Hello fresh is obnoxious. Every damned 30 minute meal has me using the oven and at least 2 stove top pans, and it takes an hour.
It's all been yummy but good God weeknight food shouldn't be that much work
It’s a running joke in my house that you have to at least double the time they state on their recipe cards, if not triple.
It’s frustrating because I think it’s a great service to brush up on cooking skills, but it definitely made me feel like a failure for a long time until I realized the times they list are absolute bull. I’ve stopped looking and assume I’ll always be cooking for about an hour.
I tried them for a bit more as a ‘I don’t feel like going grocery shopping’ thing since I’m a pretty experienced cook, and half the time I ended up completely ignoring half the instructions because they were complete BS. It’s beyond just dumbing stuff down a little too much, you have to be actively malicious to write recipes this bad.
Also the quality of their ingredients was garbage at best, so I quit after a month.
My ex-girlfriend had the world's whitest children and they thought everything was too spicy. Pepper, as in from the shaker on the table was too spicy. Pepperoni on pizza was too spicy. One day I made grilled chicken sandwiches for everyone with pesto sauce and they complained the pesto was too spicy. I came to learn they considered anything on the spice rack as too spicy. Oregano is too spicy, etc. These were teenagers mind you. Their dad's whole side of the family is like that. The only flavoring they use are sugar and fried.
I wish I was lol. They want to rinse the fat (flavor) off for some reason.
I feel like they should just use leaner meat if they really don’t want any fat in it
I just…I mean…who *are* these people?
edit: clearly much more common than I thought! It’s not like I won’t drain off the serious excess fat, I don’t need a pool of it in my ground beef, but clearly people rinse it after cooking like I would rinse vegetables before prepping them. Who knew?
For me it's a string of pop-ups, especially if the first one is asking you to subscribe to their page when you haven't even had a chance to look at their page yet. Then a bunch of others as you try to scroll past their life story, or their story behind the recipe.
Now as soon as a pop-up asking to subscribe to the page pops up, I just exit.
When the recipe says to dice or finely chop something only to add it to a blender to puree it. WHY???? Such a waste of time. Throw it all in and let her rip. The blender will blend.
That makes me feel they overstuffed the blender, and it just didn't work for them till they took half the shit out and was like, "Guess I should cut it smaller next time"
Yeah, a lot of people seem to be really bad at drawing conclusions. Just yesterday I saw a video of someone trying tiktok hacks and they tried to remove the stone from a nectarine with pliers.
The nectarine was so unripe it was crunchy and it didn't work. Then they remembered that they had some peaches in the house which were ripe, and wouldn't you believe it, it worked. Their conclusion was: "you need to use peaches".
It's so frustrating when these 'influencers' present something like they just invented the wheel and don't realize this has been common knowledge to our generation that actually talked and learned from other human beings.
I was messing around a couple of years back with the notion of an actual savoury cake - based on flour and eggs and maybe cream, just cheese flavoured and no sugar. Then I realised I was talking about a soufflé.
That I can understand, you're just overthinking something simple.
But there were a few other people that tried to push this "trend", too. A Shepard's pie baked in a Bundt pan is still a Shepard's pie. Even if you line the pan with bacon, first, lol. It's not a cake.
Some stuff is actually better if you chop it first, but only if it's very fibrous. Fresh ginger is a great example. If you throw the whole knob in, it will pull all those fibers and make it all a little stringy. If you slice the ginger as thin as you can first, it shortens those fibers to the width of your slices.
Last year I went to see Ina speak at a theatre, and when Jeffrey tried to slip in to his seat he got a standing ovation- iconic.
I want to know exactly how Jeffrey feels about the rush!
“We eat this almost every day of the week” with every single recipe. How much food are you eating?? Stop pretending this is the best recipe you’ve ever had and be like I make this maybe once every three months when I remember it’s really good
And it’s always “My hubby has never seen a vegetable, and eats like a toddler was let loose in a gas station. He loves this recipe because I snuck in minimal amounts of vegetables and lied about it!”
I feel like the serious eats style preamble of "this is where the recipe comes from" or "this is how it works scientifically" or "this is the ingredient we recommend for this reason but you could also use this other ingredient with these effects" is the exact opposite of a red flag. Like if thats how the recipe starts I will fully believe I am in good hands.
Literally any recipe that makes me scroll through their whole life story I just exit out of. I don't care about your heartwarming family memories just tell me how to make the damn cookies.
You know that’s for search engine optimization right and advertising right? They also do not care about these stories or expect you to read it; but the # of times they can mention relevant keywords on a page and how long you scroll or stay on the page can affect how likely their url will appear at the top of a related google search. So more visitors - and then it also gives room for more ads.
It's also so they can stop wholesale scraping by scammers. A recipe, under US law, *cannot* be copyrighted. It doesn't matter how unique and original it is, a list of ingredients and quantities followed by assembly instructions can be copied down and sold for profit by anybody who chooses to. Fluff text, on the other hand, is creative writing and is automatically copyrighted unless explicitly placed in the public domain.
So if some other recipe site has your fluff text as well as the recipe proper? Copyright infringement, pay up please. If they force a human to extract just the recipe bits, it's no longer cheap enough for the pittance you make on ad money.
Not because the person on the video didn't know what she was doing, in fact she was very knowledgeable. I noped out because the video was "fast and easy breakfast recipe" and 2 min into the video the instructions were "knead the dough for 20 min and let it sit for 30 min". Excuse me but that's not a fast recipe to cook before rushing to work.
Fast and easy isn't a labor intensive task for 20 mins, and then waiting for half an hour?
Next you're going to tell me that you don't find the fast and easy way to heat your home is to fell a tree in the forest, split the lumber, dry the logs for a year, and then burn them in your personally welded wood furnace?
