Ingredients

Better ingredients help, but better decisions help more.

This is a practical guide to:

• what to buy
• what to avoid
• what actually makes a difference

Topics

• Freshness cues (what to look for, what to ignore)
• Storage that preserves quality instead of drying things out
• Substitutions that won’t collapse a recipe’s structure

Rule of thumb

If you can’t taste it or measure it, it’s probably not worth obsessing over.