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Cookbooks are unironically great
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Submitted 1 year ago by ChasingEnigma@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Comments
originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee 1 year ago
derf82@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And often available super cheap at thrift stores.
poppy@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Or your library, some even digitally so you can just get them on Libby and not have to drive to the library! Plus then you can screen cap your favorite recipes. 😁
Steeve@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
But they’re all from the 90s at best, so as long as you like shake and bake, casseroles, and jello with fruit chunks in it…
Herrmens@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You could also use something like JustTheRecipe If you want something for free to get rid of the clutter plainoldrecipe might be a thing. Though the server was down last time I checked
TheGiantKorean@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Oh, this is fantastic. Thank you!
I_Has_A_Hat@startrek.website 1 year ago
95% of the time, there is a little button/link somewhere near the top of the page that says “Jump to Recipe”. Click that and you’ll go straight to the recipe.
LordOfTheChia@lemmy.world 1 year ago
“Print Recipe” works better when available too. That puts the ingredients and steps in one page (usually).
scops@reddthat.com 1 year ago
Oftentimes they’ll have a Print button as well which reduces the page down to just the ingredients and steps.
TheTetrapod@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is a game changer that seemingly nobody knows about. I fucking love that button.
JoBo@feddit.uk 1 year ago
DontTreadOnBigfoot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Uhh…I’m afraid to click that
tempest@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
www.cookingforengineers.com is one I enjoy. The recipe charts are pretty much all you need but the more detailed bits can help.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I hate those charts
Scrollone@feddit.it 1 year ago
I don’t even get how they work, and I’m an engineer
ef9357@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Try allrecipes.com. Recipes with little to no fluff.
Stabbitha@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Second Allrecipes. If anything there’s a 1-3 sentence intro to the recipe by the author, then the recipe. And it’s not overloaded with ads, and their app is halfway decent. Oh, and their comments are actually helpful. Rather than the typical “I replaced these core ingredients and it was shit. 0 stars”, it’s more “I replaced this for this reason and this is how it affected the recipe”; they’re actually a great way to crowdsource recipe modifications because the userbase doesn’t appear to be complete morons, and a lot of the comment mods are better than the original recipe.
evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think what happened is that back in the day, recipes were super sparse and crappy. Think of the typical “grandma’s recipe” written on an index card with half of the ingredients not listed as having any specific amount, and the only directions would be “mix” and “put in a hot oven”. Then you had websites that basically did the same thing. Allrecipes is a good example of this; not too much fluff, but there are so many crappy recipes on there. Unless you know who made the recipe (like chef john), it’s hard to trust a lot of them.
Then you had websites like serious eats where they wouldn’t just give you the recipe, they tell you how and why they made choices about ingredients, process, etc. That stuff is all super helpful if it’s what you are looking for, so Google et al. would give them and sites like them search priority. They also need to make money, so the added space for advertisement is a plus for them.
Now, anyone can spend a little bit of money to start a website, throw down a lot of useless preamble, and get the same search engine priority as serious eats. Most of those are garbage.
No one is going to do the work to put out great recipes for free, though, so there’s gotta be some compromise. If you are willing to spend money, there’s a lot of great cookbooks, and the ebook versions of them are easily searchable. New York times cooking, Bon Appétit, and America’s test kitchen/cooks illustrated have extensive catalogs of fairly barebones recipes if you are willing to spend money on a subscription.
There’s also apps and browser extensions that chop the unnecessary stuff off of a recipe, but just keep in mind that a lot of those sites that pop up when you just Google a recipe suck.
I think some of the best recipes you can get with no pay wall or unnecessary text are from the websites of companies that actually sell ingredients or equipment because they are basically just advertising for themselves. For example, king arthur baking company has good bread recipes cause they want you to buy their flour. Similarly, anson mills has a lot of good stuff. Those companies have dedicated test kitchens of professionals.
What I wish I had was a way to create a whitelist of sites/authors that I could search for recipes
GraniteM@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Open the recipe, with all the personal anecdotes and whatnot. Ctrl+F “Print”. This will take you to the print button that is nearly always right above the actual recipe. You can also download the printed recipe pdf for later reference.
TMPinSYR@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not exactly answering your question but it’s related.