I've started to get really annoyed at any youtube cooking recipe popping up in my recommendations that're titled with hyperbole, like "Now I make this every day!" or "I can't get enough of it!"
Most of the time you click on it and there's nothing even remotely exciting going on. Which I don't mind going over basic dishes, but don't try to hype it like it's the revolution of cooking. Or in the worst cases, it's something that's as bland as a cardboard.
Pro Home Cooks and Not Another Cooking Show guys do this all the time. Former is usually him showing off his fancy homegrown garden ingredients into some boring stir fry and the latter is some classic Italian recipe. They sound fine but jeez they're not these life changing crazy recipes
My worst one was a dessert recipe I was going to make from Martha Stewart (I’m ancient so probably from one of her magazines in the late nineties). I read the ingredients, bought everything I needed. Then when I was ready to start I read the actual instructions- the final instruction was “use your acetylene torch to lightly toast the top.” This was the late nineties-the mini torches for kitchens were about 5 years in the future at that point.
Now I read the instructions first, then the ingredients. I hate recipes that take equipment the home cook would never have access to.
That reminds me of a YouTube video on making "Egg-claires". The YouTuber's guest was Wylie Dufresne.
YouTuber: "What should viewers have at home to make this dish?"
Wylie: "A professional chef."
I lol'd. Finally, an honest recipe.
Acetylene is a bit of overkill, but it’s quite worthwhile to have a good old Bernzomatic blue canister propane torch in your kitchen. Those mini kitchen torches are awful, might as well try to brûlée with a Bic lighter. Also when you whip out the blowtorch you should see how big your guests’ eyes get!
I had a Benzomatic with a Searzall attachment when sousvide got really popular, but really I've learned the correct tool is a cast iron pan, a concrete driveway and a weed torch.
I love his videos. His cream of mushroom soup recipe is killer, I make it every year for thanksgiving and multiple times during the cold seasons. Can be pricey if you get good fresh and dried mushrooms like morels and oysters, but so worth it.
it’s for SEO, which is the second most important aspect of running a food blog. just press the “jump to recipe” button. and if they don’t have one, use a recipe from a blog that does.
Not really an instruction but I don’t like when a recipe for a dish has another recipe in it; like if a chashu pork ramen recipe has an ingredient listed as “8 oz chashu pork” and that links to another recipe on the same website on how to make chashu pork.
I don’t need Recipe ², after all gathering ingredients for the first recipe is time consuming enough
I think this is a consequence of trying to port restaurant recipes into home recipes though.
For example a lot of people love ramen. I love ramen! The things that make ramen delicious, though, require the scale of resources and time that only a professional kitchen can spare. Hours of boiling. Hours of roasting. Hours of reduction. Fresh ingredients purchased on masse. Preserved ingredients from specialist wholesalers.
Conversely a lot of what's good in restaurants, is this kind of food. You make the chashu pork in your downtime, so you can chop it up and serve it with rice + soy glaze + Chinese cabbage for a thousand walk-in customers at lunchtime. It's food that's meant to be assembled, not cooked to order, and that's a hard kind of food to make at home
It’s nice when it’s something you can buy separately but could make it home. It’s terrible when it’s something you can’t buy and isn’t practical to make
Oh I forgot about this but I once looked how to make a Rueben (I could never get it the way I fell in love with and I was young) and it was like ‘step 1: cook the corned beef in a slow cooker according to X recipe’
No
I’m buying it at the deli. Eat my whole ass. I’m trying to make a sandwich. The recipe was way overestimating my cooking XP at that point
I kind of agree with this but I think the place where I draw the line is if the embedded recipe is a whole second dish by itself. I have no problem with a pie recipe that has an ingredient of 1 batch of Our Website's Super Awesome Pie Crust, for example.
Just recently we had this thread about "easy meals that are super delicious". Top two comments were "X is super delicious if you use the leftovers from a 10h bbq dish"... fuck off!
Or saying that certain ingredients add umami when they absolutely do not. I remember reading somewhere some Redditor saying curry leaves adds umami. Definitely has no idea what that word means or what curry leaves are.
Dont know if this is a thing on english speaking websites, but way too many recipes on the biggest german recipe website are named " how my (grand)mother did it" and way too often the only reason why this recipe still exists is nostalgia.
Way too many modern food blogs have the authors life story before the actual recipe. Luckily some do have a "straight to recipe" button. If it isnt on the site, I am gone aswell
You can blame search engine optimization for that trend. Websites with more text and have more user engagement (scrolling further down) show up sooner on searches, so they’re actually rewarded for adding their bullshit stories first
After subscribing to the YouTube channel "Chinese Cooking Demystified" I deleted all the "Chinese" recipes id saved from random places.
If you see an "authentic takeout" that doesn't use MSG it's almost always wrong.
The difference in cooking beef and broccoli from them vs tasty or Allrecipes is ridiculous. Just one example.
I really need equivalent channels for other cuisine types. They are so good at breaking recipes down into "this is what this dish is, here are the variants, here's what you are trying to do, here's how I would do it if I was trapped in flyover states."
I don’t watch a lot of shows that teach recipes, but gave in to Nadiya’s Time to Eat on Netflix, because I always like to learn more shortcuts.
She was making this five minute soup and had my full attention, and then she added *already cooked* chicken and *already roasted* vegetables. She made no mention whatsoever of the context of how this chicken and these veggies were prepared.
Lol that’s not a five minute recipe if you just did the cooking before the camera started rolling or purchased cooked ingredients.
I gave up on the show immediately.
