John Becker updated and published the ninth edition of the book.

John's great-grandmother, Irma Rombauer, wrote the original Joy of Cooking in 1931.

And as Megan and John were revising the recipes, they saw just how much food had changed.

Like in the recipe for chocolate chip cookies.

In 1943, Irma wrote something like, oh, a special type of chocolate has been invented that makes, you know, making these cookies so much easier.

And she was talking about chocolate chips because before that time, chocolate chips were not a thing.

So you would take chocolate and chop it up and add it to your batter.

And then they, you know, chocolate chips were invented, making it much easier to to make chocolate chip cookies.

Right.

She's like, extra, extra.

Yeah.

Check out the latest in kitchen technology.

That episode comes out next week.

Of course, if you want to make sure you don't miss that one or any of our episodes, open up your podcasting app, whatever app you're using to listen right now, go to the Sportflow Show page and click follow or subscribe or plus or heart or like or whatever the button is in your app.

Then we can hang out all the time.

You can do it right now while you're listening.

Thanks.

Okay, let's get back to the show.

I wanted to find out, are recipe writers intentionally deceiving us with instructions that make recipes seem like they'll be quicker and easier than they are?

And if so, why?

I should say, last year I published my own cookbook, but I worked with a team of pro-recipe writers for the book.

I'm not a trained chef.

I was more the stand-in for the home cook.

I wanted to talk to someone who's a real expert, who's read and written a lot of recipes.

Christopher Kimball.

He created America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country magazine, and since 2016, he's been running his new company, Christopher Kimball's Milk Street.

Chris has a well-earned reputation for his painstaking approach to testing recipes.

This is not a guy who cuts corners.

But as he looks out at the ever-growing world of cookbooks and online recipes, does he see the same deceptions that Tom Skoka sees?

Is there an open secret in the recipe world that's being kept from the rest of us?

Dan, you are a conspiracy theorist.

You're a culinary conspiracy theorist.

Were you in that smoke-filled room, Chris?

I know.

We had this meeting back in 1973 and you weren't there.

You missed that one.

I pressed my case to Chris.

We know people love quick and easy.

Doesn't that put pressure on recipe writers to make their recipes seem quicker and easier than they are?

Did you have a really bad experience early in your career with a recipe that really pissed you off?

You've really got it out for recipe writers, I can tell you.

I mean, you're not letting go.

You got your teeth deeply into this one.

I was getting nowhere.

I decided to try a different approach.

What is your take on cooking times in recipes?

Where do I begin?

Cooking times and recipes are utterly, totally worthless.

Aha!

Is this a crack in the wall of silence?

Not really.

Chris insists there's no conspiracy, but he does have a theory on why cook times aren't always accurate.

I think people have an idea in their head from prior work how long it takes to do standard tasks, right?

By people, Chris means recipe developers.

They're just like putting these numbers down.

And And

I cook a recipe, even from our own cooks, sometimes.

And I'm going like, these times make no sense to me.

And the reason is on the stovetop, it depends on the type of pot you're using.

It depends what kind of heat you're using.

And in the oven itself, every oven heats differently because most ovens are not accurately calibrated.

So there are too many variables in a home kitchen for a recipe writer to figure out a precise cooking time for everyone.

Also, some issues can be a result of a poor choice of words.

Chris agrees you can't truly caramelize onions in 10 or 15 minutes.

The sugars just don't break down that fast.

But in that time, you can soften them and they can be very delicious.

And for some recipes, that works.

Just don't call it caramelization.

The more I talked to Chris, the more I saw evidence of this gap between recipe developers and home cooks.

A home cook, especially a less experienced one, sees a recipe as a precise set of instructions they have to follow to a T.

But Chris has a different view.

A recipe is sort of a,

you know, vague suggestion about how to do something

if you had the proper ingredients at the proper temperature, the proper cookware, you've read the recipe and you have enough time.

All right, so maybe it's not a conspiracy as much as it is an issue that arises when experienced recipe developers in professional grade kitchens write recipes for home cooks with all kinds of setups and all levels of experience.

But still, there are some open secrets in the recipe writing world.

When I started working on my cookbook, I was shocked to learn that in recipe writing, it's standard not to include prep time in the total cook time.

So when a recipe says that it'll take 35 minutes, that usually doesn't include peeling and chopping.

The ingredient list is post-prep.

You've done all your prep, and then you go to step one.

So I don't think you should include prep time.

