Hacker News Reader

Comment by ntaylor | Hacker News Reader

A recipe without 10 pages of useless, boilerplate SEO content?

I have recently purchased an instant pot the SEO content on recipes searched for drive me mad

I feel your pain. My best IP recipes are adaptations I've made from old recipes of my family's.

Here's my Cajun mother-in-law's red beans and rice recipe. She's from Chauvin, LA and this recipe is my favorite for when my wife is away and I'm cooking for the kids.

You'll need:

1 pound red kidney beans

1 link of Hillshire Farms smoked sausage (like polish style)

1-2 bay leaves

Brown rice or long-grain white rice

Crystal brand hot sauce

Rinse 1 pound of red kidney beans, then cover with 3-4" of water and soak overnight. The next morning, dump the water and rinse them thoroughly.

Chop one medium-sized yellow onion and one celery stalk.

In your pressure cooker, go a few times around the pot with olive oil and heat until shimmering.

Add the onion and just brown the shit out of it. Seriously, I always stop too soon. My mother in law gets it all nice and browned, like chocolate. Use sauté mode on your IP and turn it up to the high heat setting. When it's about halfway browned, I add the celery to the pot for the rest of the browning.

Once the onions brown, cut the heat and add 5 cups of water. If I was doing this in the crock or regular pot, I'd add way more but since we're not losing any to steam, give is perfect.

Scrape all of the burnt crap off the bottom of the pan.

Add the beans to the pot along with a bay leaf or two and one link of smoke sausage (like Hillshire Farms polish sausage style) cut into circular slices about 1/4" thick.

Bring to pressure and then cook for 15 minutes. This is how long I did it in my Instant Pot, which may not be the same as your cookers. The IP brings it to 15 PSI and then lowers it and cycles between 10 and 11.5 PSI.

After 15 minutes of cooking, remove from fire and allow the pressure to release naturally. At about 15-20 minutes, I just manually dumped what little pressure there was left.

Salt to taste. Refrigerate overnight before reheating and serving because it just tastes better that way.

Serve over brown rice or regular long-grain white rice if you prefer.

The Cajuns put Crystal brand hot sauce on top. The regular kind (not the extra-hot). It's very tangy. I've never seen a bottle of Tabasco in a Cajun pantry.

https://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Hot-Sauce-Louisianas-Pure/dp/...

Louisiana Brand is also okay if that's all you can get

I notice that it's not uncommon for American recipes to be tied to a specific brand of sauce or similar. I don't see this as often in "European" recepies, here usually the recipe is broken down further or listing a generic ingredients, this makes the recipe more useful in contexts where it is hard to get "Trademark brand sauce", but of course you lose some precision in the flavor..

Modular cooking vs roll your own :)

With hot sauces, there's a very distinct flavor difference between Tabasco, Crystal, Frank's, etc. not to mention there's regional affiliation to what hot sauce you use.

Additionally, I think a lot of "traditional" recipes in the US which were passed down in families came from advertising in the 40s/50s/60s, so they specifically call for "Hellman's Mayonnaise" or "Toll House Chocolate Chips" or "Heinz 57" or whatever.

Branded products having recipes on the label has been a marketing staple in America for a long time. Sometimes you could mail them for a little book of recipes all using that specific brand of oil/chocolate/flour/etc.. Quite a few "old family recipes" are something that Grandma got off of a Crisco tin.

> something that Grandma got off of a Crisco tin

Related – "The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’" on HN a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534495

As another commenter mentioned, the various vinegar-based pepper sauces have a wide range of flavors from fiery (Tabasco) to piquant (Crystal). The Cajuns in my extend family use Crystal and Louisiana Brand sauce. These are more on the tangy side and have much less spice. Even my six year-old likes Crystal on his red beans. I've also seen a few purely local brands in their pantries. I've never seen Tabasco, however.

A few things I forgot:

- add a few bay leaves when you add the beans and water.

- you can also add diced bell pepper when you add the chopped celery. These, along with onion, form the "Cajun Trinity", their form of mirepoix.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...

Enjoy!

The secret to my hot sauces is pressure cooking in my Instant Pot. I wouldn't do it for fermented sauces, but if you like the cleaner-tasting hot sauces the IP is where it's at.

By SEO content are you talking about the blogs where they put like a multi page story about how amazing the recipe is, and what their family thinks of it, and that time they went to a little restaurant in a foreign country and had something like X, and then at the very end a barebones recipe copied out of allrecipes or some other site? I've noticed those dominate in the past few years

I'm not sure if it's actual SEO or just bored housewives/grandmas rambling, getting consistent visits from the same demographic and riding the feedback loop to the top of Google results, in my case most of the recipes I find (I'd say 80% to throw a number) seem original, and there's no way a bot can write all the uninteresting bullcrap they're prefaced by.

Not a bot but you can (and it's very common) to hire people to write the copy for you.

Oh, didn't think of that possibility, makes sense.

"So before I tell you about this nacho recipe, let me tell you my entire life history, really diving into every time I ever at chips, cheese, or any combination thereof..."

Whenever I find a recipe that doesn't start like that I bookmark it. This is my gold standard for internet recipes (in Spanish): http://www.lapaella.net/receta-paella-valenciana/

What a fantastic format, I can see why.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com