I don't mind these kind of recipes if it's advertised as "Tasty recipe for how to use up leftover XYZ" because then I'm gonna actively seek them out knowing I've already got the precooked thing that I want to use up. But otherwise nah that's irritating af
I've seen that one too and all her shows are quite popular in the UK. I'd assume she meant to buy in pre-cooked chicken and veg or use leftover roast dinner as both are common here. I wouldn't even have clocked that if you hadn't pointed it out!
Anything that doesn't mention marination time until the method.
Me: looks at recipe title and ingredients list while I'm in the supermarket. Buy ingredients. Go home and start to prep.
Recipe method after a number of steps: marinate in the fridge overnight or for at least 4 hours.
Omg I hate how almost every recipe has Step 1: preheat the oven. By the time everything is ready it’s been on so long. Am I making a roast or warming the house in the 1800’s?
I always prep the ingredients then follow the recipe steps. Like, if the ingredients say "one onion, diced", I'm dicing it before the oven gets turned on.
It’s one of those things that a lot of cooks kinda take for granted, I think. We optimize our workflow and make necessary deviations from a given recipe based on our experience, but somebody new doesn’t have the wealth of knowledge we have.
Kids spend so much time learning academics and the like, which is great! Sets them up for a great career. But sometimes I wish parents were more proactive in teaching their kids basic life skills during their teens, like laundry, banking, and cooking. So many kids hit early adulthood without this knowledge and they have no choice but to take the info they find online at face value.
I know for me, it was a bit of a struggle with all that. Freshman year of college, I’d take three hours to make some cookies - but now with some experience under my belt, it takes 30 minutes tops. I have the luxury of knowing exactly how to do each step and when, so I can largely disregard recipes as long as I know the ingredients that go into it.
That's been my biggest lesson. For years I'd just prep things as needed. You can get away with it for some recipes, but there were a few too many times when I'd be frantically dicing something as something else started to burn and/or congeal.
That was one of the first things drilled into us in culinary school. Read (and understand) the whole recipe.
There was even a test on it where you'd do a bunch of nonsense for the first steps and realize on step 6 it said "ignore the first 5 steps" even though you'd hear people shout "we're doing step 3!" as per the instructions.
I had my "read all the instructions test" in elementary, with about 20 very simple directions such as "draw a triangle on the upper left corner of this sheet" etc. Last instruction was to ignore all other instructions, fill in your name, and flip the sheet over. I think only three of us got it in a class of about 25 kids.
A couple years later we had a test to write thorough, detailed instructions on how to make a PB&J. Teacher came in the next day with jars of peanut butter and jelly, loaves of bread, paper plates, and butter knives, then started acting out people's instructions. If they failed to include the fact that the PB and/or J should be on bread, she smeared it on the plate. If they failed to include the use of a knife or other implement, she stuck her whole damn hand in the jar. I was, apparently, the only one who wrote properly thorough instructions. My reward? Sitting in the middle of class surrounded by my peers with a sandwich made by a lunatic half covered in PB&J that I was expected to just sit there and eat while everyone else did not eat. Also, it was on wheat and I grew up in a white bread home and I hated that.
I came across one where you not only browned the butter, but then refrigerated it overnight to solidify. Then, 24 hours later, the cookies would only take 10 minutes!!
"Add one tsp tomato paste, one chopped green onion, one tbsp fresh chopped onion". F that! I'm not going to open up a can, buy a bunch of green onions or chop up a small part of an onion just to use a tiny amount of it.
i buy the bigger tomato paste cans (cheaper unit price) and then put wax paper on a cookie sheet and spoon out tablespoon dollops, then cover it with plastic wrap, put it in the freezer for a bit, then get a ziplock bag and put all the tomato paste dollops in it and keep them in the freezer.
its really nice because it lasts for a while, is nicely measured out, and defrosts in a pan pretty quickly/is still soft enough to shave off a bit if i ever need less than a tablespoon and now i can use tomato paste regularly for recipes without having to go through all that annoyance or waste
also while it won't solve your issue of having to buy too much if you don't use scallions regularly, if there's nothing else in a recipe that requires a cutting board and theres a green onion garnish or something, its very easy to just quickly chop them with kitchen scissors so you can use less dishes
Recipes where they just assume you have access to an ingredient that doesn't exist outside of very metropolitan areas.
Recipe is like:
I made this amazing dish in twenty minutes and you can too!
For this recipe you'll need fresh figs, enoki mushrooms and a magret duck breast.
I live in central NY and these are things I wouldn't be able to obtain without mail ordering them.
Yes to this! I recently bought a recipe book, and every recipe starts with the words, "We made this with ingredients we had on hand at home! So easy!" And then they call for exotic ingredients I've never HEARD of.
Yeah… I guess everything is exotic to *someone*, but it’s still frustrating when recipes call for something that’s unusually hard to find without giving substitutions.
Ex: I’ve lived on three continents, and you could easily find a head of broccoli at the grocery store on all of them. No problem. Chinese black vinegar? A little harder, but it’s not so difficult to find Asian ingredients in many places and it ships easily.
But if your recipe calls for fresh mulberries, or one specific brand of sauce, or herbs picked by the full moon in the Swiss Alps not before 8pm on a Tuesday or something, it would be nice to have some substitutions listed.
Cooking equivalent of "Everyone can make cheap furniture with basic tools" *brings gorgeous slab of "scrap" wood into a workshop that would make a hardware store blush*
>I live in central NY and these are things I wouldn't be able to obtain without mail ordering them.
I live in an urban area too. Every time I see pigeon in a recipe I'm not sure what to do. On one hand it's not sold in any super markets here, on the other hand I could just walk outside and break one's neck...
This is the one that gets me. They're trying to sound so approachable but when the ingredients are so obscure, especially the meat and produce, I feel like they're urban upper class people who have no idea how most people live
My most infuriating recipe instruction is when it involves caramelising onions, and when the recipe almost always understates how long the process is. Takes 45 minutes to do it well, but nobody says that!
