Some of these recipes seem decent if you're already somewhat experienced and have developed cook's intuition. Otherwise they're way too vague. For instance, the chicken parm recipe:<p>- There should be a photo of how to slice the chicken breast. Saying "through their width" isn't good enough. I had to explain what "lengthwise" was once because my friend cut all the vegetables the exact opposite of it.<p>- Pound with what? A lot of people will come up with very bad answers to this question.<p>- How much flour? How much egg? I'll bet that plenty of beginners will use a tablespoon of flour or a singular egg<p>- Ditto with oil. Beginners do not know how much oil is necessary to fry stuff<p>- How high heat? You probably want to turn down the heat after the oil starts smoking.<p>- Is there a single mention of adding salt? Sounds like a pretty bland recipe<p>I don't mean to be too harsh but recipes are hard. There's a reason why professional recipe developers have developed certain standards like measurements, terms (folding batter, shimmering oil, etc.), and development procedures (cross testing).
Am I the only one who thinks that this concept is perfectly good, and all the things the site doesn't have are just great further development of the idea?<p>What's wrong with a "wikipedia for recipes"? I would LOVE that.<p>All the complaints about the quality of the recipes or the lack of more in-depth explaination of each one, some kind of voting/reputation system for the recipes and for the submitters and the voters, Yes those are all good ideas to make the db more useful than just a db.<p>But you have to start somewhere. How is the core idea here of a public cookbook not fundamentally awesome? I mean hello... GIT. Recipes that are living documents that can be honed over time, complete with viewable history of what changes have been made so you can decide if you agree with them. Branches and forks for all the hundred variations on any given thing. Revisions by better experts than the original submitter of some recipe.<p>So, today on day one it doesn't already have the benefit of years of contributions and incremental improvements and revisions, Quelle Suprise!
The info about salt is plain wrong. Kosher salt is used for curing meat and as a mainly decorative addition to baking, you don't need to use it for cooking, it doesn't dissolve noticably slower in liquids. In fact when most recipes specify a volumetric measurement of salt they mean table salt and if you were to use kosher or sea salt you would be under seasoning due the reduced volume, nothing to do with how quickly it dissolves.<p>You should definitely not be using large grain salt in baking for this reason, unless it is to decorate a finished product.<p>Iodine deficiencies were and are very, very real. They're also on the rise due to food deserts and rising poverty. Iodised salt largely eliminated iodine deficiencies so people with poor knowledge of the history think they just went away. Most processed food does not contained iodised salt, so table salt is an essential source or iodine for a great many people around the world.<p>Idosing salt was and is one of the greatest public health success stories of the 20th century, do not talk about it like some conspiracy by government.
You know why all these sites have pages of effluvia accompanying their recipes? Because lists of ingredients and steps are not copyrightable. A book of recipes, however, is copyrightable. On the web, to make the content copyrightable, they have to add stuff.<p>"A mere listing of ingredients is not protected under copyright law. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a collection of recipes as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection. " <a href="https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html</a>
This website actually proves why everyone's favourite punching bag, the picture heavy SEO laden, anecdote about my mother's neighbors rabbi style cooking blogs exist.<p>These recipes would be totally un-followable unless you've made them before, especially without pictures. Some of them are terrible recipes, particularly the "curry". And maybe there are good reasons for them being very basic (e.g. they're traditional or they're meant to be simple or for beginners), but because there's very little in the way of explanation in them, who knows.<p>Hard pass. This website is just a pure html version of the first google link when you search for a recipe. Much like that first google link, these recipes will also be boring and flavorless.
> Only Based cooking.<p>Can someone shed light on what "based cooking" is? It's rather tricky to Google for and am unable to figure out what the site's author means by that.
Kenji Lopez (MIT grad chef who is reasonably famous on YouTube and for writing for Serious Eats for years and for writing this amazing cookbook <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Food-Lab-Cooking-Through-Science/dp/0393081087" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Food-Lab-Cooking-Through-Science/dp/0...</a>) gives the exact opposite advice of this blog for salt where he recommends using large flake salt for finishing and "table salt" for cooking.
What is "Based cooking" ?<p>Is it a pre-existing phrase with its own meaning, or it's just the name of the site?<p>Is this a meme meaning of the word "based" that I am too old to be aware of?
