Kitchen Geekery: The Food Blogger’s Notebook

When you're a food blogger who publishes recipe, recipe development is important.  This month on Kitchen Geekery, Dr. J. guides you through keeping a recipe development notebook - a must for recipe testing and quick reference and for one day creating a cookbook!

Last month, I discussed with you what I think are essential tools for food bloggers that also work as recipe developers. The items I listed in that post are tools I use almost every day so I can give my readers as much information as I can when I give them a recipe.

But before you jump into the kitchen, you absolutely MUST (and I do mean MUST in ALL CAPS, bold, underlined font!) have a kitchen notebook because whether you're working full-time on your blog or part-time, you must record the following:

• ingredients used
• the amounts of each ingredient
• what you're making
• when you're making it
• the steps you're following
• the little things you notice along the way…

I think a kitchen notebook is essential to your success as a blogger and the reliability of the recipes you publish. Your kitchen notebook will help you become more professional and reduce your stress level.

Here are some things to consider:

Get a Dedicated Kitchen Notebook

First of all, I know many of you use scrap paper, post-its, or random notebooks (that also contain other notes and work) to write down your recipes and bring them to the kitchen with you. I guarantee those notes will get lost in the day-to-day shuffle. You will lose track of them! They won’t contain all the information you need when it comes time to write up the recipe and publish it on your blog.

Trust me when I say I’ve gone down that road and it leads to disaster. You need to walk away from the post-it/scrap paper system right now and get yourself a notebook dedicated to your recipes, to record and keep track of everything.

Opt For a Top-Quality, Hard-Cover Notebook

My current notebook is a McGill lab notebook (size: 8.5” x 11.5”), hard cover with lined paper inside. The paper is high quality that won’t break down the minute it gets wet or dirty. The notebooks I use are the same kind I used in grad school to write down every single chemistry reaction I performed in the lab over the course of six years. In fact, my kitchen notebook strategy is modelled after my chemistry lab books. By the end of my PhD, I had almost 10 of them so they had to be properly filled out and organized from the beginning because there was no way that I could write a thesis with data recorded on scraps of paper. The same goes for us as food bloggers: we could be publishing recipes on our blog from six months ago, or we could be writing cookbooks one day, so those recipes need to be easily accessed, organized, and all together in a series of dedicated notebooks.

Use Indelible Ink!

By the way, you should write in pen with indelible ink (the kind that won’t run/bleed if the page gets wet or dirty) because your notebook will be by your side at all times, including when your sink overflows or you drop an egg. There will be splashes and mishaps in the kitchen: you don’t want your ink to run.

Organize Your Kitchen Notebook Before You Begin

Obviously, fill in your contact info on the first page in case you happen to lose your notebook, just like you did in elementary school.

Then the next few pages are left blank and will be dedicated to a table of contents. You can fill in the table of contents as you go, or I like to go back when my notebook is complete and write it in when I’m about to set the book on my bookshelf for safe-keeping.

Page Numbering Systems For Your Kitchen Notebook

After the table of contents comes the content section. I number every page. Page numbers are written at the bottom of the page and I continue the page numbering system from one book to another, so if your first kitchen notebook has 100 pages that you’ve numbered 1 to 100, then your second kitchen notebook would have pages 101 to 200. Every page is a single new recipe. Don’t combine three or four recipes on a page; there’s not enough room and it will end in confusion.

You can take this system one step further and give each recipe a number. If you're wondering how to build your numbering system, I suggest that the recipe number should be {your initials or your blog initials – page number}. So, for example, the chocolate chip cookie recipe on page 32 of my notebook would be JL-32 or FBC-32. With the continuous page numbering system that carries over from one notebook to another, all my recipes have unique numbers. There is only one JL-32, thus minimizing confusion. This way, on my computer, I can save all the photos and data associated with that recipe in the folder JL-32.

Why bother? Because you might have five different chocolate chip cookie recipes on your blog, and so you can’t name all those folders/files “chocolate chip cookies.”

