12 ms·

But how will I read about "Dakota", an avid yoga enthusiast who just happens to be a mom, who enjoys making healthy and savory meals for her family while bloggi

by kmbfjr 6y ago

But how will I read about "Dakota", an avid yoga enthusiast who just happens to be a mom, who enjoys making healthy and savory meals for her family while blogging? Seriously, I hope this spells an end to the Google ranking imposed nonsense that makes the simple act of searching for a recipe so insufferable.

tmountain 6y ago
It's a running joke in our house. I start off wanting to make some mashed potatoes, and time and time again, I have to suffer through someone's life story--the camping trip in North Dakota when Susan's husband first discovered his love of homemade sour cream--etc. Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something people would gravitate towards.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Having thought about this and my own use of cookbooks as loose inspiration rather than actually to follow in detail, I have come to the conclusion that the "fluff" is what most of the recipe-reading public want. In particular, the fluff has value even if you never cook the recipe! Which saves a lot of time and inconvenience on your part while still giving the same warm fluffy feelings. Actual "I have these things and want to cook something" could practically be automated. The big exception is baking, where precision ratios and time matters a lot. (I'm also reminded of various stories of people trying to trace the origins of much loved family recipes and then discovering that rather than being an authentic traditional Calabrian whatever, their grandmother copied it off the back of a tin. I'm fairly sure my own grandmother's cookies recipe is from Tate&Lyle)
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    I have come to the conclusion that the "fluff" is what most of the recipe-reading public want. I've often heard the prevailing reason why this happens on the web is because of SEO and 'bounce rates'. More time spent on the site improves ranking, so the actual recipe is pushed below the fold so users have to scroll down thereby adding more time on the site. Have often wondered if any SEO wonks with the inside baseball can actually validate this?
    - anticsapp 6y ago
      I can't validate this but have been told this by multiple authors and SEO professionals. So it's anecdotal. One blogger apologized to me and told me she was embarrassed doing it but it's an industry practice. She explained it's because other recipe sites use automated scraping tools and republish their recipes in an effort to outrank original authors. The personal fluff helps slow them down. Also, a lot of recipes are bullshit, they manually steal them from elsewhere and change a few variables to evade copyright claims. Although, I guess changing a few variables is how cuisines evolve.
      - kevinmchugh 6y ago
        Recipes aren't copyrightable. It's bad manners to copy and republish one without attribution, but not illegal. The introductory fluff is copyrightable, and that's one reason for it.
        logfromblammo 6y ago
        Photographs, videos, or drawings of recipes in progress are copyrightable, and usually more helpful. Furthermore, they provide evidence that the recipe is actually viable. That's why you shouldn't expect to make a cent from creating a new recipe, unless you have a chef and photographer/artist lined up, or own your own restaurant chain.
      - AnonC 6y ago
        Thanks. This makes sense. I was wondering what these fluff pieces have to do with SEO, because surely the search engines aren’t monitoring all users and how long they spend on each page in order to rank the usefulness of the content in their search results. Bounce rates and how long a visitor stays on a page matter for those who own the sites and/or do some sort of marketing on them (ads, their own products, their services, etc.).
        dvtrn 6y ago
        because surely the search engines aren’t monitoring all users and how long they spend on each page in order to rank the usefulness of the content in their search results. Probably not the search engines, but I could imagine this being a thing that goes into Google Analytics if an online recipe property is using that (or if their blogging platform has a plugin for it) maybe? Just spitballing from the hip.
  - pfarrell 6y ago
    It happened to me. When I quizzed my grandmother for her beloved chocolate chip cookies recipe, I felt like being entrusted with a huge family secret. Nope. Toll House cookie recipe (which is on the back of every package) with an extra quarter cup of flour XD.
    - scrozier 6y ago
      I read long ago that you can/should always trust recipes printed on manufacturer's packages; after all, they've chosen them to stake their ingredients' reputations on.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Some of the best stories too have bits of the art inside of the food science anecdotes that contribute to a sense of why a particular variation on a recipe worked better for the author. Some authors have more of a sweet tooth, and others live in higher altitudes or tweak their recipes for camp stoves on hiking trips up the mountains. Some authors spend days and weeks of failures trying to get a proper balance of flour to baking soda/baking powder for just the exact sort of yeast rise they want from their dough, and others just wing it let the dough live or crumble as nature intends as it adds a little chaos to the whimsy and art of their eventual plating. It's also the little touches of humanity that people want if they want to follow a particular food blogger. The anecdotes add up over time to a sense of following a workplace or family sitcom to follow week to week (whether they make the recipes or not). It's a daily or weekly "soap opera" ("flour opera"?) of an acquaintance or "friend" that you also like to crib recipes from from time to time. Where these recipe bloggers have their steadiest audiences, those stories at the top of the recipe are the real draw day-to-day, and the recipes the fun addendum to bookmark for later.
