Recipes for £30m disaster

Our appetite for stylish cookery may be as big as ever but one in five attempts to follow recipes ends in failure, it is revealed today.

With an estimated £30million-worth of food ending up in the dustbin every year, it is clearly not easy to become a domestic goddess like Nigella Lawson.

In a survey of 1,000 people - compiled, it has to be said, for Pizza Express - more than one in 10 blamed their blunders on buying the wrong ingredients, while 22 per cent believed they failed because they could not resist straying from the recipe and making it up as they went along.

The true extent of the nation's disasters in the kitchen was being shielded from dinner party guests by hosts - a quarter of whom admitted passing off someone else's cooking as their own.

For many, dreams of emulating celebrity chef idols are thwarted because recipes either contain expensive ingredients that are difficult to find, or are just too complicated.

Greek fig honey may make or break Jamie Oliver's Jethro Tart but it is not always easy to locate. Nigella Lawson wannabes, meanwhile, can be bewildered when they reach the paragraph of the tagliatelle-making recipe that reads: "When the pasty is silky and smooth..."

But the most difficult recipe for Londoners to emulate is the aptly named Chocolate Nemesis from the River Cafe. Standard food writer Lindsey Bareham said: "Everyone who has tried it says it is delicious and then wants to try it at home but it always goes wrong. If you do something with lots of expensive ingredients or lots of eggs, I would say proceed with caution."

River Cafe chef Ruth Rogers said: "The main thing is to make sure you follow the recipe exactly, from the type of chocolate to the size of the tin. If you do that, you are unlikely to fail."

James Parsons, Pizza Express chief executive, said: "It's amazing to think of all this money being spent on food that people never get to eat."