On how I keep on coming up with new recipes.
Because no one can quite believe how I keep on publishing new ideas every week!
A much requested essay-meets-explanation for you all today, answering one of the questions I get asked about my food job the most: explaining my process for coming up with new recipes both for my clients and to share with you all! I hope you find it an illuminating insight into my favourite part of my job as a food creator.
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Whilst I wear a lot of different hats (writer, author, editor, social media wizard, search engine optimisation expert, and food photographer, among others) my actual job, the what I tell people when they ask what I do is that I’m a professional recipe developer. I make up new recipes for a living.
Inevitably the follow up question I get asked most often is how on earth I keep on coming up with new recipes?
I have written on this topic before, but not in the last couple of years or so, so I figured now might be a good time to put together a more up to date response.
A good place to start I think is to talk a little more about what my job actually entails. Yes I write new recipes, but for whom, and why?
Food Blogging
I still write a food blog every week, which really is how I started. On my blog you’ll find almost a full spectrum of the types of recipes I create. Lots of my ideas on my website come from ‘The List’, which is also where I get a lot of ideas for ingredient recipes.
On my iPad, divided into seasons and types of cookery is every idea I’ve ever had for a recipe that I’ve not cooked yet, gradually added in either when I think of them in the kitchen, at my desk, when I’m asked to pitch several ideas and they were not the ones chosen, and collected from the phone notes I leave for myself when I’m out and about. Ideas can come from anywhere: I might eat something at a restaurant and think an ingredient combination is clever, or I might see something pre-made in a supermarket and think ‘I could do better homemade’ (this is where the Thai Green Pea Soup in One Pan Pescatarian (affiliate) started life, as a pre-made soup in the Sainsbury’s chiller section one day when I was looking for salmon fillets.) Or I might see a picture of something without a recipe on Instagram or Pinterest I want to make so I plan to make it up as I go along, or I can’t find a good recipe for something I really want to make at home like our favourite Garlic Chilli Chicken Curry: a curry that only seems to exist in British Indian takeaways, and is one of the most popular recipes I’ve ever written.
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Really, I’m good at making sure I write ideas down when they strike, so I’m never stuck for inspiration later.
Cookbooks
How I came up with all the recipes in both my cookbooks started with seeing which of the recipes on the list fit the theme (Student Eats and One Pan Pescatarian are both very telling titles!), going back through recipes I’d already written that I wanted to update for the project, and then filling in any gaps I thought people would expect to be addressed with both of these titles.
You’ll also find recipes on my blog that are not mine, but to which I’ve given my own touch or spin: these will either be recipes from cookbooks I’ve loved but had to change to suit different tastes and portion sizes (for example this recipe for Roast Chicken with Honey, Peaches and Thyme which now forms the template for how I cook most one pan chicken thigh dishes started life in Diana Henry’s brilliant book A Bird In The Hand: Chicken recipes for every day and every mood (affiliate), which I adapted to serve just two, and to utilise fresh thyme instead of lavender, which is a flavour profile I’d never have got past J!
I also cook from a lot of American food blogs (as I give credit to the original cookbooks, linking back to the original sources of course) where I have the duel challenges of adapting for ingredients we don’t either get here or buy in the same sizes, and then again of scaling down, as ‘serves’ sizes tend to be a lot larger on American recipes.
The latter of these two recipe inspiration sources are very telling of another way I get new recipe inspiration: what I choose to cook. When I’m not working on something I love to try new recipes, and usually the recipes I bookmark to make from cookbooks, food blogs, newsletters and magazines are either because I don’t know how to make something, or the recipe contains either a technique, pairing or ingredient I find interesting, and therefore I want to explore more.
Freelancing and Ghost Writing
As a freelancer, I’m either asked to come up with general ideas to fit a specific theme “can you pitch us 5 student-friendly recipe ideas” (BBC Food) or “we want to focus on something cheap and affordable from our butchery counter this month” (my residency at local food hall chain Macknade), or to make something specific.
If it is the former, I usually turn to the list, or else search social media (Pinterest is great for this), or the titles of recipes I’ve bookmarked to cook for inspiration, but if it is the former, I either get the typical ingredients and just cook it from my head writing down everything as I go along to use as a starting point, or adapt my own recipe for something similar I’ve already written. For example, when BBC Food asked me to create these Vegan Biscuits I started by subbing in vegan butter for regular in my usual recipe, then began tweaking from there until I was happy with the taste and the texture.
But what if someone asks me to make something I don’t already know how to cook, or have my own recipe to use as a template for?
Well, I ring my mother.
Sometimes yes, I call to ask my mother how she makes something (I did learn how to cook from her, after all), but my parents house is where the bulk of our collective cookbook collection resides. At home I have the books I cook from most often, books on different cuisines and styles of cooking, but with the exception of Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (affiliate) and The Noma Guide To Fermentation (affiliate) because I’m still reading them, that is where all the ‘textbooks’ live, the Larousse (affiliate) and the Leith’s Baking Bible (affiliate) type volumes that usually serve to fill in the gaps left in my lack of formal training.
Additionally, she’s got all the classic cookbooks, the basic cookbooks, the Woman’s Institute baking pamphlets from the eighties which tell you the basic formulas for things, that reassure me that yes, a classic Victoria Sponge before I’m let loose on it altering and adjusting to fit my vision or brief consists of equal parts butter (well, margarine is what I prefer to use for said cake), sugar and flour to the weight of eggs used in the batter.
If I’m still at a loss, I just turn to recipes from people I trust and see what I can learn along the way cooking them to the letter: my first Instant Pot has just arrived (I was never really interested in owning one but I need to use one for an upcoming ghost writing assignment) so the plan is just to cook, cook, and cook a bit more with it until I feel ready to strike out on my own, as I did years ago with the slow cooker.
Once I’ve got a basic, standard, ‘this is how you do something’ template to work from, I build up from there, testing and re-making, taking notes in my kitchen notebook (a different colour ink for each test so I can see where I’ve been) until I’ve nailed a recipe.
And of course, because I’ve not mentioned it, there is also often a lot of Googling involved! One of my ghost writing clients pride themselves on authentic recipes but made with ingredients you should be able to get your hands on in any English speaking country from a culture that is not my own. They usually send lots of similar recipes and photos through, so for that job I spend a lot of time reading other peoples recipes and stories around the dish, ringing the similarities and noting down the reasons for their differences before I write up a ‘base recipe’, usually drawing inspiration from everything I’ve read to cook, and then to tweak based on the results and any specifications the client has given me. Memorably once as the main example of what they wanted they sent me a Youtube video not in English (or French, how I wish it had been in French! Or German so J could have translated it for me…), and only a few days to turn it around!
So I hope this answers the question of how on earth I keep on coming up with new recipes to publish every week. Every recipe developer will have different methods, some similar to mine, and some totally different. If you write and publish recipes, I’d love to hear from you how you keep on coming up with new ideas in the comments!
This is so interesting, Rachel! I loved reading more about your process. Out of the three facets of your job (blogging, writing cookbooks, and freelancing/ghost writing), is there one that you like to do the most?
This is fascinating, Rachel! Thank you for sharing all of this. :)