This isn't a request or suggestion, just general ruminating...
So the other night I tried to make the carotene butter recipe for the first time. What a disaster. I certainly don't blame ChefSteps for the fairly unsuccessful attempt - I haven't been cooking for long, so there's a lot of basic experience I'm missing. For example, this was my first time attempting to clarify butter, and it didn't go at all like the video. In the video, the whey seems to all float and sort of glom together in a raft. Mine didn't float, even after I gently raked the bottom, and it did clump into lots of tiny pieces. I think I ended up with half clarified butter and my yield was pretty poor.
I'm not sure what went wrong - maybe I should have tried to clarify more than a pound at once, maybe I needed to heat the butter more or less gently, use a steel rather than nonstick pot, ... I think recipes are fragile. This doesn't just apply to ChefSteps; in fact maybe it applies less because of the videos, but even ChefSteps recipes are a bit fragile. By fragile I mean they only tell you what to do when everything is going right. Rarely do recipes tell you how to recognize and recover from mistakes. Rarely do recipes tell you which ingredient and equipment substitutions will work, and which will not. Or, as another forum member mentioned recently, very few recipes give you tolerances/"error bars" on times and quantities.
Actually, I think ChefSteps is one of the best resources for this sort of thing because of the occasional "tip" or "home cook hack" in the sidebar. But it's impossible to anticipate and answer every question, every mistake. For every tip that says "Home cook hack: if you don't have a centrifuge, use duct tape, a rubber band, and an old nail," there are a dozen pieces of assumed knowledge. Again, it'd be totally unreasonable to expect a recipe to answer every question; such a recipe would be book-length.
The situation is even more confusing when your desired outcome doesn't quite match the recipe's: now the recipe is a narrow path to a place only somewhat near where you want to go.
Another comment: compared to the average ChefSteps forum participant, I am definitely a young and inexperienced cook. But compared to many people in the United States, particularly people my age (mid 20s), I have a lot of experience. Growing up, my family ate dinner together every night. I watched my parents cook and learned from them. Often we cooked together, and as a result I can pretty comfortably do the kind of cooking they do: sautes with olive oil and garlic, roasted vegetables, meats on the big green egg, variations on baked, roasted, and mashed potatoes.. But there's so much I didn't learn: I don't know that either of my parents has ever clarified butter, broken down a fish, made a traditional French sauce, cooked offal, sharpened a knife with a stone, worried about plating, etc.
I'm enjoying learning to cook, but it surely is confusing at times.
