I blame the search engines that encouraged this
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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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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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
(NYT cooking)[https://cooking.nytimes.com/] 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.
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.
Same. I like it a lot
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?
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.
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.
Usually it's just variants of previously made things. But yeah some could be just word for word copies.
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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
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I have a Google nest hub in my kitchen. When i ask it for recipes it gives me the same options as my phone, but when i select them it cuts out all the shit and give me the recipe straight up, even offers to read me the steps one by one
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.
That's how websites keep the lights on. How dare you try to circumvent your ad responsibility
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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. Edit: damn people be hating on recipe books, guess I’m old
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.
The BBC has loads of recipes. No adds (in UK at least) and minimal fluff
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.
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