Based Cooking
based.cooking
based.cooking
- 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.
- Pound with what? A lot of people will come up with very bad answers to this question.
- How much flour? How much egg? I'll bet that plenty of beginners will use a tablespoon of flour or a singular egg
- Ditto with oil. Beginners do not know how much oil is necessary to fry stuff
- How high heat? You probably want to turn down the heat after the oil starts smoking.
- Is there a single mention of adding salt? Sounds like a pretty bland recipe
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).
Either way, the simplicity of presentation here transcends any such criticism which misses the point entirely.
Any other recipe site you visit today will have you scrolling for days just to find the ingredients amid ads and filler backstory.
I just love that this bucks that trend.
As for the quality of recipe, well, the site invites you to contribute.
Julia Child's classic (https://archive.org/details/JuliaChildMasteringTheArtOfFrenc...) does something similar in free-form.
Writing my own notes is great for understanding and retention. They get printed out, then tested to earn the right to a plastic sleeve and a place in the folder! Analogue with a digital backup.
They list stuff like a "pinch" of salt or a "stick" of butter.
Sometimes I'll make her dinner from her recipe and she'll be surprised and say "that's not the way I do it" and then she'll really enjoy the food anyway.
I think interpretation is what makes cooking an art, and many times, those little individual choices we make to interpret a recipe or system of cooking is what makes us proud of our dish.
Take the Serious Eats version. Yes, it's 10x more complicated, but it has photos and careful descriptions and measurements: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/09/the-best-chicken...
Ad ad ad... some irrelevant random video trying to play when I clearly don't want it to.
The site is really not about the quality of recipe, though they could be made better via your contribution.
It doesn't need to be complicated. Everyone who cooks knows the answers to these questions because they can remember that time their oil started smoking or they burnt this or undercooked that. Just start trying it, you'll learn as you go.
A large category where it matters a lot (I've heard) is baking. If you're making a soup or a sauce or some mashed potatoes, most of your changes are predictable and linear -- less salt means less salty. Less butter means less buttery. But when you bake things interact in sharp ways, and the ingredients interact with each other in more interesting ways. Maybe "less predictably" with certain priors -- not in a strong sense (it's chemistry). But in a weaker sense, "why didn't it rise" isn't answerable by "didn't add enough X" for any fixed X, and in most recipes 2X won't mean "twice as much rising".
But I've written down notes (for myself) when configuring a server, so later I'll know what I did. (super helpful)
Thing is, sometimes I write the exact command, but other times I just say general stuff like "setup an account" or "install devtools" ...
which is just like a lot of cooking recipes.
Interpretation is also why many people are really bad at it (and art).
If you are reading a recipe you're doing it for a reason. If you're improvising you don't need one to begin with.
But other than that point regarding the main topic, I don't disagree.
I usually make most food I'm tangentially familiar with without a recipe. But when I'm encountering a new one from a region I'm less familiar with, I need to go through a few recipes before I get the framework for it.
That's not fair, I practically never follow a recipe to the letter, and mostly don't use one at all. But I read them for ideas or the broad strokes behind something I haven't made before.
This is a time interpretation could be a horrible difference.
https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/east-coast-vs-west-coast...
I don't understand the complaint here. A stick of butter is half a cup, 8 tablespoons. The standardization is more ironclad than pretty much any other product you can get in a grocery store.
A cup means 280ml here, but 237ml in the US. A literal tablespoon varies from 7ml to 25ml, and is defined to be between 14.8ml and 20ml depending on locale.
Why not just specify in terms of litres and grams, which are the same everywhere?
So? What we have here is someone whose mother wrote down recipes involving sticks of butter. There's no ambiguity about the amount or the geography.
I don't see how REMOVING information benefits either a beginner or an experienced cook.
It's a unique form of expression, like painting or writing.
Of course, it's useful to see what other people are doing so you can expand your own skillset and create your own twist on what they were doing, and this is where recipes come in handy. But I don't _want_ to be told exactly how to create my next meal. I just want some pointers in the right direction. Too much information destroys my creative input and just makes the recipe not fun to follow.
I'm not sure if it made sense - it's difficult to explain why you enjoy something. But please understand that there are people who neither need nor want a perfectly reproducible "food production algorithm".
There is a happy medium in the amount of information contained in a recipe. Certainly a recipe that says to cook 7 ounces of meat for 12 minutes so that it reaches 167F internal temperature is ridiculous and if that recipe will fail if not executed perfectly, then that is indeed stifling to my creativity. On the other hand, if a recipe doesn't tell me whether it means a tablespoon or a cup of flour, that actually makes it more difficult to be creative since it is unclear what I would be deviating from. I've never felt stymied by a recipe that says to use 1 tbsp of butter/flour for a roux - if I decide I want to add more then I will.
I guess my complaint is that the writer has removed information from the recipe such that it now contains less information than that generally accepted medium. A certain balance of information has become convention in cookbooks and I think it's for good reason. Removing that information to me smacks of a mindset that we programmers can be notorious for - something like "this other domain can't be that hard, I can improve it by removing all this extraneous complexity that seems to me to have no purpose." It brings to mind the parable of Chesterton's fence.
Thank you for your thoughts. I hope this makes the spirit of my previous comment more clear.
Spoons can vary in size, so is it a tablespoon or a teaspoon? When dealing with spices you'll be adding 3 times the amount if you go with tablespoon interpretation so it'd be a pretty big difference in flavour and intensity.
So most likely they're relying on the "incidental standardizing" of normal silverware, and making a guess that most people's regular eating spoons are bizarrely similar in size.
Since we're on HN, there's probably a really interesting philosophical rabbit hole one could go down, concerning the idea of things that aren't officially standardized (by some standard-setting body), but end up gravitating towards almost being so, due to industrial pressures and consumer expectations.
