America's Test Kitchen Recipes Cost Way More To Create Than You Think

Getting all the ingredients for a recipe can add up quickly, especially if some of what is called for is not your typical pantry staple. You can probably expect to spend a few dollars here and there for specific ingredients — and if that sounds like a minor annoyance, how about $11,000 for one recipe? It sounds like a joke — but this shocking cost is one of the secrets at America's Test Kitchen.

America's Test Kitchen isn't just making existing recipes, but rather engineering them from scratch. Blessed with a 55,000-square-foot kitchen lab in Boston, Massachusetts, the company consists of a team of chefs, editors, tasters, and food scientists. As America's Test Kitchen explained on its website, "We are passionate about cooking — discovering why recipes work and why they don't — and sharing what we learn to help everyone cook with confidence."

The talented culinary team also tries to answer very specific questions that the average home cook may not have even known they had, like "How do you make noodles tender rather than gummy?" and "How can you turn your oven into a smoker?" And of course, arriving at a solution is part of what makes the company's recipe development process so intensive. Every dish is precisely formulated and compared to alternative versions. Between ingredient costs, employee salaries, equipment, and overhead, you can start to see how the costs could pile up dramatically.

If $11,000 for a single recipe isn't quite adding up, we'll break down further what really happens behind the scenes at America's Test Kitchen. Each recipe is tested as many as 40 times (if you're wondering what happens to all the food at America's Test Kitchen, employees eat a lot of leftovers). The stages of experimentation and refinement can take a long time — the Texas Brisket recipe took two years to develop! Before test cooks can even get started on trial and error, they must research and submit a recipe proposal for approval. Cooks will continue to test different versions of the recipe, tweaking ingredients, ratios, and cook times. Trying out different brands of olive oil, numerous cuts of meat, and experimenting with varieties of produce are all potentially part of this process.

Then there are the top-notch appliances and cookware. All that testing puts major wear and tear on stoves, dishwashers, blenders, mixers, and fryers, which require maintenance if not eventual replacement. Some recipes may call for the purchase of niche tools and products, too.

None of this would be possible without the hardworking staff. Cooks receive input from food scientists, chefs, tasters, and editors. Once the testing is done, then the writing, editing, and finalizing begin. There's also photography and shooting video for multichannel content, and keep in mind that each person involved in the recipe is getting paid! It seems excessive, but that's what makes America's Test Kitchen recipes literally tried and true.