Submitted 1 day ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to technology@lemmy.world
Let me take this opportunity to complain about online recipes these days. Everything is inflated with a ridiculous volume of unwanted fluff content that makes the recipes more difficult to use.
Like, I just want to know the ingredients for Beef Stroganoff and in what order to assemble them. What I get is a book that starts with, “Beef Stroganoff started as the ancestral celebration meal for peasant steppe farmers…yadda…yadda…yadda.”
This is because of everyone’s favorite topic SEO
@Rooster326 @xenomor not just SEO; also the blogs are paid for with inline ads so you need enough text to fit the ads in *and* a forced scroll through them to satisfy the view counters, plus you can't copyright a list of ingredients but you CAN copyright the text around a recipe so this is all a method of claiming authorship (not that that will stop the AI scrapers).
Entirely Google’s fault. Their prevalence and search ranking decisions.
I recommend picking up an analog, wood pulp-based copy of The Joy of Cooking. Pretty much any classic western dish is in there and you don’t need to worry about AI slop.
I also love my copy of The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. That one is a little more global, and has I think 500+ pages of recipes with minimal irrelevant anecdotes.
The Joy of Cooking is a blast to read, especially if you can find old editions. They are constantly updating, and if you get some older versions from the mid 20th century and before, you’ll find things like instructions on how to skin a squirrel.
That’s how Thug Kitchen started. To cut through the crap but also be funny at the same time
I can’t open this site so it might already mention this, but I went to a website that had specific buttons to have 4 different AIs offer their input on the recipe. Obviously I clicked off immediately, but that’s an insane thing to do. The whole point of a recipe is that an “expert” or at least a real human being with tastebuds presumably made this and thought it was good enough to share. I don’t want the general statistical average of every soup recipe. I want one specific recipe and for it to be cohesive and good. Some breads have rosemary in them. Some have raisins. Some have poppy seeds. I don’t need something that doesn’t understand the difference between poppy seed bread and cinnamon raisin bread telling me about poppy seed raisin bread. I know that’s not exactly how it works, but still. It’s incredible to me that people would do that.
I mean, if you want a soup recipe, this one has been feeding my family for 100+ years. Great grandma Hulda brought it from the old country, taught grandma Joan and auntie Sandra. Grandma Joan taught me. I’m the last one making it, though boy, everyone loves eating it!
Caution: As with all old recipes, makes a metric fuckton of soup. Don’t do this if it’s only 1-2 people.
Ingredients
2 Cups of flour (250g)
1/2 Teaspoon salt
1 Teaspoon baking powder
2 Eggs whipped to a froth added to 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup of warm water (118 to 177ml)
4 Potatoes
1 Onion
1 1/2 Pounds (24 oz., 680g) of beef sausage (also called German Summer Sausage)
2 to 3 Tablespoons of butter, lightly mixed with a little flour
1/2 Quart (2 cups, 473ml) of milk
1 Sterile pair of scissors
Chop the potatoes and onion into bite size pieces. Put them in a pot and pour in enough water to not only cover them all completely but to cover them to a depth of 4 inches (10cm). Bring to a boil and cook for and additional 15 minutes.
While the potatoes and onion are cooking add the water and eggs to the flour, salt and baking powder and mix in a bowl. Knead the dough repeatedly until it is completely smooth with no lumps, rough spots or wet spots.
When the dough is ready, break off strips and roll them between your hands until they are about 1/4 of an inch (6mm) thick (slightly smaller than a bread-stick).
Cut the summer sausage into bite size pieces. You may flour the knife as needed to keep the meat from sticking to it.
By now the potato and onion mix should be well cooked and it is time to add the dumplings and sausage to the mix.
The preferred method of adding the dumpings is to use the sterilized pair of scissors, hold the strip of dough above the pot and snip the dumpings straight into the pot (watch out for backsplash!)
If you don’t have a sterile pair of scissors you can cut them manually with a knife and add them to the pot with the meat.
IMPORTANT! Dumplings will swell to 3 times their cut size as they cook!
Make
them
SMALL!
Stir well and cook for another 30 to 45 minutes or until the dumplings are well boiled. Be careful at this stage because it is likely the pot will boil over if the temperature is too high.
If you place a wooden spoon across the top of the pot, that can help limit boil over.
At this point the soup may seem too thin. Add the butter and flour mixture as well as the milk as thickening agents and cook 10 to 15 minutes more if needed to thicken the broth.
Refrigerate any leftovers and re-heat like any other soup.
Grand-dad alway put vineagar in his, but you do you! 😉
This is such a beautiful comment. Feels like what the internet was made for. The holidays have me all emotional, but this just was so sweet. Thank you very much for sharing! I will probably not make this for a while, since holiday plans/family visiting/cooking for out of town picky eaters/etc etc. but it might be my first dish of the new year. Legitimately very excited to try this. Thank you again for sharing.
The AI we need.