1 table/butter knife
1 regular fork
1 small ("salad") fork
1 regular ("table" large?) spoon - approx equiv to 1tbsp
1 small ("tea") spoon - approx equiv to 1tsp
Since the spoons are so flat, they can't really compare to a proper measuring spoon.
We didn't talk about the small forks much. The smaller variants get substantially less frequently, at least in my households.
(Which is to say you're not wrong at all, I'm just stressing how standardized that subset is).
You can really see it with plastic utensils. If you get them from a restaurant, the spoons and so on are pretty consistent - not absolutely so, but it's interesting how often they'll be a certain type.
* tablespoon 15ml * teaspoon 5ml * 1/2 teaspoon 2.5ml * 1/4 teaspoon 1ml
(1) not exactly this set, but a similar one https://www.amazon.de/-/en/HAUSPROFI-Stainless-steel-measuri...
The issue is what a "spoonful" constitutes. Check the link to the recipe.
This converter table I sometimes use for conversions lists a spoon as 10ml, https://foodconverter.com/ounces-to-cups-spoons-grams-conver...
Why? As it happens, a 1tbsp basin on a utensil, with loose food (e.g. rice, corn, pudding, whatever) heaped atop the basin to its sloughing point, constitutes pretty much exactly a “mouthful” of food (for almost all human skull+jaw sizes age ≥6yo.)
Soup spoons are larger than table spoons, because you can’t heap soup, so you need a larger basin to get a mouthful of soup.
Likewise, 1tsp is the traditional heaped-to-sloughing capacity of a tea spoon—a spoon given with a tea cup+saucer, used for measuring sugar into your tea, and then stirring said tea. These are actually rather uncommon today, as they aren’t sold in flatware sets, but rather must be purchased separately. You may not have ever seen a true tea spoon. If you’ve ever seen a bar spoon, that’s an elongated tea spoon — both have a 1tsp basin.
The answer is that a "spoonful" is not precisely defined. "Tablespoon" and "teaspoon" are defined measurements, but "spoonful" isn't.
The answer from another comment is that the author meant "tablespoon."
> The idea is that when someone says "spoonful", they mean "one unit of the thing as you'd normally apportion that thing, using the spoon you'd normally use when interacting with that thing."
> So, one "spoonful of sugar" (or most spices) is a teaspoonful, because you use tea spoons when interacting with sugar in everyday life; while one "spoonful of honey" (or soup stock, or reserved pasta water, or any other thing that you only tend interact with in the context of cooking) is a tablespoonful. (Or actually, a wooden-mixing-spoon-ful, since that's what cooks had on hand to measure with — but as it turns out, wooden mixing spoons usually had the same level liquid capacity as table-spoons. The heaping measures weren't equivalent between wooden mixing spoons and tablespoons, though, and this has caused much numerical error when modernizing old recipes!)
Also 30 cranks of black pepper? Are the pepper mills standardised? What is a crank full 360 degrees or less? Or some back and forth motion, but again how large motion? How does this even work with my electric grinder?
Yeah, that alone is nonsense. Very confusing, coming from someone who is touting himself on the website as a "food science" guy.
Like step 5 says, taste it and adjust. The foods already cooked by the time your adding the spices
If you're unlucky — and the more inexperienced you are the more unlucky you are — then you'll guess wrong, and your dish will be at best okay, and at worst inedible.
A few failed experiments like this, and you'll hate cooking, or approach cooking with fear. Recipes have to be very precise, because recipes are aimed at people who are new: new to cooking or new to the dish.
> We really need to teach kids
Ah yeah. Because every single beginner is a kid, and everyone learns to cook when they are kids.
Imaging cooking was putting raw food in a box and a meal comes out of the other end. Imagine that box has a series of dials each ranging from 0-100. You don’t know what any of the dials actually do. Depending on your input, any number of settings can make a meal ranging from edible to amazing. But far more settings result in “Dubious Food.” Any individual setting can ruin the entire thing. Sure, you can power through 100 to the X combinations and ultimately, after much frustration and time and ruined food, sort of figure things out. But it’s much easier if someone says “set dial A to 53, dial B to 36,”. This lets you just tweak one dial and figure out what that dial does. Once you’ve done that you can go from dial to dial and then see how multiple dials interact. But if you just start fiddling with knobs you either get lucky or learn nothing; or you’re relying on knowledge you think everyone has even though they don’t.
Failure is ok.
Recipes should have all the ingredients in measurable quantities. All steps should be laid out in proper order, with proper technique, times and temperatures explained.
Sure. Once you're past the beginner stage, you can just glance at the description and figure out what you need. But you have to pass that beginner stage first.
Also, I do not like 'salt to taste', particularly for raw egg or raw meat mixtures. Just tell me the amount of salt, whynot?
Small changes in how you handle doughs of different hydration, and changes in timing/temperature thereafter have a much bigger difference to the outcome. I think it's better to develop an intuition for what the right consistency is and work towards that.
100% reproducible results for both is definitely "science".
The processes that happen to make the flavors and textures and results you're looking for - absolutely "science".
Some very finicky food types require a lot more precision than others, so some (very small percentage of) recipes you absolutely do have to follow very strict recipes and procedures.
But the majority of stuff - baking or "cooking" - you can wing a lot and get great results. You just might not get exactly the results you thought you'd get.
In my experience in a house that doesn't have strict climate control (no humidity control, windows often open, inexact temperature control), intuition on yeast-based dough is actually really important. Two days in a row the same exact simple bread dough recipe can behave very differently due to factors like ambient temperature and humidity.
The trick is getting from a recipe cook to an intuitive cook. For me, I feel like that leap came primarily from a single book (and years of prior absorbed "Good Eats" knowledge):
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3931154-ratio Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman
Highly recommended read.
