Why do Jamie Oliver's recipes never work for me?

[driggle]

Watching his new Christmas show. Everything looks lovely. I bought Ministry of Food on the back of the great recommendations it gets on here but I could never get anything to taste half decent or sometimes the timings would be completely wrong. Now I'm a competent cook. Give me a Mary Berry recipe or one from BBC Good Food and they always come out tasty and as I expected them to. Apart from Jamie's rogan josh curry in his 30 Minutes book, I've yet to get one of his recipes to turn out as I expected it too. What am I doing wrong? Is there a knack to adjusting his timings? Do I add less or more of what he suggests? Someone teach me his ways. I really want to like the MoF book but the 5 or so things I've made haven't been met with much enthusiasm in this house. And DP and DC will eat anything.

I love his everyday superfood books but that’s it, and I don’t really follow recipes to the line.
BBC good food are my go to recipes, simple and not loaded with 5000 ingredients you cannot find in Tesco!

I made his get ahead gravy last year. Cost a fortune, took ages and nobody would eat it!

If you like precise recipes that don't break the bank, then don't go for Jamie.

I quite like watching him on the TV and will have a go at some of his recipes, but nearly always adapt them, as I find that the measurements don't always work. He is also a big fan of hugely expensive ingredients, usually where you only need a splash or a dash and then you know you're going to be stuck with a bottle of festering lemon grass juice or whatever thing he's into for ever!

For safe and reliable recipes if I'm cooking for guests, I will always go for Delia, Mary or Darina Allen, with a bit of Nigella thrown in for a luxury pud.

@MrsJayy his TV programmes are always lovely to watch. I think a lot of that is down to the style and they sort of sell you a lifestyle as well. Which is what most cooking shows do to be fair. No-one cooks in a teeny kitchen with no room for any gadgets my kitchen (although there was that programme years ago with Rachel Koo in her tiny Paris kitchen) but his food always looks good too. I always want to cook what he's making! It just never turns out any good in reality!

I'm a good cook but just don't get on with Delia Smith recipes at all - they're always far too bland and stodgy to me! Whereas Jamie recipes usually work. I do find that different books are more or less reliable though - I think because he has such a big team now, different people work on different books and if you happen to use a recipe from a book that's had a good home economist testing them then it'll work better. I have borrowed many of his books from the library over the years and only bought the ones where multiple recipes worked. Good ones for me are Jamie's Great Britain, the early Naked Chef ones, How To Cook, Christmas, and Italy. Bad ones were Ministry of Food (cannot agree more about the extra liquid!!), the 15 and 30 mins ones. Superfood ones were hit or miss, some brilliant and some worked but just tasted weird.

Now, for rock solid reliable, you cannot beat (no joke) Annabel Karmel. Never ever had a recipe of hers that didn't work exactly right, fiddly though they are sometimes! The kids are in primary school and I still make her stuff sometimes scaled up in portion size. And the first Nigella book is reliable too.

I don't like j.o. I think he makes it up as he goes along!

I'm glad I'm not the only one. Some of the 30 min meals are great but I made the quick beef hash one recently and the whole thing was god-awful.

Plus you use every pot, pan and kitchen implement you own, plus the blender for some 'wazzy wazzy woo woo'..

I give up.

My BIL bought me Paul Hollywood's Puds and Pies book for Christmas the other year. I was a bit sceptical, but everyone in our house loves a pie so I gave it a bash.

Everything I've made from it has turned out perfectly. I made his cornedbeef pie in a fit of nostalgia for the comfort food of my childhood and it was bloody lovely, much nicer than my mums

I do like a bit of Jamie, but I'm quick to adapt things if they don't look right. And I usually evolve a stripped down version of the original recipe.

Aww Rachel koo and her teeny tiny parisian kitchen was the cutest. Yes tv cooking is lovely to watch I'm a bit obsessed with xmas cooking channel atm Delia seems to cook in her conservatory 😁

@driggle it's all personal of course but for me Delia's best book is her Cookery Course largely because it's the one my mum had so when I started cooking as a teen I used that together with her old Good Housekeeping "bible" (have I mentioned how great Good Housekeeping books are? 😀).

You want the updated edition though ie not the one my mum had which was great but, yes, full of lard etc. I think it was published around 2006 or so. So it's got all the sound methodology of the earlier book but with ingredients that a more modern cook would be better working with and some more contemporary recipes. You can get it secondhand fairly cheap off the internet but do check the publication date.

Jamie Oliver stuff never works. Too oily, too much chilli to hide blandness, too much liquid.

Delia's work, Mary's work and Ina Garten's work.

Jamie Oliver recipes need to be used as guidelines not as exact recipes.

His gravy recipe consisted of pouring in a half bottle of balsamic vinegar! I decided not to follow it.

Oh he is on ch4 now wazzying his sprouts

Agree with the previous poster about Nigella as well - the only book of hers I rely on is How to Cook, all the others the timings seem to be off for me and cakes are never done when she says they should be.

I'm actually making lunch now with a JO recipe that I've made so many times I have it memorised - tuna pasta with fresh basil and a bit of cinnamon and lemon zest. But then again I think he claims it's his wife's recipe so maybe that's why it works perfectly

Agree also that Ina Garten's work.

I have a small theory about professional chefs and cookbooks... how much do we all think they are really cooking at home? Every chef I have ever known has subsisted on a diet of cigarettes, booze and takeaway boxes of leftovers from the restaurant so I'm not sure how much they're really rustling up at home. The recipes that really work seem to be from the people who are actually doing a lot of home cooking or who have done in the past.

Watching this Christmas programme his food is well oiled and he loves the word classic I think im going to turn it off he is irritating me.

Actually that's a really interesting point, Xiaoxiong. They're not generally getting in from work and cooking for a family. Also may explain why so many recipes have small amounts of random, often expensive, ingredients all thrown together - they put together a dish with what's left over in their professional restaurant kitchen.

My f riend was married to a chef he lived of fags and takeaways he never home cooked ever.

Yes hulloa good point! One of the things I like so much about the first Nigella book is that all the recipes are written using quantities that obviously match supermarket packet sizes. Like she'll specify a whole small tub of cream so you don't have a random amount left over, or a quantity of basil or tarragon like 20g or 40g that seems arbitrary until you realise that's exactly two small packets. I think at the time she was working full time as literary editor of the Times with small children at home as well, and the descriptions of racing home from the office via the shops to make dinner really ring true!

There was actually a brilliant article about that first Nigella book in the guardian a few months ago: www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/06/how-nigella-lawson-changed-food-writing

MrsJayy sounds like chefs are all the same! I think I'd rather use a recipe from his wife, who I bet was the one making the food at home day in day out and knew what worked without all the professional kitchen stuff.

Interesting control sample would be to see whether female professional chefs, especially those who are also mothers, cook and write cookbooks more like home cooks, or like chefs. Or whether they have a freezer full of beige and microwave meals for their kids!

Delias timings are always spot on.

JO well theres a few recipes I like in his ultimate comfort cookbook but they take for fucking ever. Not everyday food at all.

Agree with you about JO. Nothing ever goes effing "gnarly" you bastard.

Agree with others, I just don't think he's very good. I would ditch him use Delia, Mary Berry or Nigella, BBC Good Food always a good source too as the comments are very useful i.e. where people have added/changed stuff.

Also I don't enjoy watching him very much, I love Nigella, her Christmas Table the other night was great.

I liked JO's happy days cookbook but I do change his recipes and timings. I dislike that he puts chili in EVERYTHING and his timings are off. Sometimes I reduce certain ingredients like herbs or lemon or vinegar because I know that I would find it overpowering the rest of the dish.