Our recipe standards

CooksGuide exists to give straight, useful answers to everyday cooking questions. Here's exactly how we write and check what you read.

We write our own content

Every recipe and guide is written by us. We use research only for factual grounding — cooking ratios, methods, food-safety guidance, nutrition and the questions people actually ask. We do not copy, paraphrase, spin or closely rewrite anyone else's recipe, article, method or wording. Our pages are original, synthesised from multiple references and general cooking knowledge.

What our labels mean

• Data-assisted guide — built from structured cooking data and official food-safety guidance, written in our own words. Used for cooking times, freezing, storage, substitutions and calculators.
• Kitchen-reviewed — written from established cooking principles and checked for sense and safety. Not independently lab-tested.
• Tested recipe — used only when we have actually cooked the recipe in our kitchen.
• Estimated nutrition — nutrition figures are calculated estimates from typical ingredient values, not a substitute for precise dietary calculation.

Food safety

Where it matters — meat, fish, eggs, rice and reheating — we follow conservative guidance consistent with UK Food Standards Agency principles, and we say so on the page. If we're unsure, we err on the side of caution. Cooking temperatures and storage times are there to keep you safe; please follow them.

What we don't do

• We never invent reviews, star ratings or testimonials.
• We never claim a recipe was "tested by us" unless it actually was.
• We never use structured data (schema) to claim something that isn't on the page.
• We don't publish thin pages just to rank — pages that don't pass our quality and safety checks are not indexed.

How we decide what to publish

Each page is scored for usefulness, completeness, originality, internal links, the presence of a proper image, and food-safety notes where relevant. Only pages that clear our quality threshold and pass safety, duplicate and similarity checks are made indexable. Everything else stays a work in progress until it's good enough.

Spotted something that looks wrong? We'd genuinely like to know — accuracy matters more to us than page count.