1. The chemical reaction to make it raise. As I said, yeast is different; but if you're using soda, you need the right amount of all the ingredients (soda, acid, salt, etc), at the right time (water starts the reaction, which will fizzle out after a certain amount of time), at the right consistency (over-mixing will screw things up too).
2. You need to balance wet and dry ingredients. So you can't (for instance) just remove sugar or add flour without also removing or adding something "wet", or the balance gets thrown of and everything changes.
For yeast-based bread you're right -- I normally just dump in water until it seems about the right consistency.
Cooking can be freewheeling, slapdash, and to taste.
Baking is a science of measurement and repeatability.
It took me a long time to understand why recipes are vague. The answer to this is because:
* Personal and cultural preferences vary widely, in particular around saltiness.
* Ingredients vary in size. A precise salt measurement for a chicken breast will be too much salt if you have a smaller breast and too little if you have a large one.
* Even ingredients of the same size vary in texture and flavor. A cheap grocery store chicken breast might need more salt to become flavorful than a free-range wild-fed chicken whose meat is naturally rich in flavor.
* Ingredients change over time. A teaspoon of dried oregano might be too much if you just got it or too little if the jar is a year old.
* Taste is experienced in context. If you're serving that chicken with heavily salted pasta and a rich cream sauce, you might want to ease off on the salt so the meal isn't overwhelming. Serving it with a salad of bitter greens and you may want to kick up the savoriness.
* Preferences change over time. Some days you're in the mood for something light, some days you want a flavor punch to the face.
Cooking is taking once-living organic things, each of which is unique with its own history, and combining them in order to please the pecularities of some arbitrary set of living organic beings. It's not assembling a LEGO set.
An additional issue with salting to a specific amount is when you're reducing a sauce. The saltiness of the final dish will depend both on the amount of salt you add and the amount of liquid that boiled off
For a lot of ingredients this can be false precision. That fresh thing of dried ginger is going to be 5x more flavorful than the jar that has been sitting in your cabinet for two years. Saying "1 tsp" doesn't actually produce consistent results and can actually discourage people from adding more if they need it.
I think it is good to have these precise amounts but also good to tell people which amounts are critical and which amounts can survive being doubled or halved without trouble.
In this case the ambiguity is a factor of 3X, the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. Or possibly more: given the quantities of the recipe he may mean some kind of personal dedicated spice spoon that could be around 1/2 tsp. In which case a tablespoon would be a factor of 6x, which is sufficient to make a recipe inedible.
If that recipe appealed, I would say that if you use a teaspoon the recipe would work (assuming he hasn't made other errors in the recipe; I didn't look that closely). But he's not following the conventions and I'd probably go looking for a difference recipe.
Once you've made a few recipes successfully you can, as you point out, easily halve or double spices. But I'd start with recipes that were better tested than this one.
Spices tend to be flexible outside a few exceptions. I'd wager that you can just wildly change almost any spice amount in almost any recipe before you've ever made it and and have any sort of calibrated taste it'll turn out fine. Salt is a way bigger risk here and not many recipes give precise salt measurements.
Hey may mean something else, including his own spoon of perhaps a half-teaspoon, which would also be a reasonable amount of spice. There's enough slack in spicing that a factor of 2 wouldn't be inedible, especially if you're serving it with a starch like rice. But a factor of 3 is almost certainly more than intended.
That's not an American thing, not since the 19th century. That's just failing to follow the conventions.
Do people normally measure spices? I never do. Ever. I assume the cook's lack of exact measuring (eyeballing) is why it says "spoonful", rather than "teaspoon."
If I'm working from a recipe, yes? I don't sweat extreme precision, but I do use measuring spoons. Especially in something like a cookbook, I assume the author has put some thought into the measurements.
For me, no, not anymore. Recipes serve as inspiration and I rarely do more than scan the ingredients list and then go off to make something (inspired).
It's taken me a lot longer to develop a great intuition of which herbs, spices, and ingredients combine to make a great flavor than it did to develop the intuition of how /much/ to use if I know what I'm using.
The problem here is the threeish kinds of cooks:
- beginner
- experienced recipe follower
- experienced intuitive
Camps #1 and #2 want exactly the same thing, they just need varying level of specificity. Both would strongly prefer you give them exact measurements.
My guess is #1/#2 is the bulk of people who cook.
The recipe cards that everyone's family seems to have as heirloom keepsakes - those are all more #2 with a dash of #3 ambiguity thrown in to throw off any people trying to copy grandma's old recipe.
The recipes swapped at potlucks and family dinners - same. There's usually a (simpler or more shortcuty than the person might want to admit) recipe buried under there.
A “regular eating spoon” is usually a tablespoon, hence the name. A teaspoon is typically used for adding sugar to, or stirring, coffee or tea, or eating desserts.
The problem isn't with American conventions. We have no "spoonful" measure any more than you do. That website is not following any American convention by declining to specify its spice amounts.
If its helpful to anyone not well versed in cooking, focus on salt first. IME its by far the most important component in most dishes.
Teaspoon where you have a bit of a pyramid on top
Estimating, I would say he is using between 1 and 2 measuring teaspoons when he does a spoonful. So probably start with 1 tsp if you aren't sure more will work and go up from there if you feel like it. The video you've linked is as much a sketch as it is a recipe anyway.
And yes, blog recipes are the worst, but there are still excellent cookbooks out there, or even BBC Good food website has pretty good recipes without the bloat of people telling you their entire life story first
It explains all these things, even what a pinch is, how to use a stove, everything you could ever need in the kitchen.
Baking would be one that need to be more exact.
I have been entertaining the idea of writing a cookbook, that is not based on recipes, but defines some king of framework, describes the main criteria that you will use to judge the result and gives a definition and parameter range to the usual vague "cook until done", "salt, pepper to taste". Kind of Good Eats meets Naked Chef, but describes it all in OO, FP, C2 Wiki and Agile metaphors.
