How many things in a recipe do you need to change to make it yours?

Answer 1

To make a recipe yours you must change four things.

Another answer:

In general cooking, there are no fixed rules on changes needed to make a recipe your own. You could use a recipe identical in, say, type of ingredients, to someone else's and have the end result a totally different dish.

Balance of ingredients, cooking times and methods, finishing, and so on, all contribute to making a dish your own. If another person can look at and taste two different dishes and assess them as being different from one another, then they aredifferent, no matter how many or how few changes have been made.

Even legal protection of your intellectual property, where you invent or produce a particular food, doesn't give real protection; this is why manufacturers of well-known foods such as Coca-Cola closely guard their recipes.

If you want to use someone else's ideas, but make the finished dish entirely their own, then simply make sure you do so in an honest manner. You'll know yourself whether your recipe is honestly your own invention, and so will others, so there'd be little point in claiming a recipe as your own when anyone can tell by tasting it that it's identical to another person's.