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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

I hate how looking for recipes has become so… disheartening. Online recipes are fine for reputable sources like newspapers where professional recipe writers are paid for their contributions, but searching for some Aunt May's recipe for 'X' in the big ocean of the internet is pointless — too much raw sewage dumped in.

It sucks, because sharing recipes seemed like one of those things the internet could be really good at.

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There seem to be quite a few recipe sharing sites around - e.g. allrecipes.com.

And they're all flooded with low effort trash and useless.

The only remaining reliable source - now that many newspapers are axing the remaining staff in favour of LLMs - is pre-2020 print cookbooks. Anything online or printed later must be assumed to be tainted, full of untested sewage and potentially dangerous suggestions.

Well there's https://www.allrecipes.com/author/chef-john/ on that particular site.

Chef John is the best.

I absolutely love Chef John. Great recipes and the cadence of his speech on YouTube (foodwishes) is very soothing, while he cooks up something amazing. If you're a home cook I highly recommend his recipes and his channel.

The wife and I use the internet for recipe ideas... but we hardly ever follow them directly anymore. We're no formally-trained chefs but we've been home cooks for over 20 years now, and so many of them are self-evidently bad, or distinctly suboptimal. The internet chef's aversion to flavor is a meme with us now; "add one-sixty-fourth of a teaspoon of garlic powder to your gallon of soup, and mix in two crystals of table salt". Either that or they're all getting some seriously potent spices all the time and I'd like to know where they shop because my spices are nowhere near as powerful as theirs.

It's not just online recipes, but cookbooks written for the Better Home & Gardens crowd. The ones who write "curry powder" (and mean the yellow McCormick stuff which is so bland as to have almost no flavour) or call for one clove of garlic in their recipe.

I joke with folks that my assumption with "one clove of garlic" is that they really mean "one head of garlic" if you want any flavour. (And if the recipe title has "garlic" in it and you are using one clove, you’re lying.)

If the recipe has "garlic" in the title, I'm budgeting 1/2 head per serving.

It's interesting to search for recipes in other languages and not find junk as we do in English.

I read Spanish and Italian fluently and stumble my way through Japanese (with translation). It's easier to find a good recipe in these languages, provided you can find the ingredients or substitutes.

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