What's wrong with a "wikipedia for recipes"? I would LOVE that.
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.
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.
So, today on day one it doesn't already have the benefit of years of contributions and incremental improvements and revisions, Quelle Suprise!
To add a recipe, you need to a learn markdown and create a PR. Learning markdown might not be hard, but learning to create a pull request, after creating a github account might put them off.
Can you imagine the state of the site after 2 power users have a holy war over whether the recipe is meant to have salt in it or not.
Cooking is not objective so it would be impossible to properly collaborate or decide if an edit made the recipe better or worse.
Like I have my way of doing things... and it's the best because I have my own taste profile... but I'll try your way to see if I'm wrong.
Things like a bagel "toasted" vs "just warmed," dishes that have a variety of regional variations (e.g. a lot of slavic dishes like borsch or stuffed cabbage rolls where I've gotten yelled at by people for pronouncing it the Russian way or making it the Slovak way instead of their own nationality's style) seem to bring up far more intensity than I'd have thought possible, but, you know, I learn more about my friends that way and we've remained friends...
in an internet comments section? Tough to maintain that kind of civility, I think. possible, but tough.
Its better to have each post be owned by someone and then have a ranking system to sort the most liked versions.
You could rank them or something, but the reason I like YouTube is that I can generally get a sense of a person and what they like. If they like similar things to me, I'll probably like their versions of recipes. Inauthentic adjustments or weird herb profiles included.
The page needs to show the ingredients and steps so I don’t have to scroll while handling raw meat.
For the Wikipedia of food, Nikki Segnit's Lateral Cooking / Flavour Thesaurus are great -- you start out with basic "stew" technique and then a dozen usual and unusual variations.
NOTE: I'm ASD, so please don't call it my "NT privilege"!
A joke I like to say is that a true geek will hear about the President caught in a sex scandal and will obsess about the fact that it was because the password was easy to guess.
You should definitely not be using large grain salt in baking for this reason, unless it is to decorate a finished product.
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.
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.
That’s really not true. Most food writers would tell you that the standard is kosher salt, and many would specify diamond kosher
In the UK the term isn't used, iodine is not (or it's so rare I've never seen/heard of it, and can't find an example now) added ever, and anti-caking agent is only added if it's marketed as a table salt.
"Kosher salt" isn't a thing this side of the pond (at least in Germany). Even regular coarse salt is not something you can expect to find in an average kitchen.
Of course if the recipe specifies weight rather than volume, the point is moot.
And speaking as a former fine dining line cook, any food writer specifying kosher for anything other than fininshing/curing is a dolt IMO :)
I've also got a coffee table book written in 1999 that says the same.
I never ever felt any bad taste from iodized salts. Had to actually google what kosher salt means, the connection with real kosher food is 0 and it seems purely US term.
There are whole articles about why you should never use iodized salts... seriously wtf
Every time I get the chance, I take a small amount of kosher salt (which is just salt used for koshering, not salt that is kosher) and a small amount of iodized salt and have visitors do a taste test. I've never had someone prefer the iodized salt, and they can always tell the difference between the two.
Maybe they have different labels in different countries, though.
It is highly useful when salting meat, or any large piece of food because you can see how much salt you are applying, unlike table salt, which dissolves almost immediately.
"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. " https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html
because their list of ingredients and steps are still not copyrightable even if all the surrounding text is.
Very few recipes are just a minimal list of ingredients and steps though? I don't think this means you have to add your life story above it, just add enough explanation about the steps and it will be copyrightable. The recipes on Based Cooking will surely pass this.
It's not like many recipe websites have 100% original recipes they're trying to stop you stealing anyway. A website of unattributed stolen recipes probably isn't worth much as it won't have a reputation or branding.
If you look in a traditional cookbook, yes. The online world is different, for all the reasons discussed here.
> unattributed stolen recipes probably isn't worth much as it won't have a reputation or branding.
That's the point, though, you can't "steal" a recipe. It can be a trade secret, like the original formula for Coca-Cola, but if that recipe were to get out anyone could make the same stuff, not call it Coca-Cola, and the Coca-Cola company couldn't do anything about it. At best they could try to find out how it leaked and pursue action under theft of trade secrets law.
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.
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.
I just don’t bother with these kinds of sites anymore. Even when I was inexperienced with cooking, I felt none of the stories or pictures (often delicately staged much like commercial photoshoot) helped me with making the recipe.
You shouldn't bother with _most_ long format recipe sites, but you should with some.
You should also realise that the fluff doesn't mean it's a bad recipe. I have a few sites that have amazing, innovative and bulletproof recipes, with lots of fluff. Those recipes aren't anywhere else. Your top recipe on google simply isn't going to have that level of thought put into it, because if it did, somebody would be monetizing it.
I don't necessarily find that to be true. Allrecipes is often a highly ranked link and it's pretty basic. And I have a few sites I tend to like that have a fair bit of writing in addition to the recipe such as SpruceEats that pop up fairly often.
I would rather not rely on commercial curry powder. This becomes a problem if one day you can't buy the same brand.
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.
Then again, there have been based vegetarians! So go and contribute your recipes!
An example would be:
"I think you should be able to shoot sales people for ringing your doorbell"
"Based"
But what online subculture? A cringe subculture? Isn't something that is positive to a cringe subculture cringe to everyone else?
Honey Boo Boo is not based.
I do understand words have multiple meanings and people interpret things differently. I'm willing to accept that other people interpret 'based' as 'cool', but that is not what the word means to me, or to a lot of other people, I'm sure.
As far as I can tell from on the usage of based I've seen, it means cringe/unpleasant/racist (depending on context).
Similarly, “based” is used to mean the opposite of “cringe”. It just so happens that most “based” content is what others might call cringe; the video I posted above is satire of exactly this. However, it doesn’t change the meaning of the word, and in fact the joke falls apart if you redefine it this way.
