Recipe for Disaster is Slate’s column about the things recipes get wrong—and how to fix them. If you’ve noticed a recipe annoyance, absurdity, or outright lie, file your complaint here and we will investigate!

Have you ever made a recipe and thought, Why the hell does this taste so bland? You might be tempted to victim-blame and assume it’s your fault. But hold up—maybe the person responsible for that dull, lifeless, weak-in-flavor “one pot” dish is actually … the recipe developer . After all, aren’t most recipes written for the masses? Aren’t they, at their core, a sort of one-size-fits-all culinary script that can’t conceivably account for all the wild variations in human taste? This time, we examine another jaded reader’s gripe: that many recipes, as written and followed,

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