Editorial standards
How I Develop & Test Recipes
Anyone can publish a recipe. Here’s what happens before one goes live on The Meal Medley — including what happens when it doesn’t work.
This page exists because you deserve to know whether the recipe you’re about to spend your evening and grocery budget on has actually been cooked by a real person. Every recipe here has — usually more than once.
The process
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It starts with a real question
Most recipes come from something specific: a dish I grew up eating, a reader asking how to make something they had on a trip, or noticing there isn’t a decent version of something online. I don’t publish a recipe just to fill a category.
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Research the tradition first
Before I adapt anything, I look at how it’s actually made — regional variations, what a dish is called in different households, what the non-negotiable parts of a recipe are versus what’s flexible. I’d rather adapt a dish honestly than call something “Mediterranean” that isn’t.
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First test: cook it as planned
A baseline cook with exact measurements recorded, timings logged, and photos taken at each stage — so I have something real to compare later tests against, not just a memory of how it went.
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Second test: change one variable
If something needs adjusting — a ratio, a cooking temperature, the order ingredients go in — I change one thing at a time. Changing two things at once means you don’t actually know which one fixed the problem.
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Third test: cook it the way you actually would
Ordinary pans, ordinary supermarket ingredients, on a normal weeknight rather than a dedicated test day. If a recipe only works with specialty equipment or ingredients most people can’t find, it either gets rewritten or it doesn’t go up.
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Someone else cooks it
I have someone who wasn’t involved in developing the recipe cook it independently from the written instructions alone. This catches the steps that make sense in my head but aren’t actually on the page.
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Nutrition information is calculated
I run the final, tested recipe through a standard nutrition database on a per-serving basis. These numbers are estimates, not lab-tested values — see the note below on what that means.
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Written, photographed, published
Shot in natural light, without styling that misrepresents what actually comes out of the pan. The photo is the dish you’ll get if you follow the recipe as written.
When a recipe fails
It doesn’t get published. If a recipe already live turns out to have a real problem — not just a matter of taste, but something that doesn’t work — I retest it, fix it, and note the update at the top of the post rather than quietly editing it and hoping no one notices.
What I won’t do
- Publish a recipe I haven’t cooked myself. That includes anything sponsored.
- Use AI to write a recipe. A recipe is a set of instructions someone else is going to trust with their time and ingredients — every one on this site has actually been cooked by a person, not generated.
- Inflate a health claim to get a click. I’m careful about how I talk about nutrition and diet research precisely because I take it seriously — see the Disclaimer for how that plays out on this site.
- Quietly change a recipe after a complaint. If something’s genuinely wrong, it gets retested and the correction is dated, not buried.
Corrections
If a recipe on this site is wrong, tell me. I’ll test it again, fix what needs fixing, and note the update date at the top of the post. Email [email protected] or leave a comment on the recipe itself.
How nutrition information is produced
Nutrition figures are calculated per serving using standard nutrition database software, based on the exact ingredients and quantities in the tested recipe. They’re a reasonable estimate, not a lab analysis — actual values can shift depending on specific brands, substitutions, and exact portion sizes.
These figures are for general education only and aren’t personalized nutrition advice. See our Disclaimer.
Who writes here
Everything on The Meal Medley is written by Sofia Meraki, home cook and nutrition graduate.