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.
I just hate that the recipe list, instructions, and the other relevant information are in three different places.
I was talked with making a peanut butter pie for tomorrow. First three I looked up had exactly this! And their “jump to recipe” button of course didn’t fucking work or was taking like 30 seconds to parse all the ads and I ain’t got patience for that bull!
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.
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.
I mean, you could take the same logic and apply it to many things AI generated…
Well… I guess you’re right … dang. 🤯
Glen and Friends has never let me down. I’d recommend the channel.
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.
🎶Why you lyen’🎶
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 recommend picking up an analog, wood pulp-based copy of The Joy of Cooking. Pretty much any classic western dish is in there and you don’t need to worry about AI slop.
I also love my copy of The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. That one is a little more global, and has I think 500+ pages of recipes with minimal irrelevant anecdotes.
The Joy of Cooking is a blast to read, especially if you can find old editions. They are constantly updating, and if you get some older versions from the mid 20th century and before, you’ll find things like instructions on how to skin a squirrel.
This is because of everyone’s favorite topic SEO
Google’s fault. Their prevalence and search ranking decisions.
edit: I dropped the"entirely" from “Google’s fault” because I guess it’s a decision by the platforms and without too, even if the alternative means less to no discoverability on Google.
That’s how Thug Kitchen started. To cut through the crap but also be funny at the same time
…So are we going back to print cookbooks? Published before 2024?
Honestly, that feels like the practical solution.
I have a cookbook (not a recipe book - there’s a difference) from 50 years ago (with the latest edition being 2019) and it’s amazing. No need to go for modern hipster recipes that don’t teach you anything…
Wayyy ahead of you, I have a collection of vintage cookbooks that is growing by the day! Muahahahha :D
America’s Test Kitchen. All you need. Recipes for nerds.
100%.
But I was pondering more what the general population might do. People are going to figure out slop recipes don’t work, but the question is what’s the next most accessible thing to replace it with?
Wandering through to mention that your local library almost certainly has a collection of cookbooks spanning decades, and, depending on your area, might even have stuff tied specifically to your region. Take the book, photocopy the recipes you’re interested in, return it, get to cooking!
my mother has something like 8000 cookbooks she’s collected from the 1930s to around 2015.
I think I’m set.
Heh, so does mine.
All our parents’ book hoarding may end up saving us. And the internet, if they become the new standard?
As someone who lives at an altitude above 50ft, most cookbooks always kinda sucked out-of-the-box.
Until they fake author or print dates.
You joke, but that’s horrifying.
This is already an SEO technique, apparently, and I could see Amazon book sellers finding a way to fudge it: https://yoast.com/help/date-appears-search-results/
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.
The vast majority of things gen AI produces becomes pointless when you take the human out of the equation imo.
I mean, if you want a soup recipe, this one has been feeding my family for 100+ years. Great grandma Hulda brought it from the old country, taught grandma Joan and auntie Sandra. Grandma Joan taught me. I’m the last one making it, though boy, everyone loves eating it!
Caution: As with all old recipes, makes a metric fuckton of soup. Don’t do this if it’s only 1-2 people.
Ingredients
2 Cups of flour (250g)
1/2 Teaspoon salt
1 Teaspoon baking powder
2 Eggs whipped to a froth added to 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup of warm water (118 to 177ml)
4 Potatoes
1 Onion
1 1/2 Pounds (24 oz., 680g) of beef sausage (also called German Summer Sausage)
2 to 3 Tablespoons of butter, lightly mixed with a little flour
1/2 Quart (2 cups, 473ml) of milk
1 Sterile pair of scissorsChop the potatoes and onion into bite size pieces. Put them in a pot and pour in enough water to not only cover them all completely but to cover them to a depth of 4 inches (10cm). Bring to a boil and cook for an additional 15 minutes.
While the potatoes and onion are cooking add the water and eggs to the flour, salt and baking powder and mix in a bowl. Knead the dough repeatedly until it is completely smooth with no lumps, rough spots or wet spots.
When the dough is ready, break off strips and roll them between your hands until they are about 1/4 of an inch (6mm) thick (slightly smaller than a bread-stick).
Cut the summer sausage into bite size pieces. You may flour the knife as needed to keep the meat from sticking to it. Easier if you remove the skin first.