- thawaway1837 6y ago
  “Why doesn’t everyone who is putting information out there for free not cater to exactly my needs”. What an utter load of bollocks. These are people who are creating something that they enjoy doing and giving you information you apparently need for free. I don’t understand why anyone would trash their desire to write something that is personal and/or interesting to them about it. And that’s setting aside that these usually make the recipes far more readable and interesting to the vast majority of people.
  - scrollaway 6y ago
    It's a sweet world view, but the truth is that the majority of these cooking sites are filling in content for SEO and ad purposes, and the "stories" are fictions written by Tom, a 22 year old freelancer who isn't a yoga enthusiast but is just trying to make ends meet at 3¢/word.
    - thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
      And, the real farce is that Google mistakenly sees all that scrolling up and down the page, looking for the recipe as 'engagement' and "Dwell time".
      - mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
        Is that mistaken? Does no one click on ads on the page while doing this?
        thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
        the algo thinks you're having a good time.
    - csa 6y ago
      This is so incredibly accurate.
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
- jackewiehose 6y ago
  > Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something people would gravitate towards In German there's chefkoch.de. It's full of ads but its core is basically a big DB of user-submitted recipes without fluff. Don't you have something like that in English?
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    I usually add "BBC" to my search term, which ① gets a straightforward page and ② ensures the measurements and oven temperatures will be metric. The further from the UK one is, the less useful this is. The measurements should only be a problem in the US and Canada, but common ingredients can change -- e.g. the fat content of cream, or whether canned tomatoes are salted or sweetened. Also, if you're from the rest of the world, you might wonder why they've forgotten the herbs and spices :-)
    - jackewiehose 6y ago
      > I usually add "BBC" to my search term Do you mean at chefkoch- or google-search? Yes, recipes are very hard to translate. For example I don't know what "cream" is and I never want extra sugar or salt in canned tomatoes.
      - Symbiote 6y ago
        I mean in Google search, or any other general web search. It's probably less necessary from the UK, but from Denmark an English-language recipe search has a good chance of giving American websites. Americans have to suffer sugary and salty canned tomatoes.
- onion2k 6y ago
  mashed potatoes Steam some potatoes. (Don't boil them. No one wants watery mash.) Add far more butter than anyone would think is reasonable. (Like, 1/2lb of butter to 1lb of potatoes. Maybe more.) Add salt and pepper. (No, more than that. You've under-seasoned them.) Mash them until they're the consistency you want. (For really smooth mash use an electric hand mixer instead of a masher.) To make them better still, put lots of wholegrain mustard or garlic in with the butter.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - galfarragem 6y ago
    I would buy a cooking book with recipes explained like this one. With real world tricks and explaining "why" you do it in that way. A raw list of ingredients is, in my opinion, almost useless.
    - gbear605 6y ago
      I’ve found that The New Best Recipe cookbook covers this pretty well for me. They have an introduction to each recipe talking about all the variants they tried, and then there’s a clearly marked recipe section.
    - csa 6y ago
      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.
  - pugworthy 6y ago
    Since this seems to be an OK thread to add humor to, I'll point out you can also stick 'em in a stew.
- wolco 6y ago
  I have one. It doesn't rank after 15 years.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something people would gravitate towards. There are apps like that, at least. I use How to Cook Everything. It's from Mark Bittman, who was with the New York Times at the time it was published. I don't know if he is anymore.
- goatforce5 6y ago
  I've had good luck with recipes from https://www.taste.com.au/ https://www.taste.com.au/ and https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/ https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/ Alternatively, if you want super barebones, go buy a copy of Escoffier's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_guide_culinaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_guide_culinaire (or an English translation thereof). It's arguably the definitive cookbook and the recipes are extremely terse, some just a couple of lines long. (e.g. "Take recipe A and recipe B, substituting X for Y.") "Escoffier's introduction to the first edition explains his intention that Le Guide culinaire be used toward the education of the younger generation of cooks. This usage of the book still holds today; many culinary schools still use it as their culinary textbook. Its style is to give recipes as brief descriptions and to assume that the reader either knows or can look up the keywords in the description."
