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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

My normal challenge with recipes is that I have no idea how authoritative the reviews are. On some sites, there are a lot of recipes that make no sense whatsoever, and yet have 5 stars.

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As I mentioned elsewhere, quality of a recipe can't be plotted on a line. It's at least a 2D space. The wrong mix of ingredients can be bad, but the instructions can also not be repeatable. And repeatability might even have dimensions of its own. Some ingredients age better than others, for instance, and some measuring systems are more consistent. Baking powder and spices are examples of the former, and brown sugar for the latter, or possibly both.

I'm confused by what you mean by authoritative. Cooking isn't really like math, there's no canonical pineapple pizza recipe unless you go too vague like: dough, sauce, ham, pineapple, delicious. Or do you mean real reviews where the stars mean something?

For recipes, stars often let me down as they seem to be more related to how the recipe worked and could be followed, not how good it tasted. And the flavors seem to be pretty bland.

I've seen five star recipes say things like "Hawaiian pizza - add pineapple, tuna fish, and lasagna". So, yeah, the star ratings are meaningless - but then there are too many recipes to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The target audience for this recipe is a Venn Diagram of "people who love lasagna but nobody else in their life does" and "people who can't eat ham for religious or dietary reasons" and "people who have no reverence whatsoever for pizza" (which also, according to some, is a superset of Hawaiian pizza eaters to begin with).

That's not a tiny number but it's not large either.

There are Facebook groups that offer reviews in exchange for reviews. You will see very new recipes, that have had zero chance to rank and be cooked, with comments like: