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Comment by Niksko | Hacker News Reader

This website actually proves why everyone's favourite punching bag, the picture heavy SEO laden, anecdote about my mother's neighbors rabbi style cooking blogs exist.

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.

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Punching bag for a reason. Terrible sites especially on mobile, have to scroll through what feels like an infinite amount of pictures and “fluff” text about how this recipe reminds the author about a warm childhood memory, which you can’t even read cause ads are popping up all over the place. The recent “jump to recipe” buttons don’t help. You jump to the recipe, but some late loading ad just pushes the recipe out of view or some ad hovers right over it.

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're generalizing too far I think. Yes, a lot of recipes have fluff that doesn't add anything. But some don't, some have crucial information that helps you understand techniques, ingredients or thought processes. If you use recipes like the link, or like the top Google links, you're guaranteed to get zero info.

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.

>or like the top Google links, you're guaranteed to get zero info.

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.

Assuming you like that style of curry, it's a decent recipe. The only trouble would be if you didn't read the whole thing first. If you didn't read ahead, you'd hit "dump all of your tomatoes and extra ingredients into a food processor" and take it literally. There would be no spinach left for the next step.

I would rather not rely on commercial curry powder. This becomes a problem if one day you can't buy the same brand.

I was about to say the same thing. For lack of pictures, it's hard to get a sense for whether they would turn out well, except in the trivially simple cases like "put some chicken and veggies in a slow cooker for 8 hours" or "bake chicken wings in a bag with Frank's RedHot".

On TFWS, it asks for people to send in color pictures of the meals cooked according to the recipes in question.

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