sseagull 6y ago
My favorite: talking about how this recipe helped you cope with the September 11 attacks (although this intro is shorter than a lot that I have seen). https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017089-maple-shortbread-bars https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017089-maple-shortbread...
- zerocrates 6y ago
  It ran in the paper 8 days after 9/11... seems pretty reasonable to me. In much the same vein as the rush by many to baking now.
  - mattkrause 6y ago
    The "9/11 content" is also literally four sentences long. One sentence also introduces the recipe contributor, while another describes the original source she adapted it from. It's not particularly gratuitous, especially given the date and location.
crankylinuxuser 6y ago
My understanding of why there's a life story copy at the top of recipes is that a recipe is not copyrightable, but a story is. And, an AI can generate a story one time relatively easy. https://lizerbramlaw.com/2015/04/07/copyright-protect-recipes/ https://lizerbramlaw.com/2015/04/07/copyright-protect-recipe...
- tylerrobinson 6y ago
  Is there evidence that the "annoying recipe sites" in question include algorithmic stories, or are you speaking hypothetically?
  - crankylinuxuser 6y ago
    I don't have any direct proof that recipe sites are doing this. I only look at just how many "stories" there are, and how many recipes. There just looks like too much writing. And it too is also very formulaic. And it's also 'if I was to do a recipe site, I'd use a text generator'
    - logfromblammo 6y ago
      Sounds cheaper than paying a freelancer $0.025 per word, too. I suppose if you were just starting a blogspam recipe site, you could initially pay freelancers for the first articles, and use them as your training corpus. But since this sort of templated recipe site is already evil, just scrape all the other recipe sites and use their articles as your corpus. "When we vacationed in { madlib( international_city ) }, we ate a { r.Name }, and it was delicious. When we returned home, we tried to recreate the recipe, but it was never quite right. After months of trying, it's finally perfect." "As a child, I remember my grandmother making { r.Name } and eating it with all my cousins. It was her secret recipe. She never told anyone. When she died, we were all very sad because we thought the recipe was gone forever. But I found this in her old { madlib( noun ) }, and now I'm the most popular cousin at the reunion." Repeat ad nauseam.
- interestica 6y ago
  I've always thought of copyrighted music as "sound recipes"
tclancy 6y ago
Now we need an bot that parses the comments and applies AI to do . . . something with the people who say the substituted half the ingredients for what they had and left the others out to reply and tell them what recipe they actually made and that they can stuff their 1 star review.
SkyBelow 6y ago
Does it pose an actual problem? When I search for recipes, I type in the food I want + recipe and then open the top 5 or so links. I quick scan for a list of ingredients. If I don't easily spot on in a few seconds I move on. I'll do this until I have a couple different lists of ingredients for making the item. This ends up taking less than a minute or two. That just isn't a significant portion of time compared to how long I'll spend comparing different recipes to find a common theme to follow. Maybe it is because I never follow a single recipe but instead combine the common themes from a couple that the whole life story before the recipe shtick isn't something that bothers me.
- onion2k 6y ago
  This ends up taking less than a minute or two. For you to open 5 websites, dismiss the cookie permission request on each one, dismiss the notifications request, scroll down to find the ingredients list, dismiss the scrolling activated newsletter signup, read the ingredients list, and click the 'next page' button to see the instructions to work out what you can tweak, all in an average of 24s per site is very impressive.
  - Freak_NL 6y ago
    Or just get thrown out completely because you are from the EU.
  - SkyBelow 6y ago
    I just tried it. Went to the top seven sites for chicken tikka masala. Exited one for not loading, had to mute another tab with an annoying video, but got to the recipe in 6 of them in under two minutes. No popups (though I do have an ad blocker that may have prevented them). >read the ingredients list, and click the 'next page' button to see the instructions to work out what you can tweak That wasn't included. I was talking about scanning to verify there was an ingredient list. I pointed that out when I said: >That just isn't a significant portion of time compared to how long I'll spend comparing different recipes to find a common theme to follow.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
zwieback 6y ago
Dakota also owns many beautiful bowls and whisks handmade from sustainable materials, featured in 20 photos before the recipe hidden behind another link I hate blogger recipes, luckily there are enough cooking sites that are well curated.
- shostack 6y ago
  Don't forget the affiliate links to said bowls.
  - nicbou 6y ago
    That's something I'm fine with. It's better than targeted ads, and sometimes answers genuine questions.
SamBam 6y ago
