I blame the search engines that encouraged this
Advertising, too.
How much have you paid the authors of the recipes you sought out?
The issue isn’t advertizing, it’s thinking bullshit stories make the advertizing more valuable.
Right? Just like people hating on news websites for having ads or paywalls, how else are they supposed to get money to survive?
Cookbooks are unironically great
And often available super cheap at thrift stores.
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. 😁
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I mean, it’s not usual to find more modern books at a thrift store. Yeah a lot of them are old, but newer ones are there.
Even among the old ones there are some that are sought after, like Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book. Best snickerdoodles of my life.
Apparently I didn’t buy a book produced within the last 5 years for $40 less than it retails for. Good to know. Can you let me know what else is happening in my life?
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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
Oh, this is fantastic. Thank you!
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“Print Recipe” works better when available. That puts the ingredients and steps in one page (usually).
You can also print it to PDF if it’s a recipe you want to keep.
Oftentimes they’ll have a Print button as well which reduces the page down to just the ingredients and steps.
This is a game changer that seemingly nobody knows about. I fucking love that button.
Oh fuck yeah
Try allrecipes.com. Recipes with little to no fluff.
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.
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
Unless you know who made the recipe (like chef john), it’s hard to trust a lot of them.
If it’s Chef John, it’s legit.
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.
www.cookingforengineers.com is one I enjoy. The recipe charts are pretty much all you need but the more detailed bits can help.
I hate those charts
I don’t even get how they work, and I’m an engineer
The X axis is time, the Y axis is steps or ingredients or something. The leftmost column is just ingredients. Check out the marshmallow one, for instance. The first step (upper left corner) is to soak the attached ingredients (gelatin and water) for ten minutes. The box below about boiling is simultaneous, but attached to different ingredients. The step after that is to mix the two batches you just produced together. Then mix in the salt until fluffy, then mix in vanilla. Let it cool for three hours, then cut it, then top with the final ingredient, which is powdered sugar.
I checked out the parmesan cheese bread, and going off that I think one column of instructions pertaina to everything to the left of it.
Interesting site but not without flaws, first recipe I looked at was essentially just “use a off the shelf bottle of curry paste to make a curry and cook some rice. Cooking time 315 minutes”
Gonna check through it though, seemed to have a nice variety, with a lot of cultures listed
NYT cooking tends to have recipes with short descriptions and very little narrative.
Not cheap but well worth the price IMO.
archive.ph will get you around the paywall too, if that’s more your style.
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.
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
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.
I use an app called “Recipe Keeper”. Once the recipe page with all of the garbage has loaded, I hit the “share to Recipe Keeper” button, and it strips out all of the garbage and just shows the recipe.
