The Intense Number Of Times Ina Garten Tests Recipes Before They Go Into One Of Her Cookbooks

Have you tried making celebrity chef Ina Garten's recipes from her cookbooks? If you have, you probably know that she has a secret to making great burgers and a technique for creating chocolate cakes without using the oven, among many other delicious dishes. Every meal she recommends is almost guaranteed to be mouthwatering, and that's because her cookbooks are a result of hours, sometimes weeks, of painstaking trial and error. According to Garten, she spends time testing each recipe because she leaves nothing to chance. 

"I know people don't believe this. But I'm really a nervous cook. And I'm sure every recipe's gonna turn out wrong. So I'm incredibly precise," she told CBS News. That precision is no exaggeration. Garten admitted she tests every recipe up to 25 times before it earns a place in one of her cookbooks. "I follow my own recipes exactly," she said. "Because I've spent so much time getting the balance of flavors and textures and everything right. I'm really not a confident cook."

Garten then prints her recipes and has her assistants make them to see if her instructions are clear and understandable. By watching others try her recipes, she easily catches surprising mistakes, like people confusing "cloves" for "cloves of garlic" in dishes that don't require the latter. This allows Garten to tweak her wording and instructions until they're foolproof before her books get printed. "I just want you to feel like I'm right there beside you, just kind of guiding you through the recipe," she quipped.

Ina Garten has come a long way since her first cookbook, 1999's "The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook," which solidified her enduring nickname. Having written 15 cookbooks to date — 13 of which became best-selling titles — she believes it's important to follow a recipe's instructions to a T to achieve favorable results. "I'm very scientific. I measure everything. I spent so much time perfecting the recipe," she told Parade.

While developing her recipes, Garten not only takes her time figuring everything from taste to texture, she also does research on similar dishes and tries out different techniques before testing out her own iterations of the recipe. "My goal in finding the right flavor is to make the dish taste as good as it can taste with as few ingredients as possible," she revealed in her memoir.

Garten's cookbooks are loved by many because they feature a wide range of simple yet delicious dishes for family meals and gatherings. According to home cook and super-fan Trent Pheifer, who has recreated thousands of the Food Network star's recipes, he adores Garten's creations because they taught him the importance of the basic techniques of cooking and baking."Ina Garten's recipes were always easy to follow with clear directions, plenty of helpful tips, and they [don't] skimp on the flavor — in a word, foolproof." (via Today)