Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Folks,

As mentioned on another thread, I've been trying out Asian Dumplings by Nguyen. I had a disastrously bad Saturday night with the book, and it's brought up to me the need for "failure modes" when giving recipes which are heavy on technique.

I was trying to make wheat starch dumplings, something I'd hoped to learn from the book. I had a lot of trouble with the dough recipe, which eventually led to me throwing out the dough and going out for a very late dinner. Later, I emailed the author, who promptly responded by immediately diagnosing that I'd let the water cool too much before adding it to the starch. While I'm glad that she answered my email, my question to her (unanswered) was, "why wasn't this in the book?" The recipe is over two pages, so it's not like there wasn't room.

This brings up something I've seen in some baking books I really like: a "failure modes" section for recipes. "If this happens, here's what went wrong, and here's what to do next." Bakeless Sweets, for example, has this pretty consistently.

Such a section in Asian Dumplings would have saved me most of the evening, and a lot of frustration and clean-up (and I wouldn't now be returning the book). What cookbooks do you have that have good "failure mode" instructions? Do you include such things in your own recipes when you give them out?

I agree that a "troubleshooting" section should be included. Alternatively, a section at the beginning explaining techniques in depth with possible problems. Flour does a good job on this I think. I find that is more common in baking books. RLB does that consistently as well. I think in your case a sentence in comments such as the key to this recipe is making sure the water does not cool beyond... would have saved you the headaches.

I don't always include all the possible failure options, but will include something like "it will look curdly, don't worry, keep whipping" or if it gets hard put it back on the microwave on low for....
OTOH, I try to give very specific instructions en to obvious things, e.g. peel and then slice onions, take out of wrapper, etc.