People who leave poor reviews for recipes...

[MaggieTheCat]

...after changing a bunch of stuff.

I see this a lot on places like allrecipes.com and the Food Network website. People will leave a poor review for a recipe, stating whatever was wrong with it, but also stating a bunch of stuff they did differently! For example, I was just reading a recipe for homemade peanut butter pie. The recipe says to make a chocolate crust using crushed chocolate wafers, and to also use homemade peanut butter for the filling (and gave the recipe for the homemade peanut butter.) One review gave it a 2 out of 5 stars, stating it wasn't very good, but also stating she used graham crackers instead of chocolate wafers in the crust, and that she used store bought generic peanut butter! Of course it's not going to be as good if you don't actually follow the recipe.

I change recipes all the time to suit my and my husband's taste. He hates onion, so if a recipe calls for a bunch of onion, I usually leave it out or use only a little, and sometimes sub something else that I think might go well (a lot of times a bit more garlic, or sometimes something like green bell pepper if I think it'd go well in the dish.) If it doesn't turn out, I don't leave a bad review because of it.

[HYHYBT]

It's especially bad when it's obvious that the exact reason it didn't work for you was the change you made. For example, Grandma once was very excited to get ahold of a chocolate cake recipe that had won some prize or other. When she mixed up the batter the way the recipe said, it looked too runny to her, so she added a bunch of flour... then threw away the recipe. Apparently the recipe was no good because her finished cake was too dry

Wouldn't admit that there was even the slightest possibility that it was the added flour that messed it up, either.

(I have to admit, though, that her recipe box is full of great stuff, especially desserts. So it didn't really need another one anyway...)

Now, if the change had nothing to do with what you didn't like, that's different. Taking your example, suppose that, not liking chocolate, they changed the crust, but made the peanut butter exactly according to the recipe, and that it was specifically the filling they didn't like in the finished pie.

[Tanasi]

If you read further into some of those comments you'll find people low-rating recipes and admitting they hadn't made the dish. They knew it would be bad because of their extensive culinary experience. For some reason I don't rate a whopper flopper's opinion very high compaired to ACI grad.