Words have multiple meanings. Clearly based is one of them.
Again, you need to separate your feelings about the things being described as “based” with the meaning intended by the people using the word. If I hate hippies and think anything they call “groovy” is really ugly and uncool, that doesn’t mean I get to just declare that “groovy means ugly and uncool”. That’s what you’re doing.
If you are worried about whether you are cool, you aren't.
The owner of this website is one such person; the use of "based" is meant to be a (not so) subtle nod to his knowing audience.
For example: anarcho-monarchism is based. It's a ridiculous ideology, and I wouldn't support it, but it'd be cool to meet someone who actually believes in it.
I think it was something with Lil Wayne a long time ago.
Most slang I can suss out but I don’t think I ever had any idea what it meant to be based then or now.
Grounded?
“Should we split this out into microservices?” “Only when we’ve identified an acute need for the increased complexity in our architecture.” “Based thinking”
To be based is to have a certain effortless confident, self-assured fearless character and disposition towards the world. Someone who's based doesn't care if what they say is controversial, because they're too cool to care, but they won't say controversial things for the sake of it- attention-seeking is cringe, it's the act of a weakling who has to scramble for whatever power he can filch off others. The Based one simply says what he believes to be true when he wills, irrespective of social norms. He could pretend, but has no need for pretense, because he does not fear reprisal.
Being red-pilled is something else; it's a certain kind of enlightenment, a disturbing revelation about the nature of the world. When you take the red pill, you're throwing aside comforting lies and confronting the hidden/evil truth.
What exactly that enlightenment is varies from subculture to subculture- the imagery of the red pill has been used by lots of people, and there's a whole range of pills now; the bluepilled are normal people who still accept the lie, blackpilled people are redpillers who have fallen into despair and hopelessness (where it's implied that the red pill usually implies a call to action, the black pill implies apathy- 'just let it all burn', and blackpillers view redpillers as naive in their desire towards action, which will be pointless at best and counterproductive at worst), the white pill which is a hopeful rejoinder to the black pill, the iron pill which says you should work out more...
A lot of these pills act as revelations to previous revelations that recontextualize the previous pill's lessons and worldview, and in the face of all this uncertainty and flux, you can imagine there's a lot of anxiety.
This is where 'based and redpilled' comes in. The based attitude quenches the neurotic anxiety of the pill-seeker's revelation, while the information in the revelation itself- paired with the confidence, self-assurence, and courage to act on it- lets the Based and Redpilled avoid the pitfalls others fall into, and stride forth as more than their peers, as the union of chad and virgin, as the guy who says the n-word on twitter and doesn't get fired because he's his own boss.
This explains: https://knowyourmeme.com/forums/meme-research/topics/57812-c...
> Being "redpilled" means you've come to accept some reality that differs from the mainstream interpretation, but is the factual and correct one. This can range from more serious issues ("there are only two genders") to more shitposty/comedic ones ("The Room is a cinematic masterpiece"). Whereas "bluepilled" is the opposite--you failed to understand the true reality of things and are stuck believing a false idea.
> Redpill and Bluepill are just another way of saying "My personal opinion is objective fact and what you think is objectively wrong"
It still seems like an odd adjective ('objectively correct') for cooking though, to me.
"The quality of having an opinion without regard for what other people think, often a controversial opinion but not always."
In this context, not having ads or unnecesary javascript is based.
Kosher salt is a fine compromise for most situations.
Just specify what you're using and how much and the person using the other one can adjust. 3 parts kosher is about 1 part table salt.
It gets way more confusing if you go to Japan -- instead of 3 or 4 salts. There are 00s. The Japanese are big in to salts.
Is it a pre-existing phrase with its own meaning, or it's just the name of the site?
Is this a meme meaning of the word "based" that I am too old to be aware of?
> J.K. Rowling is actually better that Hemingway
> > based
From here it spread to other communities (largely non-mainstream political communities on both the left and right). Its strongest assiociation is still with 4chan (and by extension the alt-right) though.
Edit: I just noticed this is Luke Smith's project. He's an esoteric fascist with an embarrassing love of 4chan memes. So yeah, that's where it comes from.
I agree with that, but regard it as an evolution from my other answer meaning "established." The reference to contentious or unpopular comes because a based person has earned the ability to present unpopular ideas without repercussion.
Now when I see the term used online it's mostly in the imageboard sense of some idea or concept being 'correct' or 'agreeable' rather than the person who originates it. I think the term is undergoing a certain amount of semantic broadening too - more and more often I see it simply as a synonym for 'cool' rather than in the narrower meaning of 'this is controversial but I agree with it'.
But usage seems to be broader according to what you wrote. I reckon the most common usage will be, that something is based, when it is unpopular or contentious, but you happen to agree with it.
[0]: I think the original term comes from street slang and has something to do with freebase cocaine and evolved from there through various online communities.
(slang, of a person) Not caring what others think about one's personality, style, or behavior; focused on maintaining individuality.
(Internet slang, 4chan) Praiseworthy and admirable, often through exhibiting independence and security.Today's web just utterly buries 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.
Kudos to whoever made this.
[0] thermomix is basically the non American alternative to the Vitamix blender. Except that it has a scale and has temperature control built in.
Of course he, not being a vegan, isn't going to add any himself.
I wonder how lack of ads and SEO influences positioning in search.
I wonder why exactly that kind of content is vanishing from Internet:
1. Geeks stopped being interested into publishing honest content (I don't find it likely).
2. Geeks gave up on publishing honest content.
3. Honest content is still there but is just diluted by for profit sites.
4. Honest content is being punished in search results by not being nice to advertisers.
5. Honest content is being outgamed by sites that make it their main mission to game the system.
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.
I’m not trying to trash this, I just don’t know what it’s trying to accomplish.