It's definitely grown worse now, but I think that this originated from recipe sites that people actually used to follow, because the blogs were interesting and we got to know the writers, and what's changed is more that we're jumping to the first Google hit and we expect them just to grant us the information we wanted. There is a difference between opening up a recipe site, like a favorite blog, or the New York Times (which does the same kind of spiel before its recipes), just to read and find out what interesting thing they have posted, vs doing a search for "pasta carbonara," clicking on the first link, and having to read a life-story. I never mind opening up the recipe section of the New York Times and reading about what's so interesting about this recipe, and memorable times it was served. That's because I trust the article to be vaguely interesting, and reading it is a form of entertainment. There's a reason why no newspaper's recipe section has ever simply been: "Pasta Carbonara: 1 lb pasta. 2 oz Pancetta. 5 egg yolks. Cheese. Combine as directed below." So I feel like the in-vogue hatred of these recipe site styles is more a reflection of how expectations on consuming and searching for recipes has changed, more than significant changes in how recipes have always worked.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  I think it's also about different types of recipe collections. There are cookbooks that are all recipes. This seems to be what the HN crowd is looking for when they search the internet. There are cookbooks where each recipe is accompanied by a little story. These seem to sell well, judging by the number of them that appear on bookstore shelves. And then there are cookbooks where all of the anecdotes are in the front of the book and the recipes are in the back. These are the ones I like because I can easily find what I'm looking for, but can still read the background about a recipe, if I choose. It's not right in front of me causing the actual recipe steps to continue on another page. I think recipes and the internet don't mix, unless you're just looking up ingredients while shopping. It's one of the areas where a fat, old cookbook is always better, in my experience. 30 years from now, nobody is going to cherish grandma's dog-eared and tattered old iPad full of recipes.
  - mdszy 6y ago
    There's also cookbooks that are almost more like a textbook, with technical cooking information followed by recipes (almost like textbook information followed by exercises).
wastedhours 6y ago
It's gone to extremes now, but to be honest - if someone wants to blog and post a recipe at the same time, that's their prerogative? Some people actually enjoy reading those things too. There's a place for straight recipe sites, and a place for personal word-vomit blogs with a recipe at the bottom. The web would be a sad place if you were only allowed to write your recipes in LaTeX.
- Guest0918231 6y ago
  Yes, they can do whatever they desire. The issue is when people are required to write life stories and superfluous content not because that's the direction they want to go, and not because it's appealing to their target audience, but because it's the only way they can rank well on Google. On the user side if you only want straightforward recipes, you're out of luck, because they're never going to be near the top of the search results. If you are one of the people looking to read these recipe background stories, even you get a mediocre experience, because the majority of the content you're reading was written primarily for Google (how many times can I reference salmon, fish, atlantic, norwegian, protein, healthy, omega-3 and smoked in this recipe story to hit all of the important keywords?).
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >The issue is when people are required to write life stories and superfluous content not because that's the direction they want to go, and not because it's appealing to their target audience, but because it's the only way they can rank well on Google. Citation needed. When I do a search on, say, Wiener Schnitzel (which I made last night) it looks to me as if the top searches are pretty to the point. Honestly, I tend to want some context for a recipe other than just a list of ingredients and some directions.
    - wastedhours 6y ago
      Same for me too - especially in the Google recipe snippets at the top of the search. I find those tend to have more straight recipes, whereas the normal search list has more of the story style. And for context, I do like reading about the history of a recipe, why it was created etc... not all the stories float my boat, but literally all it takes is a scroll.
jurip 6y ago
If a recipe is too hard to find, just move on. If there's a few paragraphs of things you don't care about before the recipe, press page down. Maybe let Dakota write what she wants on her own site. One reason I haven't seen mentioned here for that personal content: it's also a question of building context and trust. If I go to Bon Appetit for a recipe, I know they've tested it a few times and it should be more or less OK even if I don't recognize the author. If I go to a barebones anonymous just-the-recipes site, I have no faith that it ever worked and if it did, it wasn't just a fluke and it was written down right. Having some detail around a recipe from a previously unknown source allows me to build a connection to a persona in my head, genuine or otherwise. If a recipe doesn't work I'll know to avoid the site in the future. If it does work I can remember that connection and come back to the site again with some more confidence.

