Allrecipes, America's Most Unruly Cooking Web Site

I took up cooking from scratch as a hobby, and have found this website helpful.

Often, the user comments on recipes have proven to be valuable additions, especially when one user proposes a change to the recipe and other users chime in saying that the change was a worthwhile improvement.

Hot take:

Allrecipes, cooking for the uncurious person who doesn't care if they have to throw all the food away and order take-out.

Allrecipes, cooking for a community which shares a single taste-bud.

Rational take:

With just a few more scrolls and clicks the budding cook can liberate themselves from the shackles of the recipe all together. There are so many resources that teach how to cook well.

Seriously, just pick up anything by Julia Child or James Beard. Why waste your time searching when you can spend your time eating? Allrecipes is the equivalent of those old 60s and 70s spiral bound community recipe collections, use them at your own risk. ((Edit: You can find some real gems though.))

Cheers, M

P.S. Pie crust: By weight, 3 parts flour, 2 parts butter, 1 part ice water and a pinch of salt. Measure the flour into a big bowl and add the salt. Cut up butter into the smallest cubes you can and put it in a bowl, then in the freezer. Measure the ice water. Add the chilled butter to the flour and toss the cubes to coat, then quickly work the butter into the flour. Heat is the enemy. It should look like small peas or grains and it's ok if some chunks of butter aren't mixed in. (Mix it as little as possible for flaky and a little bit more for grainy crust.) Add your ice water all at once and mix, it's ok if some small chunks of ice get in but make sure you weigh the water without ice. It should make a nice ball and not be sticky. (If you poke it and it leaves a dent it's good. If you poke it and the dent contracts it's a little over mixed.) Make 2 balls and wrap them in plastic wrap then chill 1 hr or overnight. One for the top of the crust, one for the bottom.

Troubleshooting: Melting butter, drip ice water in while you're initially mixing. Overmixing, crust is brittle and shrinks a lot when rolling or baking. Sticky: too much water or not mixed enough. Crumbly, won't form a ball: needs more water, drip ice water in a tiny bit at a time.

Trouble is every third recipe is junk 'content' provided by somebody spamming the internet with made-up nonsense, for ad revenue I imagine.