> 500 words about how much the author loves winter
Also discussed in this thread, but it is far from agreed-upon that those extra words are 'cringe'; at least some people here seem to enjoy that content.
And regardless, the existence of that content is an interesting discussion; is it a legal concern, or a result of capitalism and algorithms and SEO? Or something else entirely?
"Based" is a term that is often used in alt-right circles (and 4chan, and some other places too). It isn't exclusive to these communities, but using it signals to readers what one's political beliefs (or at least community associations) are.
The author of this page has some... questionable beliefs. And the use of this term is part of signaling that without sticking "a fascist-adjacent person's guide to cooking" on the header.
I'm about 60% sarcastic here btw
2. I didn’t denigrate anything, I asked what something meant.
3. My... bigotry? Excuse me but what? I didn’t recognize a slang term.
4. I’m not gonna guess which 60% was sarcastic. But more than that was defensive.
5. To the extent it was important and valuable to me to have it identified, I couldn’t care less about “othering” a group of people that have murdered people I care about and expressed wanting me and my loved ones dead. Yep you read between the lines, I’m biased against people who want to do violence against me and my loved ones. What a fucking revelation.
6. I wish a cooking site could be something that doesn’t attract this bullshit. But since it can’t. How fucking dare you call me a bigot.
7. Edit: I’m 0% sarcastic here, I don’t need to put up a facade to be sincere.
There's a good middle point to be struck between the starkly minimalist based.cooking and the excessively backstory heavy recipe blogs.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180522221942/https://adventure... (author has since pared back the number of images; see https://adventuresincooking.com/spiced-pear-bundt-cake-with-... )
With this method, you can be sure there won't be any low-effort comments.
having spent many hours scrolling through ad laden recipe sites though i really do appreciate the straight forward approach.
chicken.based.cooking
rice.based.cookingIt’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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paella [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_mother_sauces
https://cooking.nytimes.com/68861692-nyt-cooking/14326423-no...
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.
There were some XML formats invented for that:
The sites that keep me are the ones that don't blather on about grandmas but do 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.
Isn't this how recipes - outside of friends and family - have worked forever?
Celebrity chefs are the minority. People normally just Google "air fryer fried okra" and click on one of the first three.
A meandering SEO tale doesn't prove this person cook, it proves they know how to game Google.
It's not that recipes with meandering SEO tales necessarily have better recipes. It's that recipes without any explanation usually suck. If you pick something with a meandering SEO tale, it _might_ not be terrible. Possibly not terrible is better than definitely terrible.
I'd argue that recipes themselves are why a lot of people's cooking sucks. The recipes tell you what how much and how long but fail to account for the basics of seasoning, preparation and tool selection.
If people apply a formal or acquired training to recipes they'd usually vary a lot from person to person much less the original recipe
Recipes are easy to find, especially now with the internet.
It does have a section on recipes, but a solid half or more of the book is on technique, why certain ways work and others don’t, etc.
Lots of stuff that I imagine one would pick up by working in a kitchen or going to school for it, but could take a long time to figure out on your own.
0: https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Fat-Acid-Heat-Mastering/dp/14767...
Looking back at some of the gelatin casseroles of the 60s, of course, casts doubt on some of that reliability.
You're making my point - they were gatekeepers because they were discoverable and promoted. That's what gave them credibility. Just as showing in search results does now.
People didn't pick cookbooks because they had the most aimless stories that hid the actual recipe.
a) tell if it looks like something you'd enjoy
b) tell if it turned out right after it's done.
None of the recipes on this site have any pictures, which I think will hold it back.
If you run the magazine Food & Wine and you just publish random recipes that you found for free in church-ladies' xeroxed recipe pamphlet, you're going to lose your readership pretty fast.
Of course, some magazines applied more standards than others, and so that's when the reader learns to trust the recipe in Food & Wine (or whatever, I'm not recommending them) over Reader's Digest.
The most convincing theory I heard was that the gelatin obsession was about status since it required refrigeration. Hosting a party where you served the latest, most elaborate gelatin dish said something about you.
[0] (Of course you don't have to read and quote books, and a lot of good chefs didn't as well, but that is just one factor for me to decide how much experience you have/how trustworthy you are. Just showing some recipes don't tell me that much.)
When deciding between competing recipes I want the ingredient list and a pic of the final product to decide.
I don't want to have to browse and search through the clutter of irrelevant things. I like Punchfork[1] for this. Easy to search, it presents the ingredient list and a pic then you can click through to the site for the instructions --unfortunately the actual sites are usually cluttered with few exceptions.
Recipe website de-cruft-ifier
That said, we are in the minority. Most people just Google the recipe they want to make and use the first result. This very very very rarely produces a good result. Most people don't care. And yet they wonder why their food sucks.
There's definitely some skill to cooking, but 80% of why I'm considering a good cook among my friends is because I only use recipes from people I trust, and I try to follow them as closely as possible.
It depends on your skill level / experience. Some people have a knack for cooking and just need a rough list of ingredients to figure out a dish.
Some people need detailed instructions and rely more on recipes. I don't have any idea how to season things apart from a liberal use of buillon cubes, so my best dishes are when I closely follow recipe instructions from good cookbooks.
Check out Salt Fat Acid Heat [0] if you haven’t seen it. It totally changed my idea of how to season things, to the point that I feel a lot more confident modifying existing recipes now.
One of the most eye opening things also sounds the most silly in retrospect: taste as you go. It makes such a huge difference! For whatever reason, I would always blindly follow a recipe until the very end, and hope that the “big reveal” turned out how I hoped. Now, I try to taste as I go (add a little salt; try it; add more). A related tip that blew my mind recently: if you’re making meatballs and want to check the seasoning, cook a tiny chunk of it and taste it before committing to a whole batch.
Anyway, I really like that book :D
0: https://www.amazon.com/Salt-Fat-Acid-Heat-Mastering/dp/14767...
