The Boston Phoenix this week explains the phenomenon of "America's Test Kitchen" (I should add, haughtily, that if you're not reading Cook's Illustrated, then you don't really care about cooking).

But what strikes me from this article is the description of method. If you want to know what I really do, you could do worse than the below:

Take, for instance, the question of properly dressing a cobb salad, a subject ... [taken] up in a recent issue of Cook’s: "Cobb salad’s classic vinaigrette dressing is both the tie that binds the dish together and its biggest problem. Unifying the disparate elements of this salad is a lot to ask of any dressing," which "more often than not" ends up overpowering some ingredients while leaving others "high and unhappily dry." To solve the problem, the cooks experiment with one variable at a time, engaging in repeated processes of elimination — in this case, rethinking the dressing ingredient by ingredient, then choosing the best method for applying the new and improved dressing to the salad itself (simply add and toss? coat each ingredient separately?) — until the final step is reached with no stone unturned.

But Cook’s cooks don’t stop there. "Once you’ve written the recipe, you’ve ironed out the problems — decided on the best equipment for the job, the correct temperature of the oven, and so on — then you farm it out to a freelance tester, or to people in the office who aren’t cooks," Collins says. "They’ll come back and tell you what worked or didn’t work for them — things that might never have occurred to you — saying, ‘Well, I don’t have this pan,’ which you thought was a totally obvious piece of equipment." So much, then, for too many cooks spoiling the broth; rather, for Kimball, Collin, and colleagues, a good recipe is a joint effort, democracy at work.

... "What we’re presenting is the best recipe [for any given dish] we’ve ever tasted, and we’ve tasted a lot. But the idea is that we try to make it so that anyone can make it. We try to show the bad food with the good — to make the same mistakes we all make and then show how to fix them. No one’s exempt from cooking failures, but we can explain them, at least [...] " Such a thoroughgoing, deliberate approach is the only escape route from what Kimball regards as the Scylla and Charybdis of America’s cooking trends, not to mention values: convenience at quality’s expense on the one hand, and conspicuous consumption on the other. The former, Kimball says, has dulled our collective taste buds: "As Julia Child has said, people don’t know how things are supposed to taste anymore. They’ve never tasted what real maple syrup’s like, so they keep going back to Mrs. Butterworth." The latter, meanwhile, encourages a cavalier stove-side exhibitionism that’s likely to backfire: "There is a right way and a wrong way to cook. There are things to know. So get rid of all the nonsense and figure out what’s really going on, because your natural tendencies in the kitchen to improvise are usually wrong — a lot of things that are right are counterintuitive." [Emphasis mine.]