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Comment by kraussvonespy | Hacker News Reader

Opposite opinion here: Internet recipes are generally terrible. It's almost impossible to make any determination as to whether recipes have ever been tested or optimized or anything, and I just don't trust them. But if I go to seriouseats.com (for example) and they show me all of the work they went through to get to the recipe, I trust them.

I'd say that well over half of the random Internet recipes I try aren't very good, have been developed with bad techniques, use the wrong flavors, try to fix flavor issues by adding more flavors and so on. Using a vetted site (the America's Test Kitchen recipes are also quite good) gets me ~98% success.

I'd rather take the extra 5 minutes of time to look through how the recipe was created and tested to make sure it's a good recipe than spend a couple of hours making an unknown recipe with a 50/50 shot to not be terrible. YMMV.

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I just use internet recipes for ideas more than anything else. Yesterday the wife's dinner instructions were "we have chicken and sweet potatoes", and I didn't feel like just cooking them directly. So I googled around a bit and came up with https://www.self.com/gallery/non-boring-ways-to-eat-chicken-... , no particular recommendation here, just posting that to show that I ultimately saw the picture for the "buffalo chicken sweet potatos" and made something based on that idea. I didn't even look at the recipe. In fact, I only just now noticed that the picture went with #4 and not #3. (Looking at the recipe now, I didn't even guess the ingredients from the picture correctly.)

And what was nice isn't that I made something amazing, it's more that I made something that was good, and wasn't our usual fare. It's not something I would normally have done.

The internet is pretty decent at that. If you've been cooking long enough to read a recipe and just take a few ideas here and there, I find it very helpful.

But it's been a long time since I pulled a recipe from the internet and carefully made it exactly as described. There's a lot of people with tastes quite different than mine, and somewhat more judgmentally, there's a lot of people out there with no taste posting their recipes. On the Internet, nobody knows you have the culinary tastes of a dog.

Shameless plug: Checkout https://rotten.recipes/find/recipes you can search with ingredients you have and it finds recipes from various blogs/sites across the web with them.

The nice part is it lists the recipes with a summary of their ingredients so its pretty easy to get ideas without having to delve into the actual recipes themselves.

That's awesome - I just logged in to comment that someone should write this functionality up as a product/app.

ATK does some amazing stuff.

Their gluten free baking concepts in their cookbook are like a decade ahead of most of the gluten free products you can buy at the store. Crazy stuff.

That's a great tip! I'm getting more dinner guests with gluten issues and would like to get better at that side of cooking. Is there a good place (cookbook) to start with?

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