My understanding is that you can’t copyright a recipe just like you can’t copyright data. The author’s anecdotes, however, CAN be protected via copyright. So adding the stories to the recipe some copyright protection.
thisfro@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
Most recipe pages embed the recipe as structured data which recipe mobile apps make use of, there sure are extensions or webapps using it too
Touching_Grass@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s how websites keep the lights on. How dare you try to circumvent your ad responsibility
thorbot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There’s this cool new invention where they take the information needed to make food and put it on flat pieces of wood pulp and bind them together, then you can buy the collection of pages with money. It doesn’t have pop up ads asking for your email, asking to accept cookies, autoplay videos about some kitchen gadgets you’ll never use. It’s fantastic.
kambusha@feddit.ch 1 year ago
Ok, but if these wood pulps have ANY personal anecdotes, I’m gonna come over and bonk you over the head with one.
thorbot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Fair
guazzabuglio@lemm.ee 1 year ago
(NYT cooking)[cooking.nytimes.com] tends to have recipes with short descriptions and very little narrative.
unfinishedsentenc@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Seconding this. It’s not free after the trial but you don’t have to weed through a bunch of pop up ads, auto play videos and narrative essays in order to get to the recipe. I personally like the comment sections on there to learn how other people change the recipes and experiment.
clockwork_octopus@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I use an app called Paprika. It’s not free, but well worth it, imo. It removes everything but the recipe, sorts that out into a readable format, has several timer functions that can all run simultaneously, and you can tag and filter recipes however you want.
Deepus@lemm.ee 1 year ago
The the paprika3 app, it has a in apo browser where you can find the recipe you want and yhen hit the download button to save only the recipe. You still have to trawl thtough the shit the forst time but when you come to make it again its all just sat there waiting nicely for you
UndulyUnruly@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What? You don’t have to trawl through any shit in Paprika. I don’t even wait for the page to load the “accept cookies” dialogue.
Navigate to a recipe of interest, hit the download button in Paprika. Bam! There is the recipe, ingredients and description only, no fluff.
If you don’t want to save the recipe because you don’t like it, just discard and don’t save.
drekly@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I have a follow-up question.
Where do recipes come from? Surely everyone’s just stealing each other’s recipes and the most arrogant people are compiling it all into cookbooks and pretending they invented it?
Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.com 1 year ago
This is actually why they include the personal anecdote. Supposedly it’s easier to copyright a recipe when some sort of creative writing is attached. Because the bare recipe isn’t creative or unique enough to be considered copyrightable.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The vast majority of recipes are derived from other recipes and combinations. The more ethical sources will be open about that. J Kenji Lopez-Alt, Andrew “Babish” Rea, and Alvin Zhou are VERY open about what inspired a given recipe whether it is another cook, a dish they had a t a restaurant, or just “tradition” and other cookbooks. Ethan Chlebowski and Brian Lagerstorm focus more on the underlying cooking techniques but will also generally credit the “inspiration”.
And then it is just iteration. Which is where Lagerstorm and Chlebowski are great sources as they had a semi-recent “podcast” where they made Taco Bell live or some shit and talked about how a single cheesecake video means they made cheesecake dozens of times over the course of a week or two.
This is WHY most of those recipe sites are hellscape blogposts. Because even the amateur chef likely put a couple hundred dollars worth of time and effort into that “ten dollar weeknight meal” and either they or the company that paid for the recipe need to try and make back some of that cash. Which generally means long ass blog posts for SEO and a shit ton of ads and affiliate links.
derf82@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Same way there is so many songs when we have just 12 basic musical notes. There are only a few techniques and ratios, but minor adjustments can make a difference.
Alton Brown has another great metaphor. Cooking is like driving to a destination. A recipe is like turn-by-turn directions. But there are multiple ways to get places. Good cooks like good navigators just use a map.
Cheems@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Usually it’s just variants of previously made things. But yeah some could be just word for word copies.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If it’s a baked dessert, Sally’s Baking Addiction is your one-stop shop. Her recipe preambles are about how the recipe works and how it can be tweaked, not her fake grandmother in Cyprus.
scytale@lemm.ee 1 year ago
There’s a browser extension that removes all the non-recipe parts of a page or just takes you directly to the recipe section, I don’t remember exactly. I forgot the name though. It’s the ideal way so you’re not limited to specific sites only.
Bongles@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I use copymethat.com. you can grab it as an extension in your browser or an app on your phone and then when you find these recipes it grabs the actual recipe out from all the nonsense.
Nighed@sffa.community 1 year ago
The BBC has loads of recipes. No adds (in UK at least) and minimal fluff
Fafner@yiffit.net 1 year ago
If you’re looking for an app Tasty is fairly good.
laylawashere44@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
YouTube shorts, no time for bs when you have 60s to do a recipe.
fievel@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Nowadays it’s video for everything… Am I the only old bear that prefer plain old textual tutorials?
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 1 year ago
From message boards that steal content from all other sites?
Failing that: Paywalled sites that have a source of income that is not dependent on ads and SEO.
TheLongPrice@lemmy.one 1 year ago
I blame the search engines that encouraged this
derf82@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Advertising, too.