How recipes are scored

One question: will a cook who follows this recipe faithfully get the dish it promises? Every recipe is read the same way, against the same written rules, and gets scores from 0 to 10, shown to one decimal; a tenth of a point is about the noise between two readings of the same recipe, so differences smaller than that mean nothing.

Four scores, each a way a recipe can leave something to you. Completeness. Is it written down at all? Precision. Is it a number, a kind, a size? Clarity. Does it have one reading, where you need it? Guidance. Can you tell it worked, and recover if it did not? These four make the overall. Effort is shown beside it as a level, light to heavy, with the facts behind it (time, total minutes, check-ins) counted from the text: a hard dish is not a worse recipe. Promise is how clearly the author says what the dish should be and how to check it. Safety is not a score; anything that can hurt the cook or the eater is reported at the top, always.

Each thing we find is a chance of costing the cook the outcome, weighed by how many faithful cooks it bites, how much it hurts the dish, and whether it can be noticed and fixed in time. The score is the chance that no finding costs you the dish. Every finding cites the exact line it comes from; we never report a problem we cannot point to. Authenticity is not judged: departures from a classic are noted as information, and the author's stated targets always win.

The kinds of problems

Unclear instructions. The recipe doesn't tell you enough, or tells you something two ways, so you have to guess.

Hidden work. Things you'll need to do, have, or wait for that the recipe never put where you'd see them in time.

Juggling. How many things you're doing at once, how long you're pinned to the stove, and how tight the timing is.

Fragile steps. Steps where a few seconds or a little inexperience separates right from ruined.

Your kitchen vs. theirs. Ways your oven, your altitude, your ingredients or your batch size can make the recipe behave differently than it did for the author.

Safety. Where following the recipe as written could hurt you or make someone ill.

Every scorecard records the version of the rules that produced it. When the rules change, scorecards are re-scored visibly, never silently.