20 Five Secret Signs a Recipe Won't Work

Let's face it—not every recipe is as slam-dunk as Thomas Keller's My Favorite Simple Roast Chicken (it's been saved to over 20,000 Epicurious recipe boxes).But even before you can judge how delicious a recipe is, you need to make sure that recipe won't be your worst enemy.

At Epicurious, we've literally edited thousands of recipes, and along the way, we've discovered a few key warning signs that indicate that a recipe will mess you up in the kitchen.And when a recipe is flawed, most cooks don't stand a chance: Without clear instructions, you're probably doomed to overbake the cake, undersalt the steak, and leave out the buttermilk in your pancakes.

So stop messing with bad recipes.In our continuing quest to put the best recipes on Epicurious, we've discovered five key signs that a recipe will leave you miserable and hungry.Keep this pre-flight checklist in mind every time you're deciding whether to cook a recipe.

1.There are ingredients missing.Basic but so true: If the ingredient list includes items that aren't mentioned in the instructions (and vice versa), it's a carelessly written recipe.

2.No clear starting points (or end points).Time estimates for simmering, whisking, and roasting are useful, sure, but nothing beats a helpful detail alongside about how you should know when to stop or start doing something.Everyone's kitchen is different, and these extra reference points are a basic insurance policy, helping to ensure that you'll nail every step of the recipe.

3.Rambling, confusing paragraphs.Some recipes are short and sweet in paragraph form.But if the recipe you're looking at doesn't make sense on the first (or even the second) read, it's a good sign that it's probably missing other essential information for success.Skip.

4.Ingredients/steps in the wrong order.In recipes, good copyediting and a functional recipe go hand in hand.One of the basic rules of recipe writing is that ingredients should be listed in the order that they're used in the steps.If the recipe you're looking at doesn't do that, you may want to move on to another one.

5.Necessary special equipment isn't listed.No one wants to shop for ingredients, fire up the stove, and then discover halfway through cooking that you need a kitchen scale or a Japanese mandolin.Special equipment should be listed after the ingredients or in the headnote.If it's not, there's a good chance the recipe is missing other bits of essential info, too.