Really?

I just feel like the average home cook opens a recipe, they see an amount of time, and in their head, they think, this is the amount of time that I have to cook dinner from start to finish, from the moment I'm looking at at this piece of paper to the time the food's on the table, I have one hour.

And if the recipe says 45 minutes, they say, okay, great.

I have time for this.

And then they don't realize that there's actually a half an hour of additional work that isn't factored into that 45.

Everybody who knows how to cook knows that it takes people who have less experience forever to do the prep.

So I don't think you can actually include prep time because that's so all over the place.

It might take somebody 45 minutes to prep, other person four minutes.

On this issue, Chris and I will have to agree to disagree.

I do get what he's saying, but I think that recipe writers should do their best to estimate how long it'll take the average home cook to make a recipe from start to finish, including prep.

To consciously choose to leave out a big part of the process makes recipes seem a lot faster and easier than they actually are.

In my cookbook, I decided to include prep time in my recipes.

And I'm not alone.

Now the New York Times includes prep time in its recipes, but there are still many cookbooks that don't.

And many of them are these best-selling best-selling cookbooks that promise faster, easier recipes.

Forget 30-minute meals.

Now it's 15-minute meals.

How many home-cooked meals can you realistically make in 15 minutes?

Look, I think people who buy those books know it's ridiculous.

I mean, it's sort of like...

It's an inside joke on both the author and the buyer of the book.

They both know it's kind of not really going to happen.

Well, I'm not sure.

I think less experienced home cooks really do rely on that time estimate.

And it's Tuesday night.

They got to get dinner on the table and the recipe says 45 minutes and they have 46 minutes till dinner needs to be ready.

And then the recipe ends up taking them an hour and 15 minutes and they get super stressed.

You know, caveat empty, buyer beware.

Look, if you buy a book that promises fabulous recipes in 15 minutes and most of the recipes aren't very good, okay, well, now buyer, you know, beware.

You've been, you've learned your lesson.

Look, this is really weird.

I'm coming across as being like

defending the right of people to produce crappy recipes for the market.

And you're the guy going, there's a smoke-filled room, and these people didn't actually get together, but they all are on the same page.

And when they go to these food conferences, they silently nod to each other with a knowing smile.

It's just a wink and a nod.

It's a wink and a nod.

And it's like,

we're not fixing oil prices, but yes, we are.

We're going to caramelize those onions in eight minutes, aren't we?

Yeah, that's right.

As any individual recipe developer or chef, you don't want your time estimates to sit as outliers with the whole group.

This is Liz Dunn, a journalist who writes about food, business, and culture.

Before that, she co-wrote cookbooks with chefs and adapted recipes for the Wall Street Journal.

And she has her own theory on why writers feel pressure to make recipes look easier than they are.

Because as a writer, your recipe is essentially in competition with other recipes for similar dishes.

A competition to get cooked.

You're putting together a lasagna recipe, and everybody else's lasagna recipe says it's like an hour start to finish.

You're not going to be the guy who's like, this is a two and a half hour lasagna.

Because, you know, it just, it makes you look undesirable.

So I think everybody is sort of going along with this sort of like group delusion, but nobody is doing anything intentionally harmful.

It may not be intentionally harmful, but Liz says it can be harmful nonetheless.

To understand how, you first have to know a bit more about Liz's relationship to cooking.

You know, I had been a home cook who in my teens and 20s who just loved to dive into complex, meaty recipes.

But in 2015, Liz's first child was born and life suddenly got a lot busier.

I have now his nap time as my only time to do the entire contents of my life.

And so I thought, you know, okay, no problem, because there's such, there's an entire universe of quick and easy recipes, right?

So I'm just going to sort of, I'm going to pivot to those and it'll be great.

And I quickly realized that

those recipes were neither quick or easy by the standards of a person who had, you know, a newborn and then a toddler.

Fast forward to today.

I have a 10-year-old, an eight-year-old, and a four-year-old.

And I still find the recipes that I come across profoundly not quick or easy.

There's the inaccurate cook times, the omission of prep times, all the stuff we've talked about already.

But there are other ways that recipes look easier than they are.

Some recipes have hidden recipes inside of them, meaning that one of the ingredients is a separate recipe found on a different page, like a taco recipe where one of the ingredients is pickled onions, recipe on page 60.

There is no such thing as a 15-minute recipe.