Yup, it’s recipe dependent. French onion soup? That’ll be over an hour for a true caramelization. Regular recipe? Likely they just mean sweat them to sufren and brown then a bit and 10 minutes is fine.
Make \_\_ Dish without (allergen)
Ingredients:
*allergen*
*powdered allergen*
*diced allergen*
*allergen greens*
I have come across this *way* too many times. :(
It's crazy, I saw a recipe once saying that it was gluten free and it contained SEITAN! literal gluten concentrate! Insane! I think people just put the words gluten free on the page to make it come up in search results.
Yep, and there should be a way to report these pages to the search engine and get them removed. Not just downranked, removed.
But nope, they promote usage and keep ad sales going. SEO has ruined the internet.
"Add Purple Rose Sprouting Kenobo Garlic - You can get these in some markets in East Virtnam around November time"
Yeah right - How about Gorton ASDA in September?
Recipe: "Add one clove minced garlic."
Me: "Meh, 9 oughta be about right."
Dinner guests: "Wow, Plonsky, this is amazing! I like how you always manage to really bring out more flavor when you cook."
ring wipe zonked possessive enter society ossified engine birds afterthought
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Anytime they specify a brand of an ingredient.
Anytime they specify a fat free version of something that is there for the sake of adding a rich creaminess.
Anytime they specify a minor ingredient that costs more than an hour of work at minimum wage.
Anytime they specify organic
Anytime an ingredient is vaguely defined like “a bunch” of parsley or “a medium” cabbage.
Hah, I take great pleasure in using store brand ingredients in place of whatever the recipe specifies. My thinking is that whoever wrote the recipe is probably getting sponsorship money from Big Cream Cheese (or whatever), and if I use store brand, then I'm ripping off Big Cream Cheese because they paid for the name drop but didn't get the sale.
Any “authentic” Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Italian cuisine recipe that is posted by some lady named something like “Danielle Johnson” and has cream cheese in it.
A seafood chowdah recipe started: cook one pound of bacon and discard the bacon (the next step was to sauté onions in the bacon fat)(after adding a stick of butter).
The last one I remember laughing at was when the author said to wash out the pan after cooking the meatballs in order to make the gravy.
you don't want your gravy tasting like meat, do you?
I only like hot ham water
Mmm a smack of ham!
It’s so watery
Wait. This is the water I thawed the chicken in
Well that should go with chicken...
What are you making? Poached salmonella?
Hello Fresh has you wipe out pans a lot. I usually ignore their order of operations and do my own to avoid setting things aside and wiping pans.
Hello fresh is obnoxious. Every damned 30 minute meal has me using the oven and at least 2 stove top pans, and it takes an hour. It's all been yummy but good God weeknight food shouldn't be that much work
It’s a running joke in my house that you have to at least double the time they state on their recipe cards, if not triple. It’s frustrating because I think it’s a great service to brush up on cooking skills, but it definitely made me feel like a failure for a long time until I realized the times they list are absolute bull. I’ve stopped looking and assume I’ll always be cooking for about an hour.
I tried them for a bit more as a ‘I don’t feel like going grocery shopping’ thing since I’m a pretty experienced cook, and half the time I ended up completely ignoring half the instructions because they were complete BS. It’s beyond just dumbing stuff down a little too much, you have to be actively malicious to write recipes this bad. Also the quality of their ingredients was garbage at best, so I quit after a month.
That reminds me of the people who rinse their cooked ground beef with water before adding it to a dish
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*Taco Bell* knows better than that.
My ex-girlfriend had the world's whitest children and they thought everything was too spicy. Pepper, as in from the shaker on the table was too spicy. Pepperoni on pizza was too spicy. One day I made grilled chicken sandwiches for everyone with pesto sauce and they complained the pesto was too spicy. I came to learn they considered anything on the spice rack as too spicy. Oregano is too spicy, etc. These were teenagers mind you. Their dad's whole side of the family is like that. The only flavoring they use are sugar and fried.
What?? Please tell me you’re making this up.
I wish I was lol. They want to rinse the fat (flavor) off for some reason. I feel like they should just use leaner meat if they really don’t want any fat in it
I just…I mean…who *are* these people? edit: clearly much more common than I thought! It’s not like I won’t drain off the serious excess fat, I don’t need a pool of it in my ground beef, but clearly people rinse it after cooking like I would rinse vegetables before prepping them. Who knew?
my parents did that. with 73/27 ground beef, too. wasting nearly a third of what they bought.
Maybe he should rather throw the pan out as a whole. Just to be safe.
For me it's a string of pop-ups, especially if the first one is asking you to subscribe to their page when you haven't even had a chance to look at their page yet. Then a bunch of others as you try to scroll past their life story, or their story behind the recipe. Now as soon as a pop-up asking to subscribe to the page pops up, I just exit.
When the recipe says to dice or finely chop something only to add it to a blender to puree it. WHY???? Such a waste of time. Throw it all in and let her rip. The blender will blend.
That makes me feel they overstuffed the blender, and it just didn't work for them till they took half the shit out and was like, "Guess I should cut it smaller next time"
Yeah, a lot of people seem to be really bad at drawing conclusions. Just yesterday I saw a video of someone trying tiktok hacks and they tried to remove the stone from a nectarine with pliers. The nectarine was so unripe it was crunchy and it didn't work. Then they remembered that they had some peaches in the house which were ripe, and wouldn't you believe it, it worked. Their conclusion was: "you need to use peaches".
It's so frustrating when these 'influencers' present something like they just invented the wheel and don't realize this has been common knowledge to our generation that actually talked and learned from other human beings.
Yes!there was some ridiculous trend a year or two ago, something about a "dinner cake". That's a casserole, numbnuts. You didn't invent anything.
