Recipe for a story: Blending the right ingredients.

I am learning that stories are like recipes for food. If you add too much, or too little, of a particular ingredient. It can ruin the taste of a meal. There must be a balance of tastes and textures for the meal to be well received. No single ingredient, can be overwhelmed or overshadowed by the other ingredients.
I am learning that in storytelling, as in cooking, there must also be a balance between exposition, action, and character development, too much action,and the audience loses their way in the excitement, too much exposition and the audience becomes bored, too little character development and the audience won’t invest in the story. If an author can balance the scales between this thematic triad, he or she, will create drama.
How do you balance the scale? Well, one way I have found is to go back and reread authors I have enjoyed in the past and note in particular scenes that stand out and break them down to their bare ingredients, then, I can reverse-engineer how the writer has constructed the scene. Do you have any suggestions on how to blend the ingredients for a story?