Local cooks help test recipes for state magazine

Testing recipes is a tasty venture for extension homemakers across Missouri. Butler County members of the Missouri Association of Family and Community Education have put others’ ideas to the test for 20 years.

Betty Schalk and Edna Crane are among the local group who periodically prepares and evaluates recipes for “Today’s Farmer” magazine, produced by MFA Incorporated.

“Today’s Farmer” Editor Allison Jenkins said the magazine rotates among different university extension clubs around the state. They give each club $200 to use to defray the testing costs.

When the group first started testing recipes, Schalk was the local club’s president. She recalls someone from the magazine contacted them asking for help.

Crane, who presently is the group’s president, explained, while “their magazine is designed for farmers,” in the back, they have two pages of recipes.

Schalk recalls several cooks submit recipes “over and over. You see the same names and you get to recognize them.”

The submitted recipes may be an original idea or they may have been somebody else’s recipe, but tweaked. The recipe has to be complete.

“We’re not supposed to judge them if they’re not complete, including all the ingredients,” Crane said. “It has to say how many it serves, the time it takes.”

Schalk said, “We have to make the recipes ourselves. We do it just like they send it. If they leave something out, we leave it out. Usually, they throw those out if there’s something left out. We make them and then we take them to our group and have everyone try the recipes.”

Schalk enjoyed one time taking the food to the group’s district meeting, which includes clubs from Cape Girardeau to Butler County.

“That’s kind of fun to get people’s perspective on things,” she said.

The main recipes tested this time were sauces. While they may test as few as 10, this time they tested 16 recipes.

“We had everything from sweet sauces to tomato sauces,” Schalk said. “We had pizza sauce, barbecue sauce, spaghetti sauce, chicken Alfredo sauce, and there were three fudge sauces.”

Schalk said, the fudge sauce “was nice, especially the ones that brought ice cream” to use in the testing.

Some of those making sauces for pizza and pasta brought bread, while others didn’t.

“We could borrow bread from over here to taste test something else,” Schalk said,

Schalk and Crane explained, sometimes they would give an ingredient, that’s a key ingredient and it’s not available.

An example is where a recipe calls for fresh okra, but since it’s winter, the club members may decide to use frozen okra.

Sometimes the testers have a hard time finding the right flavorings.

If a recipe calls for burned sugar or brown sugar, is it light or dark brown sugar, Schalk questioned.

“Sometimes there are flavorings we’ve never heard of,” Schalk said. “The ones with the burned sugar, club members looked for burned sugar, but burned their own sugar.”

“Something about it was not quite right and the taste and quality wasn’t good,” Schalk said. “In a case like that, we give it a low score.”

While the local women are fair in their judging, Schalk said, “it’s a personal flavor preference. There was one with horseradish. I’m sure it was very good, because it was real creamy. But, I don’t like horseradish.”

Crane said, “the one I really liked was the Big Mac” sauce, which is like McDonald’s Restaurant puts on its sandwich. “This was like that, and it was pretty good.”

A white cake with raspberry sauce “was one of my favorites,” Schalk said. “I happen to like raspberry, but it is raspberry and strawberry together. That’s what made it.”

The women agreed sometimes they felt the chocolate sauces weren’t smooth.

Another one, Crane and Schalk said, which was “pretty low on the totem pole was a sauce to put on chicken before putting the chicken on the grill.” They had to try the sauce without it being grilled.

“The pizza sauce was really good,” Schalk said. “I took some of it home and put it on a regular pizza. But, the one who made it is a good cook, so that may be why the pizza sauce was so good. It tasted quite like pizza. She had garlic bread to test it on. It wasn’t just because of that, but it tasted exactly like the recipe said.”

The magazine is published nine times a year. For each of the editions, there is a different recipe theme. The April edition theme is salad recipes like spinach, kale and other greens.