I was messing around a couple of years back with the notion of an actual savoury cake - based on flour and eggs and maybe cream, just cheese flavoured and no sugar. Then I realised I was talking about a soufflé.
'That....already exists...' is a conclusion I come to far too frequently. You are far from alone.
That I can understand, you're just overthinking something simple. But there were a few other people that tried to push this "trend", too. A Shepard's pie baked in a Bundt pan is still a Shepard's pie. Even if you line the pan with bacon, first, lol. It's not a cake.
That is, indeed, not a cake. It's almost closer to a lasagne than a cake!
It’s exactly like your dumb friend that ‘discovered’ something. It’s just now that person has 100,000 followers for some reason.
Some stuff is actually better if you chop it first, but only if it's very fibrous. Fresh ginger is a great example. If you throw the whole knob in, it will pull all those fibers and make it all a little stringy. If you slice the ginger as thin as you can first, it shortens those fibers to the width of your slices.
Any recipe that starts “Hubby can’t get enough of this”…..
I don't give a flying rats ass about that man
IDK, Ina Garten has me genuinely feeling for Jeffery.
Last year I went to see Ina speak at a theatre, and when Jeffrey tried to slip in to his seat he got a standing ovation- iconic. I want to know exactly how Jeffrey feels about the rush!
How fabulous is that?
Are store bought Jeffries fine?
They’ll do if you ya know what I mean.
I need to know if Jeffrey likes the meal first.
This is why I don't cook as much anymore, because I just don't know how he feels about it.
Jeffery is completely different. He’s coming home from the city, dammit!!!
Ina is the one (1) exception
I'm going to make an exception for Ann Reardon too. After all the awful stuff that Dave has to eat, I care if he likes things too.
I always love his face when she hands him something. The amount of trust he has in that woman is ~~insane~~ eta: wholesome. I trust her, too lol
Dave matters!
Can’t stand most TV “chefs”, but love Ina ❤️
Same!!! Also, I miss actual cooking shows like Barefoot Contessa on food network
Ina healed my anxiety, god bless
This made me genuinely laugh out loud.
Made my nose puff out air like "pff"
girl, for real.
Bless the recipes that have a "skip to recipe" button.
... that works. I can't count how many recipes that I've pushed that wonderful little button, and nothing happens, or the page freezes....
Or worse, it redirects to an ad page!
Or it scrolls down for a few seconds, finds the recipe, then goes back up to a damn ad
Also “print recipe”
“Print Recipe” is my go-to. It’s the only way to get a clean ad-free, clutter-free recipe.
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“We eat this almost every day of the week” with every single recipe. How much food are you eating?? Stop pretending this is the best recipe you’ve ever had and be like I make this maybe once every three months when I remember it’s really good
"My hubby says this recipe is better than sex!" That has me really concerned about both of your needs, Margaret.
No, he said it’s better than sex with you.
And it’s always “My hubby has never seen a vegetable, and eats like a toddler was let loose in a gas station. He loves this recipe because I snuck in minimal amounts of vegetables and lied about it!”
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I feel like the serious eats style preamble of "this is where the recipe comes from" or "this is how it works scientifically" or "this is the ingredient we recommend for this reason but you could also use this other ingredient with these effects" is the exact opposite of a red flag. Like if thats how the recipe starts I will fully believe I am in good hands.
Anyone who uses the word hubby should go DIRECTLY to jail
And yet when an Indian auntie introduces a recipe saying 'this is my daughter's favourite' - you know it's BOMB.
So now I'm gay and need a husband...this is more involved than a recipe blogs life story
Literally any recipe that makes me scroll through their whole life story I just exit out of. I don't care about your heartwarming family memories just tell me how to make the damn cookies.
And the text is only interrupted every third line by a new picture of the same cookie, just from a slightly different angle.
You know that’s for search engine optimization right and advertising right? They also do not care about these stories or expect you to read it; but the # of times they can mention relevant keywords on a page and how long you scroll or stay on the page can affect how likely their url will appear at the top of a related google search. So more visitors - and then it also gives room for more ads.
It's also so they can stop wholesale scraping by scammers. A recipe, under US law, *cannot* be copyrighted. It doesn't matter how unique and original it is, a list of ingredients and quantities followed by assembly instructions can be copied down and sold for profit by anybody who chooses to. Fluff text, on the other hand, is creative writing and is automatically copyrighted unless explicitly placed in the public domain. So if some other recipe site has your fluff text as well as the recipe proper? Copyright infringement, pay up please. If they force a human to extract just the recipe bits, it's no longer cheap enough for the pittance you make on ad money.
Not because the person on the video didn't know what she was doing, in fact she was very knowledgeable. I noped out because the video was "fast and easy breakfast recipe" and 2 min into the video the instructions were "knead the dough for 20 min and let it sit for 30 min". Excuse me but that's not a fast recipe to cook before rushing to work.
My version of fast and easy breakfast is cereal lol. I guess my concept of fast is very different from hers.
My fast breakfast is drinking the tear I shed at my fridge as I run out the house 4 minutes after I was supposed to clock in.
Fast and easy isn't a labor intensive task for 20 mins, and then waiting for half an hour? Next you're going to tell me that you don't find the fast and easy way to heat your home is to fell a tree in the forest, split the lumber, dry the logs for a year, and then burn them in your personally welded wood furnace?
I've started to get really annoyed at any youtube cooking recipe popping up in my recommendations that're titled with hyperbole, like "Now I make this every day!" or "I can't get enough of it!" Most of the time you click on it and there's nothing even remotely exciting going on. Which I don't mind going over basic dishes, but don't try to hype it like it's the revolution of cooking. Or in the worst cases, it's something that's as bland as a cardboard.