I was just looking up some recipes the other day and my goodness, does this website feel like a breath of fresh air.<p>Today's web just utterly <i>buries</i> even the simplest content underneath a mountain of shit, whether it's ads or fancy banners or a long-winded speech about god-knows-what before getting to the point.<p>Kudos to whoever made this.
The advice to eschew iodized salt in favor of kosher salt is dangerous. Iodo-deficiency is a significant number of IQ points, and in the first world, iodized salt costs the same as non-iodized. It helps thyroid function too, please do not go out of your way to avoid free iodine in your diet!
Little heads up for all searching vegan receipts there. The author has an article named "Veganism is the Pinnacle of Bugmanism" on his personal webpage: <a href="https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/vegan" rel="nofollow">https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/vegan</a>
Here's the backstory to why this was made:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvDyQUpaFf4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvDyQUpaFf4</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY70NCW98Is" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY70NCW98Is</a>
This is very nice. Nice that PR's + credit to the Author's are included in the template. I've been using a similar site for a while: <a href="https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Recipes" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Recipes</a>
Feels like transported into 90s. Just honest content.<p>I wonder how lack of ads and SEO influences positioning in search.<p>I wonder why exactly that kind of content is vanishing from Internet:<p>1. Geeks stopped being interested into publishing honest content (I don't find it likely).<p>2. Geeks gave up on publishing honest content.<p>3. Honest content is still there but is just diluted by for profit sites.<p>4. Honest content is being punished in search results by not being nice to advertisers.<p>5. Honest content is being outgamed by sites that make it their main mission to game the system.
What is “based” cooking? It’s not explained on the site. A web search obviously leads to [something-]based cooking.<p>I was hoping that there was something to this about minimizing nonsense around online recipes, but the first one I read (stroganoff) had ingredients in the instructions not included in the ingredients list.<p>I’m not trying to trash this, I just don’t know what it’s trying to accomplish.
Modern blog-y recipe websites do tend to go and on about things I really do not care about (e.g. the worst I've seen is a recipe that included 68 wedding pictures before anything related to the recipe came up [0]), but they also tend to include some helpful hints/tips/pictures of some of the techniques used.<p>There's a good middle point to be struck between the starkly minimalist based.cooking and the excessively backstory heavy recipe blogs.<p>[0]: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20180522221942/https://adventuresincooking.com/spiced-pear-bundt-cake-with-brandy/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20180522221942/https://adventure...</a> (author has since pared back the number of images; see <a href="https://adventuresincooking.com/spiced-pear-bundt-cake-with-brandy/" rel="nofollow">https://adventuresincooking.com/spiced-pear-bundt-cake-with-...</a> )
I like the idea of a simple recipe site generally, but I also like reading the user feedback on recipe sites. Is a recipe any good? Are there improvements? There is no way to tell on this site.
One place that I find has surprisingly good recipes is Wikipedia. Take paella [0] or the basic French sauces [1] for instance. It gives context and standard preparations as a great starting point with useful related items.<p>It’s more advanced than a YouTube video for someone who hasn’t cooked much yet (similar to a technical topic), but I like the additional information and encyclopedia style discussing variations rather than choosing a single truth and just trying to sell ads on a site.<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paella" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paella</a>
[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_mother_sauces" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_mother_sauces</a>
You may also enjoy the NYT's no-recipe recipes, which are freeform, forgiving recipes.<p><a href="https://cooking.nytimes.com/68861692-nyt-cooking/14326423-no-recipe-recipes" rel="nofollow">https://cooking.nytimes.com/68861692-nyt-cooking/14326423-no...</a><p>I see a lot of complaints about the state of recipe blogs in this thread. My solution was to look for better sources. NYT Cooking, Serious Eats, King Arthur, Bon Appetit, WaPo's Voraciously, etc. The recipes are well written and tested, and often have separate articles that go into more detail for the curious or confused.