by kmbfjr 6y ago

tmountain 6y ago

It's a running joke in our house. I start off wanting to make some mashed potatoes, and time and time again, I have to suffer through someone's life story--the camping trip in North Dakota when Susan's husband first discovered his love of homemade sour cream--etc. Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something people would gravitate towards.

pjc50 6y ago
Having thought about this and my own use of cookbooks as loose inspiration rather than actually to follow in detail, I have come to the conclusion that the "fluff" is what most of the recipe-reading public want. In particular, the fluff has value even if you never cook the recipe! Which saves a lot of time and inconvenience on your part while still giving the same warm fluffy feelings. Actual "I have these things and want to cook something" could practically be automated. The big exception is baking, where precision ratios and time matters a lot. (I'm also reminded of various stories of people trying to trace the origins of much loved family recipes and then discovering that rather than being an authentic traditional Calabrian whatever, their grandmother copied it off the back of a tin. I'm fairly sure my own grandmother's cookies recipe is from Tate&Lyle)
- dvtrn 6y ago
  I have come to the conclusion that the "fluff" is what most of the recipe-reading public want. I've often heard the prevailing reason why this happens on the web is because of SEO and 'bounce rates'. More time spent on the site improves ranking, so the actual recipe is pushed below the fold so users have to scroll down thereby adding more time on the site. Have often wondered if any SEO wonks with the inside baseball can actually validate this?
  - anticsapp 6y ago
    I can't validate this but have been told this by multiple authors and SEO professionals. So it's anecdotal. One blogger apologized to me and told me she was embarrassed doing it but it's an industry practice. She explained it's because other recipe sites use automated scraping tools and republish their recipes in an effort to outrank original authors. The personal fluff helps slow them down. Also, a lot of recipes are bullshit, they manually steal them from elsewhere and change a few variables to evade copyright claims. Although, I guess changing a few variables is how cuisines evolve.
    - kevinmchugh 6y ago
      Recipes aren't copyrightable. It's bad manners to copy and republish one without attribution, but not illegal. The introductory fluff is copyrightable, and that's one reason for it.
      - logfromblammo 6y ago
        Photographs, videos, or drawings of recipes in progress are copyrightable, and usually more helpful. Furthermore, they provide evidence that the recipe is actually viable. That's why you shouldn't expect to make a cent from creating a new recipe, unless you have a chef and photographer/artist lined up, or own your own restaurant chain.
    - AnonC 6y ago
      Thanks. This makes sense. I was wondering what these fluff pieces have to do with SEO, because surely the search engines aren’t monitoring all users and how long they spend on each page in order to rank the usefulness of the content in their search results. Bounce rates and how long a visitor stays on a page matter for those who own the sites and/or do some sort of marketing on them (ads, their own products, their services, etc.).
      - dvtrn 6y ago
        because surely the search engines aren’t monitoring all users and how long they spend on each page in order to rank the usefulness of the content in their search results. Probably not the search engines, but I could imagine this being a thing that goes into Google Analytics if an online recipe property is using that (or if their blogging platform has a plugin for it) maybe? Just spitballing from the hip.
- pfarrell 6y ago
  It happened to me. When I quizzed my grandmother for her beloved chocolate chip cookies recipe, I felt like being entrusted with a huge family secret. Nope. Toll House cookie recipe (which is on the back of every package) with an extra quarter cup of flour XD.
  - scrozier 6y ago
    I read long ago that you can/should always trust recipes printed on manufacturer's packages; after all, they've chosen them to stake their ingredients' reputations on.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Some of the best stories too have bits of the art inside of the food science anecdotes that contribute to a sense of why a particular variation on a recipe worked better for the author. Some authors have more of a sweet tooth, and others live in higher altitudes or tweak their recipes for camp stoves on hiking trips up the mountains. Some authors spend days and weeks of failures trying to get a proper balance of flour to baking soda/baking powder for just the exact sort of yeast rise they want from their dough, and others just wing it let the dough live or crumble as nature intends as it adds a little chaos to the whimsy and art of their eventual plating. It's also the little touches of humanity that people want if they want to follow a particular food blogger. The anecdotes add up over time to a sense of following a workplace or family sitcom to follow week to week (whether they make the recipes or not). It's a daily or weekly "soap opera" ("flour opera"?) of an acquaintance or "friend" that you also like to crib recipes from from time to time. Where these recipe bloggers have their steadiest audiences, those stories at the top of the recipe are the real draw day-to-day, and the recipes the fun addendum to bookmark for later.
