Corrections

A page that has never been corrected is either very young or not being checked.

Q: Why publish a corrections page at all?

A site with no corrections page is making an implicit claim that it has never been wrong, which almost certainly isn't true. Publishing mistakes is the only way the accuracy claims on the rest of the site mean anything.

Q: Do you change old issues after they are sent?

The email can't be recalled, so the correction runs in the next issue. The web version of the issue is fixed and carries the date it changed, so the two are never silently out of step.

This one is very young. Here is every substantive correction we have made, what was wrong, and how we found out — newest first, so you can judge the habit rather than the promise.

No corrections yet. Found something wrong? Reply to any issue and tell us.

The short answer

If we print something wrong, the correction goes in the next email and on the page it came from, dated, and it gets logged here.

We don't quietly edit mistakes away. A number that changed without a note is indistinguishable from a number that was never wrong, and that difference is the whole point of this newsletter.

The log

What we have gotten wrong

Nothing yet. No correction has been needed since the first issue was written. That is not a boast — it mostly means this newsletter is very young. The page exists so that when something does need fixing there is an obvious place for it, and so you can check whether we actually do what we say.

The policy

What counts, and what happens

What gets logged here: a temperature, a time, a price, a source, an attribution, or any claim a reader could have cooked by. If it could have changed what you did on Saturday, it belongs on this page.

What gets fixed silently: typos, broken links, formatting, and clumsy sentences. Logging those would bury the corrections that matter, which is its own way of hiding them.

Where it goes: the page itself is corrected and carries the date it changed; the next Thursday email says what changed and why; the entry lands here. Three places, because a correction only one person sees isn't a correction.

How fast: the page gets fixed as soon as we have checked it. The email correction goes out in the next issue — we don't send a separate email for it unless a number could hurt someone, in which case we do, immediately.

Telling us

How to report something

Reply to any issue of the newsletter. That reply goes to a real inbox that a person reads.

You don't need to be certain, and you don't need to be polite about it. “Your rib temp doesn't match ThermoWorks” is a complete and useful message. If you have a source, send it — that is how we check, and it is how this gets settled quickly.

If we look into it and decide the original was right, we'll tell you that too, and say why.

Common questions

Why publish a corrections page at all?

Because a site with no corrections page is making an implicit claim — that it has never been wrong — that almost certainly isn't true. Publishing the mistakes is the only way the accuracy claims on the rest of the site mean anything. It also makes it costly for us to be sloppy, which is the actual mechanism.

Do you change old issues after they are sent?

The email that landed in your inbox can't be recalled, so the correction runs in the next one. The web version of the issue does get fixed, and it carries the date it changed so the two are never silently out of step.

What if a mistake could make someone sick?

Then it isn't waiting for Thursday. Any error in a food-safety number — a USDA minimum, a holding temperature, a poultry pull temp — gets corrected on the page immediately and sent as its own email. That is the one case where we will interrupt you.