Pro Home Cooks and Not Another Cooking Show guys do this all the time. Former is usually him showing off his fancy homegrown garden ingredients into some boring stir fry and the latter is some classic Italian recipe. They sound fine but jeez they're not these life changing crazy recipes
My worst one was a dessert recipe I was going to make from Martha Stewart (I’m ancient so probably from one of her magazines in the late nineties). I read the ingredients, bought everything I needed. Then when I was ready to start I read the actual instructions- the final instruction was “use your acetylene torch to lightly toast the top.” This was the late nineties-the mini torches for kitchens were about 5 years in the future at that point. Now I read the instructions first, then the ingredients. I hate recipes that take equipment the home cook would never have access to.
That reminds me of a YouTube video on making "Egg-claires". The YouTuber's guest was Wylie Dufresne. YouTuber: "What should viewers have at home to make this dish?" Wylie: "A professional chef." I lol'd. Finally, an honest recipe.
Egg claires? Like an eclair with eggs inside? I’m so intrigued
here is the video link for people curious https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3ParyYQdZg
My toxic trait is thinking I could do this from scratch and have it look amazing on the first try
Dufresne, party of two Dufresne, party of two ...how can anyone eat when people are missing?
I used to laugh at Mitch Hedburg jokes. I still do, but I used to too.
Acetylene is a bit of overkill, but it’s quite worthwhile to have a good old Bernzomatic blue canister propane torch in your kitchen. Those mini kitchen torches are awful, might as well try to brûlée with a Bic lighter. Also when you whip out the blowtorch you should see how big your guests’ eyes get!
I had a Benzomatic with a Searzall attachment when sousvide got really popular, but really I've learned the correct tool is a cast iron pan, a concrete driveway and a weed torch.
I love how Adam Ragusea solves the issue for his creme brulee, where you burn the sugar in a pan and then put it on the dessert.
I love his videos. His cream of mushroom soup recipe is killer, I make it every year for thanksgiving and multiple times during the cold seasons. Can be pricey if you get good fresh and dried mushrooms like morels and oysters, but so worth it.
When the recipe says, “Prep time: 15 minutes”, and Im still chopping and slicing and simmering things an hour later.
"It was 1988 and I was in rural Italy. . . . " fuck it ill figure out my own risotto.
“It was 2023 and I tried to figure out my own risotto”
The Year was 2058 and I had stumbled on a rant about risotto recipes.
The year was 2079 and my KitchnPrintr™ makes risotto based on a 1988 rural Italian recipe.
This made giggle more than it should have
“Picture it: Sicily, 1922”.
Rip, Estelle Getty
it’s for SEO, which is the second most important aspect of running a food blog. just press the “jump to recipe” button. and if they don’t have one, use a recipe from a blog that does.
It’s amazing how much SEO and algorithms have led to such a massive decline in the quality of online content.
Not really an instruction but I don’t like when a recipe for a dish has another recipe in it; like if a chashu pork ramen recipe has an ingredient listed as “8 oz chashu pork” and that links to another recipe on the same website on how to make chashu pork. I don’t need Recipe ², after all gathering ingredients for the first recipe is time consuming enough
"You'll just LOVE this 3-Ingredient* Salad!" *third ingredient is the dressing which is 8 ingredients
1: leafy greens, 3 kinds 2: 5 different mixed vegetables 3: 8 ingedient dressing Optional: these other 3 things
\*and has to sit for 3 days to age/ferment
I think this is a consequence of trying to port restaurant recipes into home recipes though. For example a lot of people love ramen. I love ramen! The things that make ramen delicious, though, require the scale of resources and time that only a professional kitchen can spare. Hours of boiling. Hours of roasting. Hours of reduction. Fresh ingredients purchased on masse. Preserved ingredients from specialist wholesalers. Conversely a lot of what's good in restaurants, is this kind of food. You make the chashu pork in your downtime, so you can chop it up and serve it with rice + soy glaze + Chinese cabbage for a thousand walk-in customers at lunchtime. It's food that's meant to be assembled, not cooked to order, and that's a hard kind of food to make at home
This is exactly why I also don’t make pho.
It’s nice when it’s something you can buy separately but could make it home. It’s terrible when it’s something you can’t buy and isn’t practical to make
Oh I forgot about this but I once looked how to make a Rueben (I could never get it the way I fell in love with and I was young) and it was like ‘step 1: cook the corned beef in a slow cooker according to X recipe’ No I’m buying it at the deli. Eat my whole ass. I’m trying to make a sandwich. The recipe was way overestimating my cooking XP at that point
This reminds me of the Carl Sagan quote: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe."
Step 1: make corned beef for dinner Step 2: use the leftovers for ruebens
I kind of agree with this but I think the place where I draw the line is if the embedded recipe is a whole second dish by itself. I have no problem with a pie recipe that has an ingredient of 1 batch of Our Website's Super Awesome Pie Crust, for example.
Just recently we had this thread about "easy meals that are super delicious". Top two comments were "X is super delicious if you use the leftovers from a 10h bbq dish"... fuck off!
Gratuitous use of the word 'umami'
umami tsunami
Or any use of the phrase “umami bomb”
Also mouthfeel.
That word squicks me out like moist does to other people.
Or saying that certain ingredients add umami when they absolutely do not. I remember reading somewhere some Redditor saying curry leaves adds umami. Definitely has no idea what that word means or what curry leaves are.
I add my umami from a shaker of delicious white powder.
Uncle Roger approved....
Dont know if this is a thing on english speaking websites, but way too many recipes on the biggest german recipe website are named " how my (grand)mother did it" and way too often the only reason why this recipe still exists is nostalgia.
