recipe development for dummies

it's me, I'm the dummy.

Helllloooo!

Welcome back to recipe development for dummies. I’m your host, Kassie.

Recently so many of you have reached out wondering how to break into recipe development. From how to develop a recipe from scratch to best ways to save andmake$ when doing this line of work. While, I can’t speak for every recipe developer out there, this is just how I do it. Everyone is going to have a different approach to how they develop recipes, how they find work in this field.

A brief background into me and my recipe development journey- I got my first *official* title of recipe developer back in 2019 while working at Mr.Holmes Bakehouse and for just shy of a year I was developing donut and cruffin flavors and fillings as well as working on new and seasonal menu items. That job is what rally got my foot in the door and expanded my knowledge on how to *actually* develop a recipe. Because I also did a brief stint in culinary school, which instructors never really went over how to develop your own recipes or menu items. My learning process has for the most part been on the job and supplemented with tons of reading and hundreds of Google searches.

Back when I started out there wasn’t much out there on how to develop a recipe, and still to this day there really isn’t a ton of information on how to break into the space. I think thats due in part to the fact that every single persons journey is so different. There isn’t really a set road map like there is for becoming say a doctor or a lawyer. I do have a few posts i’ve previously written, to help you start dipping your toes. I’ll be answering other questions that have been popping up in my DMs recently as well. Which once again, this is how I went about it and not exactly a comprehensive guide on how its done.

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How did you get started creating recipes?

I got started out the way a lot of your favorite developers did, by adapting pre-existing recipes and noting what happened with each change that I made (See: the first article on “Customizing your favorite recipes”) I’ve been baking from a young age and very early on I found it very hard to follow a recipe as written. Oh I’m trying to make cinnamon rolls? Okay well what if I added some orange zest to compliment the cinnamon and what if I add more butter to the dough. I always wanted to change recipes to be a little better suited to my *personal* tastes.

Did you really test the Olympic muffin 12 times?

Oh I most definitely did, and I KNOW that sounds crazy. Like how obsessive, does this girl not have a life? I don’t actually, thanks for asking. But, that’s what it takes sometimes to create a recipe. This one was out of the norm for me because I was working to recreate something that already exists. Because the second version of the muffin I had tested was perfect to my standards but some of the markers of what made the olympic muffin the olympic muffin weren’t there. So I had to keep trucking on until I had an actual dupe to what I *gathered* the olympic muffin to be.

But, in general that’s usually what the process looks like, MULTIPLE rounds of testing. Then a few rounds of retesting to make sure the recipe works as written. This step of the process may vary for you depending on whether you’re just developing for fun/personal use or if you’re developing for shared/professional use like to a blog or newsletter or for branded work etc. For me, I share my recipes on the internet in the *hopes* that someone finds the recipe interesting enough to bake. I think it is my duty to provide a recipe that works the way I lay it out. Whether or not you like the final product is a different story lol because that boils down to personal taste and preference. I think that if i’m gonna urge people to use only the best ingredients for a recipe, the recipe better WORK.