thawaway1837 6y ago
“Why doesn’t everyone who is putting information out there for free not cater to exactly my needs”. What an utter load of bollocks. These are people who are creating something that they enjoy doing and giving you information you apparently need for free. I don’t understand why anyone would trash their desire to write something that is personal and/or interesting to them about it. And that’s setting aside that these usually make the recipes far more readable and interesting to the vast majority of people.
- scrollaway 6y ago
  It's a sweet world view, but the truth is that the majority of these cooking sites are filling in content for SEO and ad purposes, and the "stories" are fictions written by Tom, a 22 year old freelancer who isn't a yoga enthusiast but is just trying to make ends meet at 3¢/word.
  - thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
    And, the real farce is that Google mistakenly sees all that scrolling up and down the page, looking for the recipe as 'engagement' and "Dwell time".
    - mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
      Is that mistaken? Does no one click on ads on the page while doing this?
      - thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
        the algo thinks you're having a good time.
  - csa 6y ago
    This is so incredibly accurate.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
jackewiehose 6y ago
> Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something people would gravitate towards In German there's chefkoch.de. It's full of ads but its core is basically a big DB of user-submitted recipes without fluff. Don't you have something like that in English?
- Symbiote 6y ago
  I usually add "BBC" to my search term, which ① gets a straightforward page and ② ensures the measurements and oven temperatures will be metric. The further from the UK one is, the less useful this is. The measurements should only be a problem in the US and Canada, but common ingredients can change -- e.g. the fat content of cream, or whether canned tomatoes are salted or sweetened. Also, if you're from the rest of the world, you might wonder why they've forgotten the herbs and spices :-)
  - jackewiehose 6y ago
    > I usually add "BBC" to my search term Do you mean at chefkoch- or google-search? Yes, recipes are very hard to translate. For example I don't know what "cream" is and I never want extra sugar or salt in canned tomatoes.
    - Symbiote 6y ago
      I mean in Google search, or any other general web search. It's probably less necessary from the UK, but from Denmark an English-language recipe search has a good chance of giving American websites. Americans have to suffer sugary and salty canned tomatoes.
onion2k 6y ago
mashed potatoes Steam some potatoes. (Don't boil them. No one wants watery mash.) Add far more butter than anyone would think is reasonable. (Like, 1/2lb of butter to 1lb of potatoes. Maybe more.) Add salt and pepper. (No, more than that. You've under-seasoned them.) Mash them until they're the consistency you want. (For really smooth mash use an electric hand mixer instead of a masher.) To make them better still, put lots of wholegrain mustard or garlic in with the butter.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- galfarragem 6y ago
  I would buy a cooking book with recipes explained like this one. With real world tricks and explaining "why" you do it in that way. A raw list of ingredients is, in my opinion, almost useless.
  - gbear605 6y ago
    I’ve found that The New Best Recipe cookbook covers this pretty well for me. They have an introduction to each recipe talking about all the variants they tried, and then there’s a clearly marked recipe section.
  - csa 6y ago
    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.
- pugworthy 6y ago
  Since this seems to be an OK thread to add humor to, I'll point out you can also stick 'em in a stew.
wolco 6y ago
I have one. It doesn't rank after 15 years.
reaperducer 6y ago
Makes me wonder if a super barebones recipe site that literally just has recipes and absolutely no fluff would be something people would gravitate towards. There are apps like that, at least. I use How to Cook Everything. It's from Mark Bittman, who was with the New York Times at the time it was published. I don't know if he is anymore.
goatforce5 6y ago
I've had good luck with recipes from https://www.taste.com.au/ https://www.taste.com.au/ and https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/ https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/ Alternatively, if you want super barebones, go buy a copy of Escoffier's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_guide_culinaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_guide_culinaire (or an English translation thereof). It's arguably the definitive cookbook and the recipes are extremely terse, some just a couple of lines long. (e.g. "Take recipe A and recipe B, substituting X for Y.") "Escoffier's introduction to the first edition explains his intention that Le Guide culinaire be used toward the education of the younger generation of cooks. This usage of the book still holds today; many culinary schools still use it as their culinary textbook. Its style is to give recipes as brief descriptions and to assume that the reader either knows or can look up the keywords in the description."

