Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/24/learning-an-entire-life-story.html
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9 Likes
Amen and amen. The idea is kind of nice, but the execution is awful, and long pages strewn with ads make it more headache than a recipe may work.
Serious Eats has this down; an article on its own page about the history and science of a dish, and then a page for the recipe. Highly recommend.
16 Likes
This is humorous and accurate. My reaction to all recipe blogs is YOU DIDN’T INVENT FOOD LINDA JUST STATE THE RECIPE
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Nope.
2 Likes
Where’s the damn SKIP TO RECIPE button? There’s NOT one?!? And then… and THEN… it comes out baking soda flavored rubber and you’re like did they EVEN TRY IT?!?
7 Likes
My favorite recipe for cooking steak in the oven in preceded by a ten page rant on how you don’t know how to buy meat and you’re definitely doing it wrong. Then the recipe itself is embedded in more story about the physics or whatever of cooking meat. There are no bullet points- the steps are hidden inside paragraphs about tangential things. After using it twice I transcribed the actual steps out into my own document because it kept me from inflicting physical violence on the author of that post. Hell of a recipe though.
8 Likes
I use Chrome Recipe Filter. When you go to a website with a recipe on it, it will just pop up the recipe for you:
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J Peterman Waffles 
9 Likes
Serious Eats is the best. Not only do they have the recipe link up top, but the article is actually useful if you need to understand what’s actually happening and not just listen to a busy parent lament that inspired the dish. I find that at least 50% of the time a recipe is simply not suitable for home cooks. Industrial ovens and equipment where recipes are usually tested are leagues different and adjustments have to be made based on your particular setup. Plus, if you don’t have a dishwasher (human or machine), many of them leave you with a giant piles of dirty, single-use gadgets.
For instance, I recently made Tinga de Pollo from a recipe. I usually roll my own, but decided to try a tomato-based recipe. It called for stewing down two pounds of fire-roasted tomatoes, onions and chiles, then stewing down again with pre-cooked shredded chicken for an hour. Why the hell would I get three large, unnecessary dishes dirty just to boil off water and overcook chicken breast? Instead, I did it the way I usually do, cooking the chicken while shredding it into the mojo sauce and ending up with nice, juicy breast and a clean counter. Two dishes; one to blend the sauce with my stick blender and a sauté pan to pull it all together.
7 Likes
Agreed on all points. That Tinga sounds great!
3 Likes
I’ve actually seen this and it was driving me nuts. There were a few recently where i had to scroll way way way down to find the actual steps for the recipe, most of the page was a bunch of tangentially related garbage or tips for alternate recipes that i wasn’t interested in.
3 Likes
I read somewhere that search engines reward sites if they detect that you scroll all the way to the bottom of an article (i.e., appear to have read the entire thing) after clicking to the article from the search results. So recipes with long articles you have to scroll past get rewarded.
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Yes, the long-form story for recipes is meant to create more room for ads for the reader to see. These publishers do not care about the recipe, they are selling ad space.
8 Likes
I think click-bait companies have software to automatically render a straightforward one page story as 46 pages with one paragraph and a stock photo on each one.
Toss in a recipe and see what happens…
4 Likes
Very annoying, but that’s what we get for the low low price of “attention” right? How else is everyone getting paid but by ads. They know how long it takes you to get to the recipe. That’s a feature, not a bug.
I love the internet and occasionally use an internet recipe, but mileage varies so much I can’t usually be arsed. Instead I continue adding to my immense collection of cook books.
Cook books, underappreciated masterpieces in my opinion. Their shelf life in the store is mayfly short, then they end up on the clearance rack where I can snarfle them up for a couple of dollars. No clickbait or other bullshit, just the recipes (and maybe a picture for each one).
Then of course I flip through them for inspiration when trying to find some way to cook the (x vegetable/meat item) that needs to get used up in the fridge.
6 Likes
I think stewing chiles was outlawed around the same time we had to stop sending them up chimneys.
Chilis?
2 Likes
my pet peeve is freaking recipe VIDEOS. just give it to me in text, dammit, and don’t give me a life story to scroll through. i will defend Serious Eats, though – their recipes always kick ass, and i do appreciate the science or at least the culinary thought behind why you use these things, in this order, to get something delicious. i may not always want or need to know it, but it’s nice to be able to toss out that info when you put something on the table and people go “holy crap, this is GOOD.”
8 Likes
This is why I like Smitten Kitchen. Yes, almost all of her recipes have an article beforehand, but 1) she has a link to skip to the recipe, and 2) her articles are a good mix of personal anecdotes and kitchen cookery explainers. Her recipes are adaptations of those she’s found and liked, and I’ve learned a lot from her methods of simplifying and weekday-izing recipes.
6 Likes
I love Bon Apetit videos but my biggest complaint is that they sometimes don’t have a written recipe you can cross reference later. For certain dishes they do but a few i was interested in were not written down in the description or on their website so i had to scrub through the whole thing to make notes. Even then some of the instructions in the video were vague in one i took notes for so i have to make some educated guesses.
3 Likes