I'd rather have structured data, allowing the users to filter by or search for ingredients and automatically convert units.<p>There were some XML formats invented for that:<p>- <a href="http://www.formatdata.com/recipeml/" rel="nofollow">http://www.formatdata.com/recipeml/</a><p>- <a href="https://cookmate.blog/my-cookbook-xml-schema/" rel="nofollow">https://cookmate.blog/my-cookbook-xml-schema/</a>
Maybe I'm in a minority, because everyone always hoots and hollers about how they hate modern recipe web sites -- and I get it, 6 pages of memories of trips to grandma or whatever is ridiculous -- but I can't see myself ever using a plain-text recipe with no clue as to who the author is and no reason to suspect that they know what they're talking about. At that point I would probably go to SimplyRecipes, where at least recipes are voted on.<p>The sites that keep me are the ones that don't blather on about grandmas but <i>do</i> subtly give me some reason for why I should trust them, they explain that this technique makes the most sense, they describe how they've tweaked it from this cookbook or whatever. I also read the comments. In the end, though, my pre-existing trust of the site and author makes the most difference.
In the last few years I’ve learnt that there really is nothing better than a good cook book. Vibrant colors, techniques, stories - these can all really add to your experience if their presence is not solely for the purpose of including additional ads. I’ve also found that the recipe alone is truly not enough - the techniques and background are incredibly important !
I also became frustrated with recipes sites and made my own: <a href="https://nononsense.recipes" rel="nofollow">https://nononsense.recipes</a> - free to browse, or you can make an account to add your own recipes, curate a list of favorites, and leave and read comments.
You have the opportunity to make the following improvment that I've always wished for in a recipe book:<p>Repeat quantities both in the ingredients list and the instructions. Thus, when following along, you don't need to cross reference.
I had the same idea last year but i wanted to try dhall so I used that instead of markdown files for the recipe format. There is no content, but the structure is there.<p><a href="https://kiss-cooking.notarobot.life/" rel="nofollow">https://kiss-cooking.notarobot.life/</a><p><a href="https://github.com/BinaryTiger/kiss-cooking" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/BinaryTiger/kiss-cooking</a>
Does anyone else absolutely loath recipes? Using measuring spoons and shit make me feel like I’m doing a homework assignment. No recipes, no measuring for me. Just pour in the shit, do what you think it needs, eat it when you’re done.<p>Today, that was brown rice, some fried onions and bell peppers, a can of tomatoes, salt and pepper, cayenne, birds-eye, fish sauce, tamari, red wine vinegar, and garlic in the instant pot for 30 minutes.
Not everything is for everyone, and I feel like I have learned a lot about what HN thinks about cooking from this.<p>Most here seem to approach cooking as programming, maybe someone wants to make a meal compiler. I can't imagine cooking so strictly, if anything it's time away from the terminal to work with my hands and maybe create something I can enjoy or share with others. I did not expect so much rigor and seriousness! :D
Beef Stroganoff is a sour cream based sauce, which is its principle ingredient.<p>This one doesn't have it. The recipe itself is fine, just the name is off.
Not having glossy images makes the recipe easier to read.
I am also using markdown to create recipes and some other documentation.
Like the idea of using github to manage the recipes.
You would probably need to use indexing if the data became large.
Some sort of user review system might help maintain quality.
Website won't load for me in Firefox, keep getting security warnings about the site not being secure. Ignoring the security warnings just redirects me to another page with another warning.
This is kind of like the page I made for bread on my website: <a href="https://bernsteinbear.com/bread/" rel="nofollow">https://bernsteinbear.com/bread/</a><p>Love it
Can duckduckgo or other search engines be customized to only return sites like this, HN, etc... I'm thinking of being able to set parameters like:<p>1. No tracking pixels/cookies<p>2. No javascript<p>3. Load in <1 second
I do the same thing here: <a href="https://benovermyer.com/recipe/" rel="nofollow">https://benovermyer.com/recipe/</a>
How come some titles don't explain a thing?<p>It's hard to imagine what's being discussed with just the name and see 400+ comments going on.
An ad-free recipe website is a great idea. Though I've no desire to make it political, and it can be user-friendly but still light on code. So I've been working on <a href="https://recipeasly.org/" rel="nofollow">https://recipeasly.org/</a> though it is a work in progress.
The owner of this website is a reactionary with a relatively popular YouTube channel in which he openly espouses and trades in racist talking points[1].<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2eYFnH61tmytImy1mTYvhA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2eYFnH61tmytImy1mTYvhA</a>