By now the potato and onion mix should be well cooked and it is time to add the dumplings and sausage to the mix.
The preferred method of adding the dumpings is to use the sterilized pair of scissors, hold the strip of dough above the pot and snip the dumpings straight into the pot (watch out for backsplash!)
If you don’t have a sterile pair of scissors you can cut them manually with a knife and add them to the pot with the meat.
IMPORTANT! Dumplings will swell to 3 times their cut size as they cook!
Make
them
SMALL!
Stir well and cook for another 30 to 45 minutes or until the dumplings are well boiled. Be careful at this stage because it is likely the pot will boil over if the temperature is too high.
If you place a wooden spoon across the top of the pot, that can help limit boil over.
(In grandma Joans 70 year old cookpot)At this point the soup may seem too thin. Add the butter and flour mixture as well as the milk as thickening agents and cook 10 to 15 minutes more if needed to thicken the broth.
Refrigerate any leftovers and re-heat like any other soup.
Grand-dad alway put vineagar in his, but you do you! 😉
This is such a beautiful comment. Feels like what the internet was made for. The holidays have me all emotional, but this just was so sweet. Thank you very much for sharing! I will probably not make this for a while, since holiday plans/family visiting/cooking for out of town picky eaters/etc etc. but it might be my first dish of the new year. Legitimately very excited to try this. Thank you again for sharing.
It’s really good soup! 😉
The AI we need.
Thanks for sharing! Imma cook this bitch up sometime soonI hope so, I’ve had 2 heart attacks and technically died a couple of times. I don’t want the recipe ending with me.
Recipe blogs were already a problem.
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 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.
1 cup starch‽ That’s right baby, you don’t simply swallow this soup, you fucking chew it!
Yep, that’s it. I didn’t feel the need to propogate its presence. Mmmm, steak lips. And my favorite other dish made from cranberro sauce and crango juice. Also, no temperature or time at all. Just… Boil for hours?
Bosher salt, everyone’s favorite kosher salt and borax mixed seasoning. Why stop at sodium chloride when you can enjoy the power of sodium borate?
This comment is sponsored by the Department of HHS and RFK jr
Kill the ants and slugs in your brain
Somehow read that as a snail onion
Instead of AI slop, that looks to me like someone that doesn’t speak the language hurriedly transcribing it from paper, getting paid by the recipe, and knowing nobody is going to verify anything. AI knows how to spell turkey and kosher.
I considered that, but decided it was AI throwing words together like “garlicpper”. Yes, a chat LLM knows “turkey”, but an image generator doesn’t. I didn’t mention it was a graphic. Another commenter has posted it, so you can be your own judge.
Not in an image it doesn’t
True, but… I mean… who would try to generate something like that as an image? … I take that back. I’m sure somebody would.
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.
I’m pretty sure that’s already happening.
It crushes my soul that I work hard every day and make less than an AI bot running dozens of websites and youtube channels despite churning out garbage.
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
(This does not work for recipes that require exact measurements, like breads)
There’s a reason we have different words for “cooking” and “baking.”
Watch the bad substitutions in the comments actually fix the recipes now
You know, if those AI recipe pages don’t have millions of kilometers of backstory to scroll through before you get to the actual recipe written comprehensively, I can at least understand it a little bit. So I hope none of the food bloggers who did that are complaining, because you drove people to this.
Aside from that, damn, I hope it is easy to spot if something is AI in terms of recipes. Guess it is time to buy some old cookbooks to be sure.
Search engine algorithms drove people to write stories before recipes, unfortunately. Pages that just had recipes were deprioritized
SEO started killing the internet long before the genAI wave yeah. I was also always a bit mad at the concept in general. Surely search engine optimization is something for… search engines, not websites? I hate that we ended up changing the way we create websites in order to appease The Machine, instead of it getting better at surfacing quality content
In theory, Google should fight all attempts at SEO.
But they infamously stopped doing that to bump some quarterly result (as sifting through them generates more clicks), and here we are.
Some food bloggers understand this and have a button to take you straight to the recipe. So many don’t, though.
I just want a recipe for peanut butter cookies, not a web novel, Jan. If I want a story with the recipe, I’ll go watch “Good Eats.”
Even better when they have a print option, then you get a pdf of the recipe and never visit the site again. No subscribe pop up while you’re trying to look up how much water to add to the pan of flaming grease