Thanks for sharing! Imma cook this bitch up sometime soon
The vast majority of things gen AI produces becomes pointless when you take the human out of the equation imo.
Don’t let AI generate recipes. Recipes are generally tried, tweaked a little, tried again, etc until it’s consistently reproducible, and well good. The AI recipes I’ve tried get proportions wrong, skips steps, has stuff cooked in the wrong order, etc. There is no trial and error or iterations.
I mean, you could take the same logic and apply it to many things AI generated…
Well… I guess you’re right … dang. 🤯
…So are we going back to print cookbooks?
I have a cookbook (not a recipe book - there’s a difference) from 50 years ago (with the latest edition being 2019) and it’s amazing. No need to go for modern hipster recipes that don’t teach you anything…
Wandering through to mention that your local library almost certainly has a collection of cookbooks spanning decades, and, depending on your area, might even have stuff tied specifically to your region. Take the book, photocopy the recipes you’re interested in, return it, get to cooking!
America’s Test Kitchen. All you need. Recipes for nerds.
100%.
But I was pondering more what the general population might do. People are going to figure out slop recipes don’t work, but the question is what’s the next most accessible thing to replace it with?
Wayyy ahead of you, I have a collection of vintage cookbooks that is growing by the day! Muahahahha :D
my mother has something like 8000 cookbooks she’s collected from the 1930s to around 2015.
I think I’m set.
Heh, so does mine.
All our parents’ book hoarding may end up saving us. And the internet, if they become the new standard?
Until they take without or print date.
You joke, but that’s horrifying.
This is already an SEO technique, apparently, and I could see Amazon book sellers finding a way to fudge it: yoast.com/help/date-appears-search-results/
As someone who lives at an altitude above 50ft, most cookbooks always kinda sucked out-of-the-box.
Maybe if I could find a recipe for a simple corn bread without a trilogy worth of lore about the writer’s grandmother, they wouldn’t be in such a predicament. In terms of AI strengths, informational efficiency is paramount. I can think of fewer things I can search for with more worthless gunk tacked to it than a recipe.
Don’t worry bloggers, soon Ai will have affiliate links and SEO and people will move on to the next new thing until it becomes a soulless money Hussle.
I’m pretty sure that’s already happening.
It crushes my soul that I work hard every day and make less than an AI bot running dozens of websites and youtube channels despite churning out garbage.
Recipe blogs were already a problem.
don’t forget to add the lye to your gravy this year. it makes it way less lumpy.
use it in a 1:1 ratio with the amount of water you use.
🎶Why you lyen’🎶
I watch chefs on YouTube demonstrate techniques, and then make recipes up as I go based on the ingredients I have available (This does not work for recipes that require exact measurements, like breads). Finding recipes through search engines has been a nightmare for a looong time.
Also - Madhur Jaffrey and America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks. Both go into detail on techniques you can bring forward into all your cooking. Madhur Jaffrey taught me how to cook Indian food and it’s amazing
(This does not work for recipes that require exact measurements, like breads)
There’s a reason we have different words for “cooking” and “baking.”
Once you do enough cooking, you start to realize that most recipes can be rendered down to a few basic components and combinations … and it all depends on what region of the world you’re in, what culture, what foods are available and what you grew up with.
Cooking, preparing, cutting and serving a turkey/chicken is fairly simple if you stick to just the basics … and use a digital thermometer to monitor the internal temperatures
Gravy is a bit of a trick but do it enough times and you get the hang of it … if all else fails, have a packet of instant gravy mix handy (it makes gravy in about ten minutes)
Everything else with the Thanksgiving dinner is basically just boiled vegetables … if you plan on anything more complicated than this, then you are spending the entire day in the kitchen.
Dessert can be very simple or very complicated … depending on how masochistic you want to be … but it’s best to prepare the sweet stuff a day or two ahead of time.
Whatever you do … stay in the kitchen and pay attention to everything that is cooking, baking, frying or boiling … if it’s roasting for hours, stay nearby and be ready to act on it if anything changes or goes bad … in your off time when nothing needs to be done in the kitchen, wash the dishes and clean the space, because you’ll be making a mess again as soon as you start processing food again anyway.
If you’re not cooking, you’re cleaning. If you’re not cleaning, you’re cooking.
Thermometer! Always a thermometer! Not even meats, it’s great for breads, and also temping oil for deep frying.
This year, my family decided on a big get together. I have no idea who all is coming.
My plan is to start Wednesday with cranberry sauce so it has time to sit in the fridge overnight.
Thursday morning I have it all planned out…
2 loaves of banana bread (350°)
Scalloped potatoes (350°)
3 loaves of bread, white, medium wheat, dark wheat (425° oven, internal to 180°)
Sweet potatoes with toasted pecan topping. (stovetop +450° in the oven for toasting).
If I start by 10:00 it should all be done by 4:00 which gives me time to clean up, pack up, and get to the house.