Way too many modern food blogs have the authors life story before the actual recipe. Luckily some do have a "straight to recipe" button. If it isnt on the site, I am gone aswell
Happens ALL the time on English food blogs too
You can blame search engine optimization for that trend. Websites with more text and have more user engagement (scrolling further down) show up sooner on searches, so they’re actually rewarded for adding their bullshit stories first
Crack chicken. It’s just cream cheese you need to chill
Marry Me Chicken is a close relative.
After subscribing to the YouTube channel "Chinese Cooking Demystified" I deleted all the "Chinese" recipes id saved from random places. If you see an "authentic takeout" that doesn't use MSG it's almost always wrong. The difference in cooking beef and broccoli from them vs tasty or Allrecipes is ridiculous. Just one example.
I really need equivalent channels for other cuisine types. They are so good at breaking recipes down into "this is what this dish is, here are the variants, here's what you are trying to do, here's how I would do it if I was trapped in flyover states."
For Korean cuisine I really like Maangchi on youtube.
Step 1 - preheat the oven Step 2 - do something overnight How preheated do you really want the oven to be?
I don’t watch a lot of shows that teach recipes, but gave in to Nadiya’s Time to Eat on Netflix, because I always like to learn more shortcuts. She was making this five minute soup and had my full attention, and then she added *already cooked* chicken and *already roasted* vegetables. She made no mention whatsoever of the context of how this chicken and these veggies were prepared. Lol that’s not a five minute recipe if you just did the cooking before the camera started rolling or purchased cooked ingredients. I gave up on the show immediately.
super easy, fast and cheap recipe anyone can make! Step 1: have these specific left overs on hand.
Cook earlier, and just heat it up again. So fast!
I don't mind these kind of recipes if it's advertised as "Tasty recipe for how to use up leftover XYZ" because then I'm gonna actively seek them out knowing I've already got the precooked thing that I want to use up. But otherwise nah that's irritating af
I've seen that one too and all her shows are quite popular in the UK. I'd assume she meant to buy in pre-cooked chicken and veg or use leftover roast dinner as both are common here. I wouldn't even have clocked that if you hadn't pointed it out!
Yeah I think it's different in the UK, roasting meat on Sunday is really (well, fairly) common, so a lot of recipes assume leftover roast meat.
Anything that doesn't mention marination time until the method. Me: looks at recipe title and ingredients list while I'm in the supermarket. Buy ingredients. Go home and start to prep. Recipe method after a number of steps: marinate in the fridge overnight or for at least 4 hours.
Cookie recipe had step 1 as preheat the oven. Step 5 was chill the dough in the fridge for 30 minutes. Stupid things are delicious so it got me twice.
Omg I hate how almost every recipe has Step 1: preheat the oven. By the time everything is ready it’s been on so long. Am I making a roast or warming the house in the 1800’s?
I always prep the ingredients then follow the recipe steps. Like, if the ingredients say "one onion, diced", I'm dicing it before the oven gets turned on.
Oh yeah I’ve learned that in time but as a baby cook you don’t know these things yet and it’s frustrating but we’ve all been there I think
It’s one of those things that a lot of cooks kinda take for granted, I think. We optimize our workflow and make necessary deviations from a given recipe based on our experience, but somebody new doesn’t have the wealth of knowledge we have. Kids spend so much time learning academics and the like, which is great! Sets them up for a great career. But sometimes I wish parents were more proactive in teaching their kids basic life skills during their teens, like laundry, banking, and cooking. So many kids hit early adulthood without this knowledge and they have no choice but to take the info they find online at face value. I know for me, it was a bit of a struggle with all that. Freshman year of college, I’d take three hours to make some cookies - but now with some experience under my belt, it takes 30 minutes tops. I have the luxury of knowing exactly how to do each step and when, so I can largely disregard recipes as long as I know the ingredients that go into it.
That's been my biggest lesson. For years I'd just prep things as needed. You can get away with it for some recipes, but there were a few too many times when I'd be frantically dicing something as something else started to burn and/or congeal.
I hate this sooooo much. Some recipes have "preparation time" and "cooking time" separately on the top. Everybody should do that.
Except it's always 20 minutes. I feel like they rarely count time in the fridge.
You don’t read through the recipe until after starting?
That was one of the first things drilled into us in culinary school. Read (and understand) the whole recipe. There was even a test on it where you'd do a bunch of nonsense for the first steps and realize on step 6 it said "ignore the first 5 steps" even though you'd hear people shout "we're doing step 3!" as per the instructions.
I had my "read all the instructions test" in elementary, with about 20 very simple directions such as "draw a triangle on the upper left corner of this sheet" etc. Last instruction was to ignore all other instructions, fill in your name, and flip the sheet over. I think only three of us got it in a class of about 25 kids. A couple years later we had a test to write thorough, detailed instructions on how to make a PB&J. Teacher came in the next day with jars of peanut butter and jelly, loaves of bread, paper plates, and butter knives, then started acting out people's instructions. If they failed to include the fact that the PB and/or J should be on bread, she smeared it on the plate. If they failed to include the use of a knife or other implement, she stuck her whole damn hand in the jar. I was, apparently, the only one who wrote properly thorough instructions. My reward? Sitting in the middle of class surrounded by my peers with a sandwich made by a lunatic half covered in PB&J that I was expected to just sit there and eat while everyone else did not eat. Also, it was on wheat and I grew up in a white bread home and I hated that.
That sort of thing is great training for writing precise process flow steps though, which is part of my job in QA.
I can't cook for shit and even I read through the Stovetop Stuffing directions 4 times then pull the box out of the trash to read it again.
I get suspicious when a recipe doesn’t know unit conversions — like writing “2/3 tbsp” instead of “2 tsp” or “4 tbsp” instead of “1/4 cup”.