If you're really, if you are really taking into account all of the time that goes into executing a recipe, like from the moment I step into my kitchen and I read that recipe to the moment I've washed the the last pan, I'm gonna say a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is a 15-minute recipe, maybe ramen, not something that has 14 ingredients and involves getting three different pans out.

Like that is not a 15-minute recipe.

On top of all that, there's the basic reality that making meals on a regular basis is a lot of work.

You need to plan the meal, buy the ingredients, wash the veggies, and make sure your kitchen is actually clean enough to cook in before you can even get to step one of the recipe.

For For the majority of U.S.

households, that work falls on women.

A Pew study from 2019 found that 71% of mothers handle both the grocery shopping and the cooking for the family.

Liz can see all these structural problems now, but in her early years of parenting, trying to cook dinner while doing a million other things, she blamed herself.

There is nothing more discouraging that when you are ending your workday, you're at the end of a long workday, you come home, and when you

cannot execute a recipe that has been billed to you as simple or easy, because either because you don't have enough time or because it's actually more complicated than it looks, I mean, that, that really is a major downer.

That's a terrible, terrible way to end your day is to fail at this thing that you're being told is so simple.

I am a person, I should probably go to therapy about this instead of talking to you on this pork fold, but so I am a person who, because I, a lot of my identity in my teens and 20s was wrapped up in being like the food friend, you know, the one who

had every cookbook, was a really competent cook, would invite people over for dinner.

That was a, that was really a big part of my identity in my friend group and in my family.

And when I had

kids and not only had much less time, but also felt much more

sort of

physically overstimulated.

When you have little kids, you're touched all the time.

You're just,

it's a very sort of tactile physical experience, as is cooking.

Cooking is all about, you know, a physicality and it's about the smells and it's about the, you know, using your hands and all of that.

And that's something that I loved when I was working and, you know, when I was writing during the day.

But when I had these little kids, it was just something I didn't need anymore.

And so I became really sort of resentful of

needing to cook, but really conflicted because I felt like being a mother who didn't cook from scratch for her kids was like a really jarring idea.

I'd always assumed I'd be that mother who was making all the baby food from scratch and like just doing, feeding my kids 100 foods before they were one.

And I just couldn't pull it off.

And that

was really difficult for me.

Over the years, Liz has gotten better at balancing cooking with the rest of her life.

She says one breakthrough has been to see past another lie, one that's taken hold with the the rise of foodie culture, that to be a great home cook, you have to always be trying something new.

You have to be able to cook a hundred dishes from a dozen different cuisines.

Instead, Liz has done what her parents and grandparents did, cook a handful of recipes over and over again so they become fast and easy for her.

It's actually an incredibly pleasing and gratifying feeling cooking things repeatedly and honing them.

I don't know,

there's something very comforting to me about cooking and recooking a dish over and over again and having it be part of my repertoire.

And I think that we're sort of actively discouraged from cooking that way now because of the focus on novelty.

Again, I think very much driven by the, I've called it the recipe industrial complex, which is very dramatic,

that's trying to, you know, encourage us to get interested in new recipes, which have their time and place.

I just don't think their time and place is 5.30 on a Tuesday night when, in my case, you've got like three kids who just ran through the door and they're hungry and you realize that, you know, you should have actually started this project at four o'clock.

And occasionally on a weekend, I will do something that's a little bit more complicated, but I really have given that up for weeknights.

I've just decided it's like, you know, not today, Satan.

That's Liz Dunn.

You can check out the newsletter she writes with Jane Black.

It's called Consumed.

Find it at consumed.substack.com.

You can also find all of my friend Chris Kimball's work at 177milkstreet.com and check out his podcast, Milk Street Radio.

And if you want to read more of Tom Skoka's work, he runs the publication Indignity, find it at indignity.net.

Finally, we want to hear from you.

Have you ever felt deceived by a recipe?

Or are you a beginner home cook who just feels like recipes don't work for you?

I want to hear about it.

Send me an email or voice memo to hello at sporkful.com.

Be sure to include your first name and location.

This episode was produced by me along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O'Hara.

It was edited by Nora Ritchie.

Our engineer is Jared O'Connell.

Music helped from Black Label Music.

The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios.

Our executive producers are Nora Ritchie and Colin Anderson.

Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

That was Dan Pashman, host of The Sporkful.

If you're looking for more Sporkful episodes to listen to, there are so many that I think you'll dig, listen, and follow The Sporkful wherever you get your podcasts.