some people have a substitution problem

[honigfrosch]

I cooked something last week and, no joke, there was some nitwit in the comments talking about how she subbed beef for pork, left out the soy sauce, made any number of other changes, and then gave the recipe one star because it didn't taste good? YOU DIDN'T MAKE THE RECIPE, BRENDA. You made whatever other unholy concoction of ground beef and ditch water you described in your comment.

Context is pshaw_raven being a wiz in the kitchen.

Comments

[camwyn]

There's a book by David Joachim, The Food Substitutions Bible, which does a very good job of splitting out the reasons for various substitutions (for example, if you need to swap something for all purpose flour in a recipe that uses flour as a thickener, do this; if you are using flour in baking, do this other substitution instead; if it's a health issue, use these other substitutions). It makes a point of noting 'do not do this in X kind of recipe' or 'if you do this, you will need to remove half a cup of Y from the recipe to avoid screwing up the texture'. I got it from a bargain bin sale at a Borders that was closing down years ago. Very helpful.

But I still wouldn't complain when a heavily subbed recipe came out different from what the original made me expect, even using the book.