sseagull 6y ago

My favorite: talking about how this recipe helped you cope with the September 11 attacks (although this intro is shorter than a lot that I have seen). https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017089-maple-shortbread-bars https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017089-maple-shortbread...

zerocrates 6y ago
It ran in the paper 8 days after 9/11... seems pretty reasonable to me. In much the same vein as the rush by many to baking now.
- mattkrause 6y ago
  The "9/11 content" is also literally four sentences long. One sentence also introduces the recipe contributor, while another describes the original source she adapted it from. It's not particularly gratuitous, especially given the date and location.

crankylinuxuser 6y ago

My understanding of why there's a life story copy at the top of recipes is that a recipe is not copyrightable, but a story is. And, an AI can generate a story one time relatively easy. https://lizerbramlaw.com/2015/04/07/copyright-protect-recipes/ https://lizerbramlaw.com/2015/04/07/copyright-protect-recipe...

tylerrobinson 6y ago
Is there evidence that the "annoying recipe sites" in question include algorithmic stories, or are you speaking hypothetically?
- crankylinuxuser 6y ago
  I don't have any direct proof that recipe sites are doing this. I only look at just how many "stories" there are, and how many recipes. There just looks like too much writing. And it too is also very formulaic. And it's also 'if I was to do a recipe site, I'd use a text generator'
  - logfromblammo 6y ago
    Sounds cheaper than paying a freelancer $0.025 per word, too. I suppose if you were just starting a blogspam recipe site, you could initially pay freelancers for the first articles, and use them as your training corpus. But since this sort of templated recipe site is already evil, just scrape all the other recipe sites and use their articles as your corpus. "When we vacationed in { madlib( international_city ) }, we ate a { r.Name }, and it was delicious. When we returned home, we tried to recreate the recipe, but it was never quite right. After months of trying, it's finally perfect." "As a child, I remember my grandmother making { r.Name } and eating it with all my cousins. It was her secret recipe. She never told anyone. When she died, we were all very sad because we thought the recipe was gone forever. But I found this in her old { madlib( noun ) }, and now I'm the most popular cousin at the reunion." Repeat ad nauseam.
interestica 6y ago
I've always thought of copyrighted music as "sound recipes"

tclancy 6y ago

Now we need an bot that parses the comments and applies AI to do . . . something with the people who say the substituted half the ingredients for what they had and left the others out to reply and tell them what recipe they actually made and that they can stuff their 1 star review.

SkyBelow 6y ago

Does it pose an actual problem? When I search for recipes, I type in the food I want + recipe and then open the top 5 or so links. I quick scan for a list of ingredients. If I don't easily spot on in a few seconds I move on. I'll do this until I have a couple different lists of ingredients for making the item. This ends up taking less than a minute or two. That just isn't a significant portion of time compared to how long I'll spend comparing different recipes to find a common theme to follow. Maybe it is because I never follow a single recipe but instead combine the common themes from a couple that the whole life story before the recipe shtick isn't something that bothers me.

onion2k 6y ago
This ends up taking less than a minute or two. For you to open 5 websites, dismiss the cookie permission request on each one, dismiss the notifications request, scroll down to find the ingredients list, dismiss the scrolling activated newsletter signup, read the ingredients list, and click the 'next page' button to see the instructions to work out what you can tweak, all in an average of 24s per site is very impressive.
- Freak_NL 6y ago
  Or just get thrown out completely because you are from the EU.
- SkyBelow 6y ago
  I just tried it. Went to the top seven sites for chicken tikka masala. Exited one for not loading, had to mute another tab with an annoying video, but got to the recipe in 6 of them in under two minutes. No popups (though I do have an ad blocker that may have prevented them). >read the ingredients list, and click the 'next page' button to see the instructions to work out what you can tweak That wasn't included. I was talking about scanning to verify there was an ingredient list. I pointed that out when I said: >That just isn't a significant portion of time compared to how long I'll spend comparing different recipes to find a common theme to follow.
0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago

zwieback 6y ago

Dakota also owns many beautiful bowls and whisks handmade from sustainable materials, featured in 20 photos before the recipe hidden behind another link I hate blogger recipes, luckily there are enough cooking sites that are well curated.

shostack 6y ago
Don't forget the affiliate links to said bowls.
- nicbou 6y ago
  That's something I'm fine with. It's better than targeted ads, and sometimes answers genuine questions.

