What an utter load of bollocks. These are people who are creating something that they enjoy doing and giving you information you apparently need for free. I don’t understand why anyone would trash their desire to write something that is personal and/or interesting to them about it.
And that’s setting aside that these usually make the recipes far more readable and interesting to the vast majority of people.
Or Doreen, a 54 year old freelancer who isn't a yoga enthusiast but is trying to make ends meet at something under 3¢/word.
I haven't actually written for the site in question. I'm not trying to imply that I have. More like saying "Yeah, this is absolutely a thing."
And it's a thing in part because my actual original blogging that's the real deal doesn't get enough tips and Patreon supporters. If people want to see less content marketing to get ad revenue and more quality writing aimed at providing something fresh, they should be looking for independent authors to support whose writing they actually like.
I was providing original content written entirely by me for years before I began doing freelance writing. I would have likely never become a freelance writer if people had been willing to leave tips, promote my writing, engage with me so I would have a better idea of what to provide for my audience and so forth.
If you don't like what's on the internet, go "look in the mirror" so to speak. I've been on Hacker News nearly 11 years and was literally homeless for nearly six of that while people around here told me "Go get a real job. Writing doesn't pay. Your expectation that your writing should be capable of providing a living wage is just silly talk."
It's not so-called market forces at work. It's human choice and those choices are rooted in what we value and all this. If this world isn't the world folks want to see, they can make other choices more in line with what they claim they want instead of "being traffic" while complaining about it.
(Edit: For the record: Most of my freelance writing is content for small business sites and I don't feel the tiniest bit of regret. I like working for a paid service and I blog about that too and get accused of the site being content marketing when it absolutely isn't. http://writepay.blogspot.com/)
They're very welcome to write their life story, but I bet if google changed their algorithm slightly you'd see it disappear - and I'd say that would be a good thing.
HNers writhing over each other to be the most cynical and dismissive.
For fun, can you link me to a highly ranked recipe page with a bullshit SEO story on it in line with "the camping trip in North Dakota when Susan's husband first discovered his love of homemade sour cream"?
https://www.gimmesomeoven.com/easy-beef-stroganoff-recipe/
You have to scroll halfway down to get your ingredients list after learning that her husband is a vegetarian, getting a history of the author cooking mostly plants before anyway, getting a lesson on what egg noodles are and, finally, the ingredients.
Two days ago, I made this absolutely delicious "5 minute tiramisu": https://wishesndishes.com/5-minute-tiramasu-dip/ - That page doubles as a sponsored article, too (see disclaimer).
But just to prove your point and make you happy, and also because I'm hungry, I googled "sushi recipe idea" and clicked the first link that, without fail, talks about the very special valentine's day Tom^Wthe author and her husband spent years ago and how sushi is now a tradition.
https://www.fifteenspatulas.com/homemade-sushi/
This isn't a cynical thing. Go to fiverr.com and search for "write recipes". Here's the first result that comes up when doing that: https://www.fiverr.com/francosalzillo/write-text-around-a-re...
That's the more professional version of it. The guy's highly rated and it looks like it's his actual job.
"When I woke up that Sunday morning, it was a crisp 68°. I opened every window in the house (the first time we’d aired it out since April) and put on a pair of jeans and a light long-sleeved shirt. While Scott was busy appraising his fantasy football rosters, I was searing beef and taking pictures."
They're mostly copying recipes from other places then applying SEO. That's it. The ridiculous probably-made-up stories are for SEO.
I see this as more a problem of the web, than the recipe sites themselves. More and more often, web sites are shoving information down your eyeballs to keep you on the page longer. I hate this trend. I want the service or information to give me what I want, and get out of my way. Google search? Get me what I want, and get out of the way. Email inbox? Same deal. Yet the exact opposite is happening with more and more invasive time wasting drivel, being injected everywhere.
There's no arguing about it making recipes more "readable" when you have to scan down page after page to get to the actual ingredient list. That's super annoying. To put it into perspective, if the recipe was at the top, and the blogger wanted to spend five chapters talking about their life afterwards, more power to them, I wouldn't care a bit.
Actual "I have these things and want to cook something" could practically be automated.
The big exception is baking, where precision ratios and time matters a lot.
(I'm also reminded of various stories of people trying to trace the origins of much loved family recipes and then discovering that rather than being an authentic traditional Calabrian whatever, their grandmother copied it off the back of a tin. I'm fairly sure my own grandmother's cookies recipe is from Tate&Lyle)
I've often heard the prevailing reason why this happens on the web is because of SEO and 'bounce rates'. More time spent on the site improves ranking, so the actual recipe is pushed below the fold so users have to scroll down thereby adding more time on the site.
