If you food blog recipe site didn’t have 17 miles of bullshit about your life story that no one gives af about before the recipe, maybe, just maybe more people would use your recipe.
I just hate that the recipe list, instructions, and the other relevant information are in three different places.
Yeah I don’t understand why they moved away from recipe cards and single page things you can just look at.
Let me take this opportunity to complain about online recipes these days. Everything is inflated with a ridiculous volume of unwanted fluff content that makes the recipes more difficult to use.
Like, I just want to know the ingredients for Beef Stroganoff and in what order to assemble them. What I get is a book that starts with, “Beef Stroganoff started as the ancestral celebration meal for peasant steppe farmers…yadda…yadda…yadda.”
That’s how Thug Kitchen started. To cut through the crap but also be funny at the same time
I recommend picking up an analog, wood pulp-based copy of The Joy of Cooking. Pretty much any classic western dish is in there and you don’t need to worry about AI slop.
I also love my copy of The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. That one is a little more global, and has I think 500+ pages of recipes with minimal irrelevant anecdotes.
The Joy of Cooking is a blast to read, especially if you can find old editions. They are constantly updating, and if you get some older versions from the mid 20th century and before, you’ll find things like instructions on how to skin a squirrel.
I have my mom’s 1967 edition with recipes for muskrat and opossum! And as the spine has completely disintegrated on that one, I also have a newer copy without the instructions on how to prepare small game. Still a kitchen staple.
I can’t open this site so it might already mention this, but I went to a website that had specific buttons to have 4 different AIs offer their input on the recipe. Obviously I clicked off immediately, but that’s an insane thing to do. The whole point of a recipe is that an “expert” or at least a real human being with tastebuds presumably made this and thought it was good enough to share. I don’t want the general statistical average of every soup recipe. I want one specific recipe and for it to be cohesive and good. Some breads have rosemary in them. Some have raisins. Some have poppy seeds. I don’t need something that doesn’t understand the difference between poppy seed bread and cinnamon raisin bread telling me about poppy seed raisin bread. I know that’s not exactly how it works, but still. It’s incredible to me that people would do that.
I mean, if you want a soup recipe, this one has been feeding my family for 100+ years. Great grandma Hulda brought it from the old country, taught grandma Joan and auntie Sandra. Grandma Joan taught me. I’m the last one making it, though boy, everyone loves eating it!
Caution: As with all old recipes, makes a metric fuckton of soup. Don’t do this if it’s only 1-2 people.
Ingredients
2 Cups of flour (250g)
1/2 Teaspoon salt
1 Teaspoon baking powder
2 Eggs whipped to a froth added to 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup of warm water (118 to 177ml)
4 Potatoes
1 Onion
1 1/2 Pounds (24 oz., 680g) of beef sausage (also called German Summer Sausage)
2 to 3 Tablespoons of butter, lightly mixed with a little flour
1/2 Quart (2 cups, 473ml) of milk
1 Sterile pair of scissorsChop the potatoes and onion into bite size pieces. Put them in a pot and pour in enough water to not only cover them all completely but to cover them to a depth of 4 inches (10cm). Bring to a boil and cook for an additional 15 minutes.
While the potatoes and onion are cooking add the water and eggs to the flour, salt and baking powder and mix in a bowl. Knead the dough repeatedly until it is completely smooth with no lumps, rough spots or wet spots.
When the dough is ready, break off strips and roll them between your hands until they are about 1/4 of an inch (6mm) thick (slightly smaller than a bread-stick).
Cut the summer sausage into bite size pieces. You may flour the knife as needed to keep the meat from sticking to it. Easier if you remove the skin first.
By now the potato and onion mix should be well cooked and it is time to add the dumplings and sausage to the mix.
The preferred method of adding the dumpings is to use the sterilized pair of scissors, hold the strip of dough above the pot and snip the dumpings straight into the pot (watch out for backsplash!)
If you don’t have a sterile pair of scissors you can cut them manually with a knife and add them to the pot with the meat.
IMPORTANT! Dumplings will swell to 3 times their cut size as they cook!
Make
them
SMALL!
Stir well and cook for another 30 to 45 minutes or until the dumplings are well boiled. Be careful at this stage because it is likely the pot will boil over if the temperature is too high.
If you place a wooden spoon across the top of the pot, that can help limit boil over.
(In grandma Joans 70 year old cookpot)At this point the soup may seem too thin. Add the butter and flour mixture as well as the milk as thickening agents and cook 10 to 15 minutes more if needed to thicken the broth.
Refrigerate any leftovers and re-heat like any other soup.
Grand-dad alway put vineagar in his, but you do you! 😉
This is such a beautiful comment. Feels like what the internet was made for. The holidays have me all emotional, but this just was so sweet. Thank you very much for sharing! I will probably not make this for a while, since holiday plans/family visiting/cooking for out of town picky eaters/etc etc. but it might be my first dish of the new year. Legitimately very excited to try this. Thank you again for sharing.
It’s really good soup! 😉
The vast majority of things gen AI produces becomes pointless when you take the human out of the equation imo.
Recipe blogs were already a problem.
I watch chefs on YouTube demonstrate techniques, and then make recipes up as I go based on the ingredients I have available (This does not work for recipes that require exact measurements, like breads). Finding recipes through search engines has been a nightmare for a looong time.
Also - Madhur Jaffrey and America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks. Both go into detail on techniques you can bring forward into all your cooking. Madhur Jaffrey taught me how to cook Indian food and it’s amazing
(This does not work for recipes that require exact measurements, like breads)
There’s a reason we have different words for “cooking” and “baking.”
I just saw someone repost AI Slop as a list of “classic Thanksgiving crockpot recipes”. It included various ingredients such as:
- 3 lb bonciles torkey roast
- 1/cup starch
- 1 ln ctrioin steak
- 2 tsp bosher salt
- 1 smail onion
- 1 1/Z cup beet broth
Honestly, it got me angrier than it should have, but it’s a sign of the times. It wasn’t verified by the poster and it’s just clearly AI Slop.
Somehow read that as a snail onion
Instead of AI slop, that looks to me like someone that doesn’t speak the language hurriedly transcribing it from paper, getting paid by the recipe, and knowing nobody is going to verify anything. AI knows how to spell turkey and kosher.
Not in an image it doesn’t
True, but… I mean… who would try to generate something like that as an image? … I take that back. I’m sure somebody would.
I considered that, but decided it was AI throwing words together like “garlicpper”. Yes, a chat LLM knows “turkey”, but an image generator doesn’t. I didn’t mention it was a graphic. Another commenter has posted it, so you can be your own judge.
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Search engine algorithms drove people to write stories before recipes, unfortunately. Pages that just had recipes were deprioritized
Slop it up!
I knew my short phase of collecting cookbooks would pay off one-day!
You can get good 2nd hand cook books for insanely cheap (compared to new) from op shops/thrift. It’s one of a few things that are still decent value on the 2nd hand market.