And more importantly, lots of people really _think_ they fall into a category where they don't need recipes to "cook well". In reality, they started off following shitty recipes, and so now their "expertise" is built on shoddy foundations.
I strongly agree with this. I consider myself a fairly accomplished cook, I've been cooking since I was tall enough to see over the table, but one of the big things that helps is that I will take the time to find the right recipe, mostly by looking at the recipe itself and being able to visualize and taste the food before I make it, but also but reading what the author writes and deciding if I trust them.
Besides, people looking for recipes are getting something of real value, sometimes hard won. That is hard to know, unless all that is shared too.
I play it like you do. The better sites offer context and serve up whatever AD helps them pay their way. Totally equitable.
One can always start really learning to cook too. Reasonable food is not too tough and being able to spiff up a recipe or substitute is the reward.
Great food is harder. I am getting there myself and I have a two generation body of recpies and notes to draw on.
My grannie was very sharp. Approached cooking like she did many things. She often had real mastery of stuff she wanted to do or was interested in. Similar values were present in my wife's side of the fam. A couple of those are over 100 years old! (Brought over on a boat from Europe)
In those books are notes, context, other info. Those are where the great was noted down, passed down.
That experience has given me a perspective on all this. People who share are doing something pretty damn high value.
It should be appreciated, funded, etc.
And no, our family books are getting scanned, but are not going online just yet. The women consider it personal.
I suppose it is.
It is also the food that brings people home every year too. I grok that.
Maybe the better people can end up on substack. Deliver the good recipes and context needed for people to get the great in them.
I may subscribe. Pretty sure my wife would, if it were someone she values somehow.
To me, being unable to be bothered some means maybe also not being all the concerned about the food.
Self correcting, IMHO.
1. Jump to recipe link right at the top (almost all recipe sites I regularly use have this).
2. Ingredients are described with extra hints or reasons for using them
3. Equipment used
4. Tips for the recipe, sometimes possible substitutes
5. Storage tips
No annoying background, just a short intro and pictures for the basics and otherwise helpful text.
[0]: https://mouthwateringmotivation.com/2021/03/08/no-bake-keto-...
https://www.theguardian.com/food/series/how-to-cook-the-perf...
As someone who admittedly loathes _and_ is bad at cooking - it sounds like you are describing a combination recipe book _and_ cooking-instruction/cooking-history book. I wonder if people are frustrated because the two are getting conflated - they _just_ want the recipe, but they are being given both recipes and background?
And while I'm grateful for youtube, blogs, reddit, etc for reducing the barriers for folks to share information about topics like cooking and home improvement, they've also taught me to appreciate a good editor.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Food_and_Cooking
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101255.On_Food_and_Cooki...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/117144.The_Curious_Cook
The first edition is over 100year old, my grandmother gave the second edition of that book to my mother who gave it to my sister.
Have you read Modernist Cuisine at Home and can you compare?
It's a beautiful book and is an interesting read. That said, I don't really use it much although I have a few go tos. A lot of the recipes are way more work than I'm going to put in for, say, an omelette.
[0] https://www.americastestkitchen.com/
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Recipe-Editors-Cooks-Illustrated-Maga...
If I have a criticism of them, it's that they make some things more complex than they need to be for little gain in the final product. They have you cook everything three different ways as a friend puts it. I think they've probably gotten a bit better on this front as well.
- Every grain of rice ( Fuschia Dunlop ) is close to what I’d consider a perfect cookbook.
- Franklin BBQ ( Aaron Franklin ) is a definitive guide to how to use an offset smoker. I’ve read through portions over and over again - it’s only got about 10 recipes.
- My two south’s ( Asha Gomez ) - A wonderful collection of recipes inspired by South India, the south.
A good cook book will usually have a section that introduces new ingredients, tells you how to source them, introduces new techniques or methods, and also introduce some shorter recipes that can be used as dependencies for others. At the end of the day - you want good building blocks.
Repeat quantities both in the ingredients list and the instructions. Thus, when following along, you don't need to cross reference.
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.
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
This one doesn't have it. The recipe itself is fine, just the name is off.
> More spinach than you think you need
What? Just tell me how much goddamn spinach to use.
Love the project, will follow along!
Love it
1. No tracking pixels/cookies
2. No javascript
3. Load in <1 second
It's hard to imagine what's being discussed with just the name and see 400+ comments going on.
You'd probably be better off with a book from Alton Brown or someone like that. America's Test Kitchen stuff has pretty careful instructions as well although they're not necessarily pitched at complete novices. You could also do worse than Cooking for Geeks by Jeff Potter from O'Reilly.
The reason, “Based.”
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2eYFnH61tmytImy1mTYvhA
Then again, I'm not a subscriber to this whole new-age identity politics wokeness mess.
But it still does not answer my question.
With such great things as having a picture of 'soydevs', or such titles as 'Schooling a beta GNUTard', 'Virgin social media vs. chad RSS', 'Orderly dissolution of the United States into its component parts' and you know, about half of his videos having thumbnails with pepes and the kind of alt-right shit you used to see in r/TheDonald'... I'm sure he's just a nice Linux nerd who would never associate with the kind of people that idolized 'based stickman'.
Right?
> Right?
Actually yes, I've seen plenty of people like that. You're missing a relevant fact that it's funny. Just to give an example, another Linux channel, MentalOutlaw.
Most people get over that kind of mentality by the time they are 20 something and working. Some don't, I guess.
I think the fact that you said 'owning the libs' speaks for itself.
We should end this discussion as it isn't going anywhere
down: defining yourself as either conformist or non-conformist is cringe, but ok
This stickman guy seems to be the opposite of that. Hanging around in cities, headbutting with antifa losers, makes you just as much of a loser. None of it's real, it's all performative- it's all cringe, a waste of time, a distraction when you could be building something better. LS definitely wouldn't consider stickman 'based'.
