[csa]

America’s Test Kitchen (TV) / Cooks Illustrated (books) will scratch your itch.

My foodie friend and I use a lot of their recipes.

The cool thing is that sometimes you will disagree with their preferences (totally normal), so you can use one of their variants that has the attributes that you want. Or similarly, you can see how changing certain ingredients changes the outcome and personalize your version of the recipe accordingly. It definitely saves some experimental batches.