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Those are the absolute worst. A recipe with someone's jackass life story for 2000 words. You start to wonder if it's even a recipe at all. You have to scroll fo
by corodra 7y ago
Those are the absolute worst. A recipe with someone's jackass life story for 2000 words. You start to wonder if it's even a recipe at all. You have to scroll for a good minute, hoping you didn't miss the recipe. Then come the ads that reformat the size of the page. Everything jumps around and you have to rescroll again.
Exactly why I stick to cookbooks in the past year or so. More and more, "fuck the internet", long live murdering trees.
- dheera 7y agoOne thing about cookbooks is that the massive barrier to actually publishing and distributing is a natural filter for credibility; most cookbooks have tried-and-true recipes and are either authentic or a genuinely good adaptation by a skilled chef author. The internet is full of garbage recipes that either just don't work, inauthentic, and uncreative, all at the same time. As far as murdering trees go -- let's not forget that libraries and e-books exist.
- corodra 7y agoIn my experience, ebook cookbooks get annoying when you have dirty fingers and the screen goes dark because you forgot to switch it back to always on. And there's a great tendency that the recipe is always fucking formatted so you have to scroll more or "turn the page". Cookbooks, at least the ones I own, are all formatted so you never have to turn the page. Seems silly, but that's important. Yeah library, to check if you want to buy it or just write down a handful of recipes.
- com2kid 7y agoThe flip side of this is that the cookbooks rarely have super niche recipes. Even some of the highest rated "authentic" cookbooks have the flavor level tuned way down to be more "suitable for American tastes". The best cooking tutorials are barely translated Youtube videos. Or even better, recipes going through Google Translate. (Or get a multi-lingual friend... :) ) Cook's Illustrated also does some 100% legit international recipes, they are smart enough to A/B test against the country of origin and try to match up the flavor profile with ingredients that are available in America, which can be more work than just directly translating to "closest cultivar of a plant". I've also enjoyed the organic explosion of low carb cooking that has happened online. I have been witness to the community growing from its very beginnings less than a decade ago when it was just some people trying to make weight loss taste good, to professional level chefs jumping in with their recipes. It is now possible to source low-carb recipes online that can go toe to toe with any other genre of food (e.g. https://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/chocolate-hazelnut-sandwich-cookies/ https://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/chocolate-hazelnut-sandwic...). Of course there is also an explosion of low-carb blog spam. Ugh. I do sometimes miss when everyone in the community was there because they loved just trying new things out and sharing their experiences. The same SEO problems exist...
- dheera 7y ago> The best cooking tutorials are barely translated Youtube videos. Yeah I love those. The "random grandma with a gopro" tutorials always work, modulo language barrier. The video editing is crap and you sometimes have to keep fast forwarding while stuff is cooking but the recipes are good.
- jrumbut 7y agoCould you give us a link to a great random grandma with a gopro video? I have been to what I thought was deep in the Internet recipe mines and never saw this.
- evilduck 7y agoProbably not a GoPro but Chinese food channels seem to fit this description fairly often. Here’s one https://youtu.be/fz_aSsuhg8Y https://youtu.be/fz_aSsuhg8Y
- throwaway8879 7y agoYou may like the "Pasta with Italian Grannies channel" channel. I recently discovered it and it's the best.
- lapnitnelav 7y agoI don't know why but I find it really relaxing to watch those kinds of cooking video with a slower pace. It's good to slow down and enjoy those fairly simple things.
- p1necone 7y agoI don't know about that - for every one 'Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat' there's 99 'middle aged white persons easy diet fad of the year 5 minute meals'. Published cook books dont really seem better to me. There seems to be two distinct 'genres' of cookbooks. One written by people who have studied cooking, and one written by people that have studied marketing.
- bscphil 7y agoMy strategy is to bookmark the sites of the people who have good published cookbooks. You have a much better chance of getting good recipes from someone who knows what they are doing, as you said, but you also get the additional convenience and variation from being able to search online. In my experience, these sites tend to be less spammy too, but there's certainly variation there too.
- pascalxus 7y agooooh but look at all that "Dwell time", that's how google's algorithm knows you're having a great time. I switched over to duck duck go several months ago. it's just as good as google for almost everything.
- thehashrocket 7y agoWe started using an app called Paprika that parses the page and extracts the recipe. Although, I will admit, my youngest daughter and I get a kick out of the stories. We even try to predict which theme the writer will go with. Some are like Christmas Hallmark movies. lol.
- ip26 7y agoIt gets better. Or, well, worse. Last time I ran into one of those, I wanted to make curry. After the 2000 words gushing about how it was the most delicious thing ever and how they "couldn't even", the recipe was to pour a jar of premade curry over rice.
- anderspitman 7y agoBlame the web, not the internet
- loco5niner 7y agoFor most of us "the web" = "the internet"
- batiudrami 7y agoThe reality is these stupid recipe websites are just reproductions of other people's recipes anyway. Look for an "adapted from" credit - it will only have minute changes. Maybe they halve the cream somewhere "because it's too rich for their family" or something.
- cylinder 7y agoYep, maybe using magazines and other gatekeepers of quality was not such a bad idea.