Welcome to the Health eCooks Recipe Test Kitchen

By Toni Donina
Published 4/15/2025

If you’ve ever found yourself in the middle of your kitchen, apron dusted with flour, trying to tweak a recipe to make it just a little bit healthier, then you're one of us.

At Health eCooks, our healthy recipe test kitchen is where the magic (and the mess!) happens. Like your own kitchen, ours hums with the sounds of sizzling pans, clinking spoons, and excited chatter over a dish that almost nailed it. The difference? We don’t do it alone. Behind every Health eCooks recipe is a team of chefs, registered dietitians, and food editors all working together to create meals that are good for your body and a joy to cook and eat.

Healthy cooking isn’t just our job, it’s our shared obsession. For more than 25 years, we’ve tested, tweaked, and perfected over 1,500 healthy recipes so you can trust that the food you serve your family and friends is both nourishing and consistently delicious. 

Here’s how our test kitchen works. It’s a step-by-step process, just like you might test a new recipe at home if you had a dozen extra hands.

  • Step 2: Each Recipe Gets a Healthy Makeover

    Our food editor digs deep into each recipe’s roots, studying versions from our favorite cookbooks, blogs, and beyond. Then, the rewriting starts, removing excess sodium, sugar, and fat, and swapping out any hard-to-find ingredients with wholesome ingredients for a fresh, natural taste. The editor selects ingredients that comply with Health eCooks dietary guides.

  • Step 3: Our Dietitian Steps Up to the Table

    A registered dietitian reviews the new recipe draft, ensuring the ingredients support a variety of healthy diets, whether for heart health, diabetes, or just everyday wellness. The dietitian calculates the full nutritional information of each recipe and determines the ideal portion sizes.

  • Step 4: Back to the Editor for Simplifying and Budgeting

    With nutrition facts locked in, the food editor adjusts the recipe again by streamlining steps, and making sure the recipe is affordable and accessible to home cooks everywhere.

  • Step 5: It's Cooking Time!

    Our professional chefs fire up the stove and cook the recipe exactly as written. It’s taste-tested, refined, and sometimes even scrapped (about 1 in 3 recipes don’t make the cut). The goal? A recipe that actually works and tastes amazing.

  • Step 6: Say Cheese! (And Kale...)

    Once approved, the recipe is styled, photographed, and filmed. Our creative team captures every angle—whether it's for our cookbooks, website, or your favorite food-loving social feed.

  • Step 7: Final Touches

    The food editor fine-tunes the written recipe one last time, ensuring the instructions are crystal clear and the ingredient list is indeed healthy. All ingredients, nutritional information and portion sizes are double-checked against dietary guidelines from trusted American health associations.

  • Step 8: A Bigger Picture

    Our work doesn’t stop with you. Health eCooks shares our recipes with hospitals and medical centers nationwide so patients and their families can find recipes that show them how to make their favorite foods healthier.

We Test Every Healthy Recipe in our Kitchen Because You Deserve More Than Just “Healthy.”

You deserve food that makes you excited to cook, comforts your body, and makes your family embrace healthy home cooking. That’s why we test every recipe on the Health eCooks in the Healthy Recipe Test Kitchen. We want your healthy kitchen at home to feel like a place of joy, filled with the aroma of fresh home cooking.