Recipe Analysis
I've got someone in the house who needs low sugar and I can't do wheat without miserable allergic reactions. So - I often end up digging around for recipes that'd work within those guidelines.
When I started cooking, the worst you'd run into was the rare "In 1967, I thought about politics, and then cooked an apple" or dubious sponsored cooking from recipes doing oddly greedy substitutions "replace all milk and eggs with our mayo" sort of things. So it doesn't hurt to check if an older recipe still pops up in a person's cooking if you've got years of various meals posted.
For example, Cook's Illustrated swore that brining your corn prior to grilling it improved it. Years later, they admitted the sole value was a little extra browning from the sugar in the brine sticking to the corn. They also regularly swear you cannot cook something with vanilla or with the "wrong" potato. I've often found that to be silly in my opinion.
Often, you can use a yellow all purpose potato replacing a brown baking potato, or replace a dark molasses for a lighter one with minimal changes. A tamari soy is darker and usually more salty, but a splash replacing another soy isn't going to destroy the world if you're careful of salt levels. Similarly, salted and unsalted butter, depending on brand, often do not change the end result.
However, you can still do some vague "do I trust this" on recipes.
Does the recipe match what you know of the ingredients / proportions / believable results?
Does the "simplicity" of the recipe sound like it could be slightly tweaked for better results or for improved flavor?
Does the result even match what you want the dish to be?
Does the recipe sound like it's giving you the best chance of it working with what you have?
Let's say you're looking at a cake. They swear it lasts forever, slices well, and is beautiful. It has no eggs and uses a lot of Splenda.
Fake sugars tend to change how the food tastes and bakes, but Splenda can make a pretty "normal" looking result. Without gluten, no eggs will often make a fragile cake. Without fat and protein making up for the lack of eggs, you will probably have a cake that dries up fast, crumbles or is delicate, and will likely need some kind of substitution. Vegan cakes often use apple sauce, for example. If you can eat eggs, I find them far more dependable than egg replacements in gluten free recipes, but that is a personal taste thing.
Let's say you've got a brownie. It's photographed at midnight, next to a bonfire, in winter. The best you can tell is that it's got chocolate, and it looks a little greasy. The recipe is literally chocolate, coconut oil, egg, sugar, and almond flour.
Considering there's no starchy flours in there, you will be highly unlikely to get a firm chewy brownie. The amount of oil (from the oil, the eggs, and the almond flour) could easily make something too greasy to be pleasant. You may also have some gritty texture due to the almond flour being the only flour.
By "simplicity," I'm talking about things where the author clearly wants the shortest possible ingredient list. Most gluten free recipes, for example, tend to use a "sticky" starch like corn starch, and a dry starch like rice flour. To understand what I mean, take some of each in some water, and heat in the microwave or a pan. If your noodle recipe seems "fragile" and prone to tearing, and it has no gelling starches like corn starch, you can often improve things with adding some. If it seems like you're eating noodles made of eggy jello - you've likely got too much gelling starches.
If you've got a recipe that's clearly pared down to five ingredients or less, and you know that other versions are more complex, you might want to compare them. Sometimes, things are just complex because they're complex. A fish soup with one fish will often be as edible as one with three and some shellfish. A particularly good example of "it'd work, but -" is those recipes for banana pancakes. Often you can get a better pancake with more ingredients, and the results aren't necessarily worth the speed in mixing them up if you're frying each one as small as possible.
By the "results you want" thing, look back at the greasy brownie issue. I like a chewy brownie, so I tend to favor recipes that will give me that. I do not like a pale soft sugar cookie, or a pale shortbread cookie. Recipes that want that will not give me what I want.
Another thing to look out for is the author's personal issues. If someone bakes everything at 350 degrees, I'd feel suspicious that perhaps it'd work at another temperature. A keto author did everything from pizza to biscuits at 350 degrees at wild baking times, and magically using standard temperatures and baking times worked well. Cook's Illustrated occasional fixations on the "true flavor of an ingredient" often means that I'm adding vanilla or garlic because my allergies do not care about the true flavor that the tree pollen hides.
By "does the recipe sound like it'll work well with what you have" thing is situations where you may not have key ingredients or the techniques sound overly complex. There's a blogger who loves a certain type of modified tapioca starch. I found their recipes to not work with mine, so if she calls for it, I just don't even try to see if it'd work. On the other hand, another one swore by organic gelatin and organic beef tallow. I found my gelatin and my lard to work exactly fine for my purposes.
By techniques, I'm talking about my personal energy. I've got a few cakes that work well. One involves melting butter, and dumpling almond flour, a bit of starch, eggs, and sugar in it. It takes almost 45 minutes to bake, but it's very lazy. Another one involves some beating to mix sugar and eggs and heating up some milk. It takes about 30 minutes to bake, but about twice the time to mix together. It also uses 3/4ths the amount of sugar due to having more ingredients.
The final cake is a chiffon style thing with beaten egg whites and sifted flour. It bakes in a flash because it's intended for layered or rolled cakes. It's tedious to mix up, overbakes at times, but it's lovely if that's what you need.
If I'm looking at a recipe, and it calls for wild precise timing or strange substitutions, I might try it. I wouldn't make a massive batch. The best example of that I found was someone making lava cakes. She had a recipe for high altitude that called for under a cup of flour for about 5 cakes, and a very low amount of sugar. She also said the secret was to make the batter (which sounded like a standard batter in standard proportions) and then chill it until fully firm.
This made sense to me. High altitude baking often has things dry out too fast due to humidity and temperature issues. A lava cake requires you to pull it out at the magic time. She called for baking it, and then letting it sit for two minutes before you served.
It worked perfectly.
