[neaden]

So as someone who cooks a lot, and gets frustrated by long blog like posts that lots of recipes have this day, this website is probably even less useful for me. The tagging system isn't being used correctly, Ham Sandwich is tagged with Banana for some reason. Speaking of Ham sandwich some of the recipes are just way too simple, this just tells me how to assemble a sandwich which I don't think anyone really needs. Those are issues that can be solved long term, the other thing that will cause a problem long term is once this site starts getting repeat recipes. The blog like start to recipes may be annoying, but at least it sometimes helps you understand the decisions different people make for their recipes, or suggest substitutions/modifications.

Edit: The Spaghetti Carbonara recipe actually has multiple mistakes. it says the cook time is 0 minutes, it tells you to add the beaten eggs but never tells you to beat them, the recipe includes butter as an ingredient but the recipe tells you to heat the oil, and never says to grate the cheese. If this was a wiki or something I could try to fix those issues, but as it currently is I don't see any way to even flag it. It's also tagged as Banana and Greasy.

[duxup]

I just started moving my recipes all to ... github.

I find it easier to manage a bunch of markdown files than anything else.

Also rewriting them lets me list ingredients as groups as far as what goes together in a bowl or whatever ...the laundry list of ingredients so many sites list drives me crazy.

Outside of America's Test Kitchen... I've never found a blog's exposition on why they did what they did helpful. More often than not their description actually makes me question if they actually cooked the recipe often enough (or at all).

[rossjudson]

I had so much fun making <food>! I love to recreate recipes for <food>. I’ve been so pleased with the end result! It is the best dish ever! My <relatives> really enjoy it. You will enjoy it too. If you're planning to have just one half, you may want to reconsider, because once you start, you won't be able to stop. This is really the best one I've found! Please see my other recipes and visit the links below. I really like making this with my <equipment>. Read on to find out the secret to making totally awesome <food>. There are so many different side dishes to pair with <food>. Here are a few of my favorites: <side 1>, <side 2>.

[aqfamnzc]

What is <food>? (1 paragraph explanation) What is the best way to make <food>? (1 paragraph, mentioning <food> by name at least 8 times) What are benefits of <food>?

The aggressive SEO tactics, more than anything, are what drives me crazy.

[patrickk]

I blame google more than anything. Unfortunately, stuffing the content to hit minimum word counts is what ranks in google, and google obviously has a monopoly on search. Without this annoying blah blah, these websites would never rank and it wouldn’t be worth the authors time to make a recipe website. Maybe google should make a blog post on a “recipes” algo update that punishes filler content (of course they will never do that, they have all the arrogance befitting a monopoly provider). Readers, SEOs, cooks and even google themselves would benefit /rant over

I mainly use BBC Good Food. Being taxpayer funded and having unlimited google juice means they don’t need to play this game.

[oakesm9]

BBC Good Food is actually a commercial company rather than being publicly funded. It comes from the commercial arm of the BBC (BBC Worldwide).

BBC Food was the publicly funded website, but I think that was shut down a few years ago.

[marksbrown]

You mean this website has been shutdown? https://www.bbc.co.uk/food

[frogcoder]

I upvoted, but I really wanted to down vote you.

[roel_v]

I have a system based on Markdown-formatted (along with some custom markup for metadata) recipes on Dropbox, and some Python code that generates a formatted (as in, nice looking, like a proper cookbook) PDF cookbook. I then print the cookbook, make my notes in it, and once it gets too greasy/scribbled on, I consolidate the notes into the Markdown files and re-print. Every time I add a new recipe to my regular 'rotation', I add it to this cookbook (along with some tweaks for my ingredient availability and equipment), to not let it become just a random stack of disjoint recipes. This way I grow a proper 'family cookbook' that I hope I can pass on to my kids when they move out. It's also somewhat integrated with a broader meal-planning system, think GTD for keeping yourself fed.

I think the main problem with 'recipe websites' is that people don't want 'recipe websites'. They want 'cookbook websites', i.e. some editorial oversight over recipe quality, some standardization in units, style of directions, have a picture with each recipe, etc. What am I going to do with 100k crappy half-asses notes on everything someone somewhere ever threw together in a kitchen somewhere? I'd much rather have 2000 quality recipes that I know I can rely on.

[oAlbe]

Would you be willing to share your cookbook? It sounds like an absolutely interesting idea, and I'm really curious to see what it looks like.

[xenodium]

> I find it easier to manage a bunch of markdown files

Org counterpart (single file), but similar story. Static html export is handy also.

