Testing Team: Matchmaking

I’ve been working on my next cookbook—actually, there are two forthcoming cookbooks! They go together like best friends and will be published by Artisan next year. Right now, I’m in the stage of the process where the recipes I’ve developed for these books are being tested in other people’s kitchens around the world. It has always been super important to me that my recipes are delicious, easy to follow, and reliable. In order to achieve that goal, I rely on our Testing Team, a wonderful group of home cooks.

The Team carefully tests the recipes, measuring precisely and timing all the cooking down to the exact minute. They share invaluable feedback that leads to clearer, more concise, and generally improved recipes for everyone. I am so grateful for their input.

For these two books, our Testing Team is 105 members strong. I was blown away by how many people generously offered to share their time. Thank you very much to everyone who signed up!

After gathering information from the Team (such as how many recipes would you like to test? What’s your ingredient budget? Are there foods you don’t eat?), the next step is figuring out which recipes to give each tester. The first time I tried to do this by hand, I gave myself such a headache. Graham suggested that a computer might do a better job at this particular task. He wrote some code that took in all the information about the recipes plus all the information from the testers and then output a spreadsheet of recipes matched to testers. While it would have taken me many, many hours, the computer breezed through it in a cool 2 seconds.

Now all the recipes have been shared with the Team, and I’m excited to hear what they think!