You see, my goal is to minimize confusion. Using initials before the recipe number isn’t obligatory, but it can be especially handy if you're part of a team working on a blog because in that case you both will inevitably have overlaps in your numbering systems. Using a numbering system with initials will avoid all confusion. My initials are JL so my chocolate chip recipe would be numbered as JL-32. If my cat were contributing to my blog one day, his initials are ZS so on page 32, his recipe would be ZS-32. Our recipe numbers will never overlap and are easily distinguished.

How Each Page of Your Kitchen Notebook Is Organized

At the top of every page, write the date and give your recipe a title and a number (if you're numbering your recipes). Then organize the page as follows:

Table Of Ingredients

Make a table of ingredients: list every ingredient in the first column, preferably following the order they will be used in the recipe. Then, in the next column, fill in the quantities of each in grams/millilitres and then use another column for cups. I like to do my conversions of grams to cups beforehand, which I can verify once I’m in the kitchen and make adjustments as I go.

In the early days of my blog, I took the time to weigh out cup-sized volumes of my commonly used ingredients, so I know one cup of flour is 125 grams in my kitchen and one cup of granulated sugar is 200 grams.

Leave some space at the bottom of the table for last-minute ingredient additions, et cetera. If you're cooking and plan on adjusting the seasoning as you cook, leave room to make changes and add in those ingredients.

Method/Directions

Write out your method/directions: if you're a baker, you know in advance if you're using the creaming method for cakes or the sanding method for pie crusts, so you can write up a procedure before you head to the kitchen. Then you follow that procedure.

If you're cooking you might work differently, in which case you must keep your notebook by your side and jot down each step as you do it or as soon as possible after.

Finishing Up The Recipe

Finish the page with a yield: how many cookies did your recipe make? what size were they? was your recipe a flop? If so, write down why. Even a failed kitchen experiment is useful and there’s always something to learn. Write it down so you don’t forget!

At the bottom of the page, make sure there’s a page number that matches your recipe number at the top.

Your Kitchen Notebook Should NEVER Leave Your House

Again, this is another lab rule, but it’s also completely justified here: your kitchen notebook should never, ever leave your house. Say you work part-time as a recipe developer and part-time interviewing restaurant chefs for a newspaper. I'm suggesting you have two separate notebooks for these tasks and that your kitchen “lab” notebook should reside exclusively in your house or wherever you work on your recipes because if you lost it, you potentially could lose a year’s worth of recipes and tests. That scenario is completely unacceptable to me.

Again, the notebook with your recipes should never leave your house. If you want to take a backup of it with you, scan it or take pictures of what you need rather than taking the notebook with you.

What Now?

• Go out and buy a new, clean notebook with high quality paper.
• Set up a system now so you can organize and record as much information as possible every time you make something in the kitchen.
• Maintain the notebook as you go. There will be days where you break all the rules, and that’s okay, but you must get all the information you need in your notebook soon because working from memory is asking for angry readers.
• Back it up by taking pictures or scanning the pages of your notebook.
• When you finish your notebook, fill in the table of contents in the first pages you saved.

If you develop your recipes in a professional way, using all the right tools and delivering as much of the key information as you can to your readers, your recipes will be more reliable and useful for everybody, including you.

Do you have a system to keep track of all your recipe testing and kitchen experiments? Do you have something to add to my suggestions? Let me know in the comment section below.

More Recipe Development Reading

• Kitchen Geekery: The Food Blogger's Toolkit
• The Importance of Weights and Measures
• Recipe Development as a Profession
• Using a Simple Innovation Process in Recipe Development
• And there's even more here!

Kitchen Geekery is written by Janice Lawandi. Janice is a PhD-chemist-turned-baker, which is why she loves to use science to understand and solve problems in the kitchen. She is currently working as a recipe tester and writer in Montreal, QC. Visit Janice’s blog, The Bake School, for more baking science and inspiration. You can also follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

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