Contributing to Equipment Reviews
Besides recipes, Cook’s Illustrated's cookbooks and website are well-known for their product tests, which offer advice on what cooking supplies wear well over time, work best for certain tasks, and are most cost-effective. Much like the recipes, website members also voice their agreement or disagreement with the product test outcomes and even participate in the same story/image sharing and trouble-shooting discussions. However, equipment reviews are also an interesting form of everyday writing, as the accumulation of comments becomes an extension of the review itself.
In this particular example, Cook’s Illustrated updated their reviews for the best large coolers, and users were displeased with the final results, arguing that it was too expensive, that few average people would have a use for such a large cooler, and that the methods Cook’s Illustrated employed in their experiment were fundamentally flawed. Cook’s Illustrated comment moderators noticed the overwhelming dissent, and attempted to direct users to other reviews of less-expensive coolers. However, they eventually admitted that they might need to expand their product-testing to include rotomolded options.
By interrogating the methods, the members who participated in this discussion thread ended up not just exposing the flaws in the product testing, but have probably inspired the Cook’s Illustrated team to add another experiment closer to these users’ needs as consumers.