The first time you make a recipe you should strive to follow it as closely as possible to give it a fair shake.
Amen!
If the recipe isn’t great, you’ll know and maybe make changes to salvage it. My family has several recipes like that, where the original is “meh”, but after tinkering it becomes a staple.
Most notable are our chocolate chip cookies. They started out as Toll House, but now includes browned butter, better chocolate chips and a few other techniques that makes complex tasting cookies.
I struggle with this when I come up against an instruction that my experience tells me is a very bad idea. Especially since I make a lot of recipes from random blogs. I have to determine what weird instructions will result in a cool new experience verses what will ruin a dish because the author is an idiot.