> Also rewriting them lets me list ingredients as groups as far as what goes together in a bowl or whatever

Lol. Ingredient grouping. Nice to hear it’s not just me.

https://xenodium.com/cheese-cake-recipe-no-crust https://xenodium.com/oatmeal-cookie-recipe https://xenodium.com/dal-makhani-black-lentils-recipe

[Natsu]

If you want to go into the why of cooking, try Cooking for Geeks. It's the best explanation of cooking I've seen.

[ehutch79]

The long blog format is for SEO purposes

[aqfamnzc]

That and to make the visitor scroll past 8 banner ads before getting to the recipe.

[danpalmer]

> The Spaghetti Carbonara recipe actually has multiple mistakes

One of them being that it's called "Spahetti Carbonara".

Separately, the recipe calls for whole eggs rather than egg yolks. This is a somewhat contentious issue, and many chefs have opinions one way or another. This recipe appears like it's The Definitive Spa(g)hetti Carbonara, but doesn't acknowledge that many consider it to be incorrect.

For me this is an issue with all recipe sites – my level of cooking ability, my ingredient preferences, how "authentic" I want to be, opinions I've formed on particular dishes – these are all very personal to me and unlikely to be fully represented in recipe sites.

I've started keeping my own recipe collection comprised of recipes I've made and enjoyed, I make no attempt to make them publishable, and I edit them as much as I feel necessary.

[smoe]

I think it is a bit less of an issue for normal cooking site, where it may say “Bob’s Spahetti Carbonara”. Whether it is authentic or not doesn’t really matter.

Whereas a site like this I reckon would aim for having definite versions of recipes, which is a) I think impossible for any dish and b) pretty much useless if you don’t happen to live in the exact region where it is from.

E.g. I have 3 different versions of the recipe for a Finnish blueberry pie. The original (well nothing original about it, just how my mother learned to make it), a Swiss version and a Colombian one. Because for the latter two I need different substitutes for the filling and slightly different measurements and baking time over all.

For me, recipe sites are just a starting point and inspiration for the personal collection. And I prefer having many different versions, some traditional, some sacrilegious available to compare and try rather than trying to get them into a single lowest common denominator version.

[slow_donkey]

I'm building a search engine for this exact issue - there's 10000 recipes for every dish but they have to be contextualized: Do I want mac and cheese in the next 30 minutes or am I serving this for Thanksgiving? Those are 2 different experiences and recipes.

Even the base issue of at least ranking recipe blogs by quality isn't solved by other aggregators such as Google / Yummly which are more of a recipe dump.

If you or anyone else is interested I'm planning to release a version in the coming weeks - email is in profile.

[berkes]

My unsolicited advice: try to split up basics, common-recipes and specialties.

Basics are "how to bind soup", "choosing and cooking pasta", or "frying onions". Common recipes are then "bound vegetable soup" or "maccharoni with tomatosause (and fried onions)". Specialities would be those recipes you try for christmas, or when the in-laws come over next month.

It's highly frustrating to find a recipe that says "bind the soup with starch" without going into how to do this (or even worse: what ingredients this needs!). But for someone more experienced, it is highly frustrating to have to read through five lines explaining how to fry the onions.

As with most education, cooking is layered: you build on top of existing knowledge, without repeating it each and every time. I presume this is partly a classification issue and organisation challenge. You don't want "how to bind soup without milk or eggs" to turn up when someone is searching "vegan tomato-soup". The web has hyperlinks, which would probably be a very good way to organize recipes.

[dogma1138]

Buy a few good cooking books. Far better and more useful than hunting on the internet.

And most importantly start your own recipe book.

[freddie_mercury]

Yeah, I'm not sure why people are so averse to just buying one or two cookbooks.

You can buy The Essential New York Times Cookbook for $2.99 right now which has 1,000+ recipes from decades of The New York Times.

And even without special pricing you can get something like The Joy of Cooking or How to Cook Everything for $20. Just one of those books is, realistically, all you need for a lifetime of cooking and will give you far more recipes and far better instruction than the website in the OP.

[koolba]

If my old cooking book had as much fluff as SEO recipe sites, it’d take more space than a Brittanica set.

[downut]

I cook constantly 2-3 meals/day for my partner and myself these days, and it's not just COVID. We live in a US smallish high mountain west city and frankly, with notably rare exceptions, the eating out or takeaway experience is just abysmal. But it has been on this trajectory from when we moved here a quarter century ago. All my fault. However, now I know a trifle about cooking. The following is a biased view of a very many country traveler who loves many cuisines, not necessarily expensive.

So I cook. I have good equipment. I'm pretty darn good. I don't do "modern techniques" such as sous vide, tho David Chang might convince me yet. The partner manages the kitchen garden (tonight was the final batch of 2020 eggplants). But the real intellectual property for the various cuisines is to buy the good cookbooks, and READ them. I'm not kidding. Read through entire sections over time. The really good ones have a theme, often not explicit. And cook out of them! Make mistakes. Make glorious successes.