SamBam 6y ago

It's definitely grown worse now, but I think that this originated from recipe sites that people actually used to follow, because the blogs were interesting and we got to know the writers, and what's changed is more that we're jumping to the first Google hit and we expect them just to grant us the information we wanted. There is a difference between opening up a recipe site, like a favorite blog, or the New York Times (which does the same kind of spiel before its recipes), just to read and find out what interesting thing they have posted, vs doing a search for "pasta carbonara," clicking on the first link, and having to read a life-story. I never mind opening up the recipe section of the New York Times and reading about what's so interesting about this recipe, and memorable times it was served. That's because I trust the article to be vaguely interesting, and reading it is a form of entertainment. There's a reason why no newspaper's recipe section has ever simply been: "Pasta Carbonara: 1 lb pasta. 2 oz Pancetta. 5 egg yolks. Cheese. Combine as directed below." So I feel like the in-vogue hatred of these recipe site styles is more a reflection of how expectations on consuming and searching for recipes has changed, more than significant changes in how recipes have always worked.

reaperducer 6y ago
I think it's also about different types of recipe collections. There are cookbooks that are all recipes. This seems to be what the HN crowd is looking for when they search the internet. There are cookbooks where each recipe is accompanied by a little story. These seem to sell well, judging by the number of them that appear on bookstore shelves. And then there are cookbooks where all of the anecdotes are in the front of the book and the recipes are in the back. These are the ones I like because I can easily find what I'm looking for, but can still read the background about a recipe, if I choose. It's not right in front of me causing the actual recipe steps to continue on another page. I think recipes and the internet don't mix, unless you're just looking up ingredients while shopping. It's one of the areas where a fat, old cookbook is always better, in my experience. 30 years from now, nobody is going to cherish grandma's dog-eared and tattered old iPad full of recipes.
- mdszy 6y ago
  There's also cookbooks that are almost more like a textbook, with technical cooking information followed by recipes (almost like textbook information followed by exercises).

wastedhours 6y ago

It's gone to extremes now, but to be honest - if someone wants to blog and post a recipe at the same time, that's their prerogative? Some people actually enjoy reading those things too. There's a place for straight recipe sites, and a place for personal word-vomit blogs with a recipe at the bottom. The web would be a sad place if you were only allowed to write your recipes in LaTeX.

Guest0918231 6y ago
Yes, they can do whatever they desire. The issue is when people are required to write life stories and superfluous content not because that's the direction they want to go, and not because it's appealing to their target audience, but because it's the only way they can rank well on Google. On the user side if you only want straightforward recipes, you're out of luck, because they're never going to be near the top of the search results. If you are one of the people looking to read these recipe background stories, even you get a mediocre experience, because the majority of the content you're reading was written primarily for Google (how many times can I reference salmon, fish, atlantic, norwegian, protein, healthy, omega-3 and smoked in this recipe story to hit all of the important keywords?).
- ghaff 6y ago
  >The issue is when people are required to write life stories and superfluous content not because that's the direction they want to go, and not because it's appealing to their target audience, but because it's the only way they can rank well on Google. Citation needed. When I do a search on, say, Wiener Schnitzel (which I made last night) it looks to me as if the top searches are pretty to the point. Honestly, I tend to want some context for a recipe other than just a list of ingredients and some directions.
  - wastedhours 6y ago
    Same for me too - especially in the Google recipe snippets at the top of the search. I find those tend to have more straight recipes, whereas the normal search list has more of the story style. And for context, I do like reading about the history of a recipe, why it was created etc... not all the stories float my boat, but literally all it takes is a scroll.

jurip 6y ago

If a recipe is too hard to find, just move on. If there's a few paragraphs of things you don't care about before the recipe, press page down. Maybe let Dakota write what she wants on her own site. One reason I haven't seen mentioned here for that personal content: it's also a question of building context and trust. If I go to Bon Appetit for a recipe, I know they've tested it a few times and it should be more or less OK even if I don't recognize the author. If I go to a barebones anonymous just-the-recipes site, I have no faith that it ever worked and if it did, it wasn't just a fluke and it was written down right. Having some detail around a recipe from a previously unknown source allows me to build a connection to a persona in my head, genuine or otherwise. If a recipe doesn't work I'll know to avoid the site in the future. If it does work I can remember that connection and come back to the site again with some more confidence.