How we develop recipes
What goes into a Chef Paulo recipe, where the nutrition numbers come from, and what the photographs are. Written plainly, because you should be able to judge for yourself.
Where these recipes come from
Chef Paulo is a Mediterranean cookbook publisher. Every recipe on this site was developed for one of our books, and each one names the book it came from. What you see here is the same recipe as the printed page — the same ingredients, the same quantities, the same method. Nothing is thinned out for the web.
We publish a small share of each book for free, deliberately. It is a sample, not a substitute: the book is where the full collection, the menus and the week-by-week structure live.
How a recipe is reviewed before it is published
Every recipe passes through a structured editorial review before it reaches a book or this site. That review looks at it from several angles in turn: whether the technique holds up, whether the steps are clear enough for a home cook working alone, whether the ingredients are ones you can actually buy, and whether the finished dish is balanced rather than merely plausible on paper.
Recipes that fail that review are revised or dropped. A recipe that reads well but would not work in a domestic kitchen is a recipe we would rather not have published.
We do not make claims about testing that we cannot stand behind. If you ever see language on this site suggesting a level of testing that has not happened, that is a mistake and we would like to know about it.
Where the nutrition figures come from
Nutrition is calculated per serving from the USDA FoodData Central database, ingredient by ingredient, against the quantities in the recipe as written. It is not estimated by eye and it is not copied from a similar dish elsewhere.
Treat the figures as a good estimate rather than a laboratory measurement. Real ingredients vary — the fat in a cut of lamb, the size of an egg, how much oil actually stays in the pan — and any of that moves the numbers. Sodium in particular depends heavily on how much salt you add at the table, which no recipe can know.
If you are counting something for a medical reason, use these as a starting point and check anything that matters against your own ingredients.
About the pictures
The dish images on this site are illustrative renderings, produced digitally to show how a finished plate is meant to look. They are not photographs of a specific plate of food that was cooked and shot on a particular day.
We are telling you this because it is the kind of thing you would want to know, and because a recipe site that quietly implies otherwise is trading on something it has not earned. The recipe, the quantities and the nutrition are the real work. The picture is there to show you what you are aiming at.
How this site makes money
The recipes are free. Links to our cookbooks, and to the occasional piece of equipment a recipe genuinely calls for, are Amazon affiliate links — if you buy through one, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Every one of those links is marked, and any page carrying one says so before you reach it.
Our buying guides reason from two things: what a piece of equipment has to do in a working kitchen, and the manufacturer’s own published specifications, which we attribute rather than present as our own measurement. We do not run comparative equipment tests — you will not find “we tested 12 models” here — and we do not quote prices or star ratings, which go out of date the moment they are written.
A word on health
Several of our books are written with a particular way of eating in mind — lower sodium, more fiber, more of the fats associated with the Mediterranean table. That is a description of the food, not a medical claim. Nothing here treats, manages or replaces care from your doctor or dietitian, and we would rather be plain about that than imply otherwise.
Found something wrong?
A quantity that looks off, a step that does not work, a number that cannot be right — tell us. Corrections are genuinely welcome, and we would rather hear it from you than leave it wrong.