Comment by devchix

I'm not disagreeing with you, but there's substance to what the sister-in-law is claiming. I've had a few (not many, but frequent enough) mistakes from very highly produced books, from high-profile celebrity chefs - case in point Thomas Keller. As I was measuring out the ingredients I thought no way this could be right, I'm an experienced home cook and baker. Went with the recipe against my instincts anyway and it turned out quite bad. Especially when the recipe is adapted from a pro kitchen, they make gargantuan portions of stuff, and when reduced for the home cook, the portion and ratio don't necessarily get tested. There are also egregious substitution advice blithely thrown in, for example the Bouchon Bakery cookbook tells you to heat river rocks (but not sedimentary rocks! lol wut?) in your oven and throw water on them to create steam. If you follow this advice you're likely to ruin your oven when one of these rocks explodes. The pros use steam-injected ovens, the test kitchen uses steel chains, but this "use river rock" thing was probably thrown in there by a non-baking intern and I can promise you they never tested this.

Except for rare pockets, the state of Internet recipes is utter garbage. Get a good foundational cookbook, cook and learn from your experience, which no shortcut can substitute. The people who do test their recipes as far as I know, are Cooks' Illustrated and America's Test Kitchens (they're the same company I think).