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As someone who cooks a lot, recipes are the worst. As the author points out, it is the obviousness of what the recipe writers are doing that makes it so annoying. I have to acknowledge that I am at least somewhat to blame for this (albeit miniscule in the scale of things) as instead of seeking out concise recipe sites I opt to google in the first place.

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Not only that, but the recipes themselves are often poor quality. A few years ago, I was looking for recipes for banketstaaf, a Dutch almond pastry usually made around Christmas. I found half a dozen copies of the exact same recipe. Sometimes with unit differences or scaling everything up/down, but the exact same recipe. And that recipe didn't even work, as it resulted in an extremely runny filling.

It ended up taking half a dozen attempts to vary the recipe before I got it right, but it was rather frustrating at the start.

Why don't you just buy a recipe book? You said so yourself that you know exactly what these sites are doing. They won't give you a concise recipe because it goes against their incentives.

Usually I'm looking for something specific and question whether books will be much help. Eg., I have some salsa, sausage and lentils what can I turn them into type searches.

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