25 August 2026

Why I cost every recipe to the gram

People assume this series came out of an interest in nutrition. It did not. It came out of a decade of work where getting the number wrong was somebody else's problem before it was mine.

I cooked for about 20 years first. Ships out of Southampton and Miami, then hotel kitchens in half a dozen countries. Front line the whole time. What nobody tells you about a ship's galley is the arithmetic: 2,000 people, three times a day, for 11 days, and then the same again with a new 2,000 next Tuesday. You do not cook a dish on a ship. You cook it 400 times, and then you cook it 400 times again.

That is where I learned the thing these books are about, and I learned it by accident. Cook a carbonara 400 times and you stop seeing a recipe. You start seeing which parts are load-bearing and which parts are there because the last person did it that way.

The second career is the one that matters

The hours ended the cooking, eventually, the way they end it for most people. But I did not go back to a restaurant afterwards, and the reason is worth being straight about: I had got more interested in the constraint than the cooking.

So I spent roughly 10 years developing recipes to a specification rather than to a menu. Four kinds of work, and they are all the same job.

**Menu engineering for restaurant groups.** Taking a dish that works when one chef cooks it and making it work when 200 cooks in 40 kitchens cook it, at a fixed cost per plate, to the same weight every time.

**Food for ships and aircraft.** Built around constraints that have nothing to do with taste and cannot be argued with. Cook-chill, hold times, altitude, allergens declared at scale, and no second chance because there is no second kitchen.

**The health food trade and the meal-kit companies.** Recipes that had to hit a calorie figure and a protein, carbohydrate and fat breakdown printed on the side of a box, and still be something somebody would order twice.

**Sports catering.** Cooking to a dietitian's brief for athletes. Somebody qualified set the numbers. I made the food. I am going to keep saying that, because it is the distinction the whole thing rests on and it is the one people get wrong.

Why it matters for a cookbook

Here is the difference between those rooms and a cookbook, and it is the whole argument.

If you take 15g of oil out of a recipe that ships in a box with a printed figure on the side, somebody notices immediately, because the figure moves and a person whose job it is checks it.

If you take 15g of oil out of a dish in a cookbook, nobody notices anything. There is no printed figure to move. There is no person whose job it is. Which is exactly why cookbooks do it constantly and say nothing at all about what it did to the dish.

So this series applies a factory discipline to a domestic book. Every figure is computed from the recipe's own weighed ingredient list against public food-composition databases, and the appendix in every book prints the exact database row used for each ingredient. Not because it is difficult. Because once you have spent 10 years in rooms where you could not get away with skipping it, it stops feeling optional.

What I am not

I am not a nutritionist. I am not a dietitian. I have no qualification in either and nothing in these books is dietary advice. I never had a Michelin star and never wanted one. And I am not Italian, or Japanese, or Polish, or anybody's grandmother, which is exactly why the series is called Authentic-ish rather than something with the word traditional in it.

What I am claiming is kitchen authority, and it is volume and repetition rather than fame. I cooked this food several hundred times for people who had paid for it, then spent a decade costing recipes to the gram for people who checked. That is the entire qualification and it is the only one on offer.

The full method, with the 15 swaps for each cuisine and what every one of them costs you, is free at /swaps.

The swap kit is free, and it is the part of the book you would use most.