I don't see the edginess, either. Something edgy is trying to be transgressive and out there, but LS's thumbnails and titles are just standard /g/ vernacular. To his audience- internet-goers who are used to /g/-style vernacular- there's nothing edgy or transgressive about the language/imagery used, it's just standard memes. Speaking your subculture's language to your subculture isn't edgy. Black rappers don't say digger to offend white suburban moms, LS isn't going to left-wing people's facebook/twitter pages and posting soyboy memes at them; he's mocking those people in his own space, among his subculture. Of course they can be edgy and offensive to you, but you're the suburban white woman in this scenario.
I certainly don't think anyone should aspire to being 'a nice linux nerd', or to go out of their way to appease suburban white moms' overactive sensitivities and imaginations, for that matter. That would be very cringe and bluepilled, so to speak.
My favorite ridiculous bit is when you pretend that all the stupid /g/ slang isn't designed around shock value. By your own argument, I guess pedophilia is acceptable and not transgressive of social norms as long as your audience is a group of pedophiles. I wish I could kiss that juicy multi-dimensional galaxy brain of yours!
BTW, there's nothing wrong about trying to be nice. Like, literally there's nothing more acceptable than being agreeable. But I guess that's too much to ask from someone like you who is clearly too cool for school and 'so based'.
I used to think like that when I was an edgy teen. I'm so glad I grew the fuck up.
The problem with pedophilia isn't that it's offensive, it's the harm caused. As you well know... If you can make a good case that soydev memes are as bad as, you know, molesting kids, then please do.
The point about niceness is that agreeableness alone isn't indicative of morality. The bureaucrats managing the death trains were as agreeable as anyone. Niceness is nice to have, and some degree of agreeableness is needed to operate in society, but niceness for niceness' sake is just vapid. Successful sociopaths are nice. Niceness, politeness, these are all social ceasefires/tools. Nothing wrong with that, but they shouldn't be the fundament of your personality- there should be something more to you than "I'm a nice guy". And "I'm a nice linux nerd" just sounds especially vapid.
If I met you in real life, I'd be nice and polite (according to the social rules of our current culture), of course. And LS is being nice and polite according to the social rules of /g/ culture. That space isn't really meant for you and doesn't have to conform to the rules of politeness of mainstream culture, much as you wouldn't go into, I don't know, a punk rock concert and ask them to tone down their language a bit. Would you deny these weirdos their safe space, where they can joke about wagecucks and gnutards? That language was born of attempts to be edgy, yes, but once it became fixed it was no longer mutually offensive to interlocutors.
Ironically, you're being more interpersonally combative/abrasive than anyone I've seen on LS's channel! Less nice, in other words. With your attitude, and your sailor's mouth, you might belong on 4chan, after all.
I'm not here to convert anyone. Catharsis is also a perfectly valid reason to do something.
> The problem with pedophilia isn't that it's offensive, it's the harm caused. As you well know... If you can make a good case that soydev memes are as bad as, you know, molesting kids, then please do.
Filling people's heads with 'edgy' stuff has led us to the current situation were we have self-declared incels shooting up public places while live-streaming their violence 'for the lulz'. The Christchurch massacre was the perfect example of the logical conclusion of the nihilistic onanism that is 4chan shitposting.
I'd argue that setting people into the edgy -> racist to be edgy -> conspiracy theories about replacement -> violence sausage machine, on the premise of laughing at 'soydevs' (whatever that is supposed to mean) has real-life consequences just as bad as pedophilia.
> That space isn't really meant for you and doesn't have to conform to the rules of politeness of mainstream culture, much as you wouldn't go into, I don't know, a punk rock concert and ask them to tone down their language a bit.
> Would you deny these weirdos their safe space, where they can joke about wagecucks and gnutards?
As I said, the problem with these weirdos' safe-space is that it is increasingly leading to consequences in the real world. They can say whatever the hell they want in their safe-space, but you can't ask me to not tell them how stupid and/or deranged they sound when they come to my space. That's the only way to adjust their expectations ``
> Ironically, you're being more interpersonally combative/abrasive than anyone I've seen on LS's channel! Less nice, in other words. With your attitude, and your sailor's mouth, you might belong on 4chan, after all.
Almost like people can have strong opinions without having to resort to calling others 'soydevs' and 'suburban white women'.
>Almost like people can have strong opinions without having to resort to calling others 'soydevs' and 'suburban white women'.
I'd take being called a soydev or a suburban white woman over being called a shithead or being compared to pedophiles, thanks! Are those really the most horrible words you can accuse me of using...? They seem pretty tame.
I'm not here to convert either, and I leave filled with a sense of relief that you aren't able to more strongly impose your will on the world and others.
Again, you view those culturally/politically opposed to you as a monolith, and so lump people together who don't fit together, like a southerner saying all muslims are terrorists. There's a difference between your local imam and an al-qaeda follower who murders a bunch of people, and in the same way there's a difference between LS and and the christchurch shooter. Lumping them together is inaccurate, and if you think the latter is a pipeline to the former, well, 'islamophobe' is a word. I guess 'chanophobe' is next...
It used to be pretty common to find independent sites that had all sorts of interesting information and if you dug further you'd find the author has very extremist political or religious views, which you mostly ignored. Now it's all gone or replaced with a fake politically-correct "personality" out of fear of offending anyone.
> Long story short, a bugman is someone who rejects the purpose and role of humans in their natural environment. They reject tradition, religion, their family, gender roles.
Ah, I can smell the rank mold from here.
> you're given for your acceptance some inane religious platitudes like "equality" and "rights" along with vaguely Marxist notions of "exploitation" and "slavery" and "oppressed classes,"
Plus the usual inane stuff about vegans being fundamentalist skinny soybois who will die at 40 and become impotent from their diet. Oh, and also global warming is a myth. Lovely stuff.