What should I check before starting a recipe?

Recipes hide their requirements. Chilling time, softened butter, a specific tin, an ingredient at room temperature — all of these appear mid-method and are impossible to fix once you have started.

What you'll need

• The recipe (optional)

Step by step

1. Read the whole method before touching anything.Two minutes. It is the single highest-value thing you can do and it catches almost every problem before it becomes one.
2. Check every ingredient against what you actually have.Including quantities. Discovering you have half the flour at the creaming stage is the classic failure.
3. Look for hidden waiting time.Chilling, resting, proving, marinating, soaking. A recipe that says thirty minutes may contain two hours of waiting buried in step four.
4. Check for ingredients needed at a particular temperature.Softened butter, room-temperature eggs, cold water. These take time to prepare and are usually mentioned as an aside.
5. Check the equipment, especially tin sizes.Tin dimensions change baking times substantially. A recipe for a 20cm tin baked in a 23cm one is thin and overcooked.
6. Check the oven temperature and whether it is fan or conventional.The difference is about 20°C. Getting it wrong affects every bake, and many recipes do not state which they mean.
7. Get everything out and measured before you start cooking.Especially for anything fast. Once a pan is hot there is no time to weigh flour or find the paprika.
8. Note the yield and adjust if needed.Check whether it serves the number you need before you start, not while the pan is on.

Tips

• Write your own notes on recipes you repeat — actual oven times, adjustments, what you would change. Second attempts become far more reliable.
• If a recipe seems to be missing information, look for a different one. Well-written recipes state tin size, temperature type and total time honestly.
• For anything with several components, work out the order and rough timings before starting. It is what professional kitchens do and it is why they are calm.

Common mistakes

• Starting before reading the whole method — Hidden chilling time, softened butter and specific equipment all appear mid-method and cannot be fixed once you have begun.
• Not checking tin or pan size — It changes cooking time and depth substantially, and it is one of the most common reasons a bake does not work.
• Assuming you have enough of an ingredient — Discovering you have half the required flour at the creaming stage means the dish is already lost.

Questions people ask