Can I come too? Do you have room for uninvited guests? I won’t talk to anyone or bother anyone … I’ll just eat :)
You know, if those AI recipe pages don’t have millions of kilometers of backstory to scroll through before you get to the actual recipe written comprehensively, I can at least understand it a little bit. So I hope none of the food bloggers who did that are complaining, because you drove people to this.
Aside from that, damn, I hope it is easy to spot if something is AI in terms of recipes. Guess it is time to buy some old cookbooks to be sure.
Search engine algorithms drove people to write stories before recipes, unfortunately. Pages that just had recipes were deprioritized
SEO started killing the internet long before the genAI wave yeah. I was also always a bit mad at the concept in general. Surely search engine optimization is something for… search engines, not websites? I hate that we ended up changing the way we create websites in order to appease The Machine, instead of it getting better at surfacing quality content
Some food bloggers understand this and have a button to take you straight to the recipe. So many don’t, though.
I just want a recipe for peanut butter cookies, not a web novel, Jan. If I want a story with the recipe, I’ll go watch “Good Eats.”
Even better when they have a print option, then you get a pdf of the recipe and never visit the site again. No subscribe pop up while you’re trying to look up how much water to add to the pan of flaming grease
The only AI generated recipe I would ever purposely make is the cake from Portal.
Except I don’t know where I am gonna get alpha resins… Whatever those are.
ooh, look at mister has-a-cross borehole electro-magnetic imaging rhubarb here.
Doesn’t everybody?
Glen and Friends has never let me down. I’d recommend the channel.
I just saw someone repost AI Slop as a list of “classic Thanksgiving crockpot recipes”. It included various ingredients such as:
Honestly, it got me angrier than it should have, but it’s a sign of the times. It wasn’t verified by the poster and it’s just clearly AI Slop.
1 cup starch‽ That’s right baby, you don’t simply swallow this soup, you fucking chew it!
Yep, that’s it. I didn’t feel the need to propogate its presence. Mmmm, steak lips. And my favorite other dish made from cranberro sauce and crango juice. Also, no temperature or time at all. Just… Boil for hours?
Bosher salt, everyone’s favorite kosher salt and borax mixed seasoning. Why stop at sodium chloride when you can enjoy the power of sodium borate?
Kill the ants and slugs in your brain
Somehow read that as a snail onion
Instead of AI slop, that looks to me like someone that doesn’t speak the language hurriedly transcribing it from paper, getting paid by the recipe, and knowing nobody is going to verify anything.
I considered that, but decided it was AI throwing words together like “garlicpper”. Another commenter has posted it
I knew my short phase of collecting cookbooks would pay off one-day!
You can get good 2nd hand cook books for insanely cheap (compared to new) from op shops/thrift. It’s one of a few things that are still decent value on the 2nd hand market.
I tried making roasted plantains the other week after getting a ridiculous deal on 40 pounds of them. ($6!) I’ve only ever made chips before, so I looked up a video recipe with a great looking finished product. By the time they had finished baking, they were still basically raw, and I had to up the temp to something reasonable. If a recipe came out on or after 2023, I’m ignoring it forever.
Plantains are a fickle plant. Ripeness is a huge factor, and that aside, some are just fibery/less sweet and don’t cook as fast.
The recipe was bunk from the get go, but I wasn’t certain until after trying it. 90c for 1 hour, and then 120c for 15 minutes with very ripe plantains. I thought they knew something I didn’t. I’ve learned to be intensely skeptical of online recipes.
Cooking at 200c for 15 minutes flipping, and cooking for another 15-25 minutes was universally decent
Maybe controversial, but if I ask AI for a recipe I get one. If I search for something and go to a website there’s a fucking novel to trawl through before I find the actual recipe. Even then it’s in weird units half the time.
90% of the time I’m only looking for advice on a single aspect. How long to cook X at Y? Can I put X in Y? List required ingredients. etc.
Just makes sense to add gemini to the search and get the answer I’m looking for immediately.
Yeah I hear you there. Quick recipes are the singular reason I find AI useful.
Watch the bad substitutions in the comments actually fix the recipes now
enjoy your dinner with glue, rocks and rat poison!
Slop it up!
I’m so glad i nabbed my families cook books. I’ll be needing them in the near future.
myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip 14 hours ago
If you food blog recipe site didn’t have 17 miles of bullshit about your life story that no one gives af about before the recipe, maybe, just maybe more people would use your recipe.
Soup@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I just hate that the recipe list, instructions, and the other relevant information are in three different places.
snugglesthefalse@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
Yeah I don’t understand why they moved away from recipe cards and single page things you can just look at.
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 14 hours ago
I was talked with making a peanut butter pie for tomorrow. First three I looked up had exactly this! And their “jump to recipe” button of course didn’t fucking work or was taking like 30 seconds to parse all the ads and I ain’t got patience for that bull!