Have often wondered if any SEO wonks with the inside baseball can actually validate this?
The introductory fluff is copyrightable, and that's one reason for it.
That's why you shouldn't expect to make a cent from creating a new recipe, unless you have a chef and photographer/artist lined up, or own your own restaurant chain.
Bounce rates and how long a visitor stays on a page matter for those who own the sites and/or do some sort of marketing on them (ads, their own products, their services, etc.).
Probably not the search engines, but I could imagine this being a thing that goes into Google Analytics if an online recipe property is using that (or if their blogging platform has a plugin for it) maybe? Just spitballing from the hip.
It feels like people are trying to make money around information that is fundamentally impractical to make money off of, so they're forced into doing whatever it takes to make money off of it anyway. "Whatever it takes" is defined by Google yet ruins the user experience, and so that is why recipe sites are this way.
Sometimes it's a little rambling, but there's often useful information about the recipe that follows, like shortcuts that seem like they should work, but don't. She includes some interesting links or background, and getting a bite-sized glimpse of someone else's life isn't the worst thing.
I think that food is much more dispersed apart from super stars like Nigella, Jamie and the BBC so its harder for the average food blogger.
Also don't discount the target audience for these pages might not be the average developer / nh reader. Also don't discount the
the what? They got to him, the food bloggers did.
WHAT WERE YOU TRYING TO TELL US
Nope. Toll House cookie recipe (which is on the back of every package) with an extra quarter cup of flour XD.
It's also the little touches of humanity that people want if they want to follow a particular food blogger. The anecdotes add up over time to a sense of following a workplace or family sitcom to follow week to week (whether they make the recipes or not). It's a daily or weekly "soap opera" ("flour opera"?) of an acquaintance or "friend" that you also like to crib recipes from from time to time.
Where these recipe bloggers have their steadiest audiences, those stories at the top of the recipe are the real draw day-to-day, and the recipes the fun addendum to bookmark for later.
Steam some potatoes. (Don't boil them. No one wants watery mash.)
Add far more butter than anyone would think is reasonable. (Like, 1/2lb of butter to 1lb of potatoes. Maybe more.)
Add salt and pepper. (No, more than that. You've under-seasoned them.)
Mash them until they're the consistency you want. (For really smooth mash use an electric hand mixer instead of a masher.)
To make them better still, put lots of wholegrain mustard or garlic in with the butter.
My foodie friend and I use a lot of their recipes.
The cool thing is that sometimes you will disagree with their preferences (totally normal), so you can use one of their variants that has the attributes that you want. Or similarly, you can see how changing certain ingredients changes the outcome and personalize your version of the recipe accordingly. It definitely saves some experimental batches.
No. The butter gets lost in the potatoes and mouthfeel of the fat is compromised. That is the reason that so much is needed if you do it this way. Much better to only add it right when serving, leaving the butter and potatoes largely unmixed. Preferably added in an amount “to-taste” by the individual. I believe this was covered by McGee’s “On Food and Cooking”, but I may be misremembering.
Alternatively, if you want super barebones, go buy a copy of Escoffier's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_guide_culinaire (or an English translation thereof). It's arguably the definitive cookbook and the recipes are extremely terse, some just a couple of lines long. (e.g. "Take recipe A and recipe B, substituting X for Y.")
"Escoffier's introduction to the first edition explains his intention that Le Guide culinaire be used toward the education of the younger generation of cooks. This usage of the book still holds today; many culinary schools still use it as their culinary textbook. Its style is to give recipes as brief descriptions and to assume that the reader either knows or can look up the keywords in the description."
There are apps like that, at least. I use How to Cook Everything. It's from Mark Bittman, who was with the New York Times at the time it was published. I don't know if he is anymore.
In German there's chefkoch.de. It's full of ads but its core is basically a big DB of user-submitted recipes without fluff. Don't you have something like that in English?
The further from the UK one is, the less useful this is. The measurements should only be a problem in the US and Canada, but common ingredients can change -- e.g. the fat content of cream, or whether canned tomatoes are salted or sweetened. Also, if you're from the rest of the world, you might wonder why they've forgotten the herbs and spices :-)
Do you mean at chefkoch- or google-search?
Yes, recipes are very hard to translate. For example I don't know what "cream" is and I never want extra sugar or salt in canned tomatoes.
It's probably less necessary from the UK, but from Denmark an English-language recipe search has a good chance of giving American websites. Americans have to suffer sugary and salty canned tomatoes.