Technology

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.

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.”

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.

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.

…So are we going back to print cookbooks? Published before 2024?

Honestly, that feels like the practical solution.

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.

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.

Recipe blogs were already a problem.

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.

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

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.

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.

I just saw someone repost AI Slop as a list of "classic Thanksgiving crockpot recipes". It included various ingredients such as:

• 3 lb bonciles torkey roast
• 1/cup starch
• 1 ln ctrioin steak
• 2 tsp bosher salt
• 1 smail onion
• 1 1/Z cup beet broth

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.

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 knew my short phase of collecting cookbooks would pay off one-day!

Glen and Friends has never let me down. I'd recommend the channel.

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.

Watch the bad substitutions in the comments actually fix the recipes now