I will not elaborate here, but I find these these English Language authors essential:

"Chinese": Fuchsia Dunlop, for Hunan and Sichuan. I have 6 more for mostly other regional cuisines but none so uniformly excellent.

"Mexican": Diana Kennedy, Rick Bayless, and some Sante Fe, NM, US authors whose books are annoying because errors, though pretty awesome overall.

"Indian": Maya Kaimal, utterly essential. But I dip into Neelam Batra slightly less often. I have to because she is encyclopediac.

"Southern/Eastern Mediterranean": Claudia Roden (Oh you really should try out her felafel recipe, but be sure to dry out the surface of the beans after soaking. And um I made absolutely killer moussaka tonight mostly based on her recipe)

"Italian": Marcella Hazan. There are many others. Keep it simple and honest.

"French": Well I am sorry, I am going to go with the classics by Richard Olney and Julia, but I note that I only usually use "Mastering... V1" and "Simple French Cooking".

"American/Anglo": Oh this is too annoying for too many. I use the "The Joy of Cooking" as a starter. My version is copyright 1980, given to me as a going away to college gift that same year. In there is wisdom, that I have only appreciated as I have grown older and more experienced. "The Meat Book". You wonder how an Englishman could have cross cultural accuracy on Anglo sourced materials... and he does! Uhh, sure, Fuschia. Anyway, I love Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. For vegetarian dishes, my goto author is Deborah Madison. She is perfect. Right in the tradition that is implicit in the authors I reference above, but for vegetarians. And now, I want to emphasize two authors: Michael Rhulman & Brian Polcyn, who changed the way I think about food by introducing me to real charcuterie. But I had to read it through and make a bunch of things to understand it, and then, I began to understand how a lot of other cuisines work.

Do I have my own recipe book? I do! But it is not so essential to me as the above authors.

[debruinf]

I think crowd sourced recipes never work. Apart from obvious mistakes, a recipe is a very personal thing: how you describe steps, what ingredients, your cooking setup/hardware, what instruction you need, what ingredients are available etc. I recently did a Show HN[0] for a different approach: a private kitchen notebook to accommodate exactly this, your recipes.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26609394

[peter_retief]

Yes it really does need some work. There is a need for a simple well curated recipe site though, there is always lots of interest.

[vanilla-almond]

"There is a need for a simple well curated recipe site though, there is always lots of interest"

Does BBC Food count? It's ad-free if you are in the UK (possibly not if you're outside the UK). It has a wealth of recipes and food-related content:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food

[Half-Shot]

Honestly this is what I use most of the time because it's hit the mark nearly 99% of the time. Quite a variety of recipies, and actually the comment section is genuinely full of useful information!

[locua]

It is my usual go to, thought a crowd-sauced job might be nice :P

[peter_retief]

I do use them from time to time, one of the better sites.

[moehm]

Honest question: What is your problem with traditional cookbooks like "Le guide culinaire"[0]? They are a curated source of recipes which stood the test of time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_guide_culinaire

[JackFr]

Not OP, but I’ve got no problem with them. In fact given how bad most recipe websites are, I’ve largely returned to them.

[peter_retief]

I just bought three really thick cookbooks from a public library sale.

[JackFr]

I’ve found nothing better than the NYT Cooking site. High quality recipes well indexed, well formatted. Not ridiculously overwhelmed with ads.

Alas, not free -- but for my money, well worth it.

[corytheboyd]

Honestly, just using a straight up wiki (with good moderation of course) sounds way more useful than anything proprietary.

[2muchcoffeeman]

Good point. Why is there no cooking wiki?

[unhammer]

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Spaghetti_alla_Carbon...

[locua]

You could send an email. That recipe was a dud added for testing it has now been removed...

[angio]

The carborana recipe also includes garlic which I'm not saying is wrong, but it's not standard. Also carbonara has neither butter nor oil.

[anandrm]

Just curious .. when YouTube has it all . Why text recipes ? Personally I feel when you know recipe visually it’s better .

[domano]

I like to check the recipes when cooking

Also looking at step-by-step instructions allows me to quickly understand the recipe if i know most techniques involved. This way i sometimes just need a few seconds to absorb a new recipe or put it into mental cache while constructing my own based of multiple ones from the internet.

[BananaSandwich]

Banana ham sandwiches are pretty good if you give them a try

[Xunjin]

Ahhh HN spirit at it's finest. Made my hard/depressive day with a good laugh, ty BananaSandwich.

[jvalencia]

it's not a bug it's a feature, let's pivot