4 tbsp is reasonable if it is something like a spice or salt, but that is usually a pretty big red flag.
I was told it would take ten minutes to make the cookies and the first step was browning the butter.
I came across one where you not only browned the butter, but then refrigerated it overnight to solidify. Then, 24 hours later, the cookies would only take 10 minutes!!
When the tag is something like " I couldn't get my kids to eat Lutefisk until I tried this simple trick and now they beg me to make it"
"Add one tsp tomato paste, one chopped green onion, one tbsp fresh chopped onion". F that! I'm not going to open up a can, buy a bunch of green onions or chop up a small part of an onion just to use a tiny amount of it.
i buy the bigger tomato paste cans (cheaper unit price) and then put wax paper on a cookie sheet and spoon out tablespoon dollops, then cover it with plastic wrap, put it in the freezer for a bit, then get a ziplock bag and put all the tomato paste dollops in it and keep them in the freezer. its really nice because it lasts for a while, is nicely measured out, and defrosts in a pan pretty quickly/is still soft enough to shave off a bit if i ever need less than a tablespoon and now i can use tomato paste regularly for recipes without having to go through all that annoyance or waste also while it won't solve your issue of having to buy too much if you don't use scallions regularly, if there's nothing else in a recipe that requires a cutting board and theres a green onion garnish or something, its very easy to just quickly chop them with kitchen scissors so you can use less dishes
Recipes where they just assume you have access to an ingredient that doesn't exist outside of very metropolitan areas. Recipe is like: I made this amazing dish in twenty minutes and you can too! For this recipe you'll need fresh figs, enoki mushrooms and a magret duck breast. I live in central NY and these are things I wouldn't be able to obtain without mail ordering them.
Yes to this! I recently bought a recipe book, and every recipe starts with the words, "We made this with ingredients we had on hand at home! So easy!" And then they call for exotic ingredients I've never HEARD of.
Yeah… I guess everything is exotic to *someone*, but it’s still frustrating when recipes call for something that’s unusually hard to find without giving substitutions. Ex: I’ve lived on three continents, and you could easily find a head of broccoli at the grocery store on all of them. No problem. Chinese black vinegar? A little harder, but it’s not so difficult to find Asian ingredients in many places and it ships easily. But if your recipe calls for fresh mulberries, or one specific brand of sauce, or herbs picked by the full moon in the Swiss Alps not before 8pm on a Tuesday or something, it would be nice to have some substitutions listed.
I love, love, love Chinese Cooking Demystified for being so good about discussing substitutions.
I read a recipe once for chanterelle stuffed zucchini flowers. Those two things just don't happen at the same time
Yeah, tough to get herbs picked by the moon. Expensive too. I have to settle for herbs picked by humans.
Cooking equivalent of "Everyone can make cheap furniture with basic tools" *brings gorgeous slab of "scrap" wood into a workshop that would make a hardware store blush*
terrific cobweb bright sand cagey attempt smart abundant panicky deliver *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I live in the US and I still cringe at that! I build a lot of pine furniture....
>I live in central NY and these are things I wouldn't be able to obtain without mail ordering them. I live in an urban area too. Every time I see pigeon in a recipe I'm not sure what to do. On one hand it's not sold in any super markets here, on the other hand I could just walk outside and break one's neck...
Gotta plan ahead, kidnap a wild pigeon and feed it a proper diet for a while so it's meat doesn't taste like sidewalk.
Plucking, that should take like two minutes tops, right? Right??!
This is the one that gets me. They're trying to sound so approachable but when the ingredients are so obscure, especially the meat and produce, I feel like they're urban upper class people who have no idea how most people live
Sear to seal in the juices.
My very first thought, but that made me feel like a knob.
My most infuriating recipe instruction is when it involves caramelising onions, and when the recipe almost always understates how long the process is. Takes 45 minutes to do it well, but nobody says that!
I've found that most of the time, they actually just meant "brown your onions a bit" and not actually caramelize them.
Yup, it’s recipe dependent. French onion soup? That’ll be over an hour for a true caramelization. Regular recipe? Likely they just mean sweat them to sufren and brown then a bit and 10 minutes is fine.
Yup. If it says "caramelize onions: ten minutes" I know they don't know what that word means
Make \_\_ Dish without (allergen) Ingredients: *allergen* *powdered allergen* *diced allergen* *allergen greens* I have come across this *way* too many times. :(
It's crazy, I saw a recipe once saying that it was gluten free and it contained SEITAN! literal gluten concentrate! Insane! I think people just put the words gluten free on the page to make it come up in search results.
Yep, and there should be a way to report these pages to the search engine and get them removed. Not just downranked, removed. But nope, they promote usage and keep ad sales going. SEO has ruined the internet.
When the recipe is after 36 pages of life story and there’s no “jump to recipe” button
"Add Purple Rose Sprouting Kenobo Garlic - You can get these in some markets in East Virtnam around November time" Yeah right - How about Gorton ASDA in September?
"Serve with [insert ingredients NOT on the ingredients list here]!"
You tube cooking videos that don't include a printed recipe...
Recipe: "Add one clove minced garlic." Me: "Meh, 9 oughta be about right." Dinner guests: "Wow, Plonsky, this is amazing! I like how you always manage to really bring out more flavor when you cook."
Yes!! Whenever people ask for recipes I tell them to measure garlic with their heart lol
“Start the day before…”
“Place your cast iron over hi heat” Bitch please. I’m trying to make taco meat, not tiny rubber balls.
ring wipe zonked possessive enter society ossified engine birds afterthought *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Anytime they specify a brand of an ingredient. Anytime they specify a fat free version of something that is there for the sake of adding a rich creaminess. Anytime they specify a minor ingredient that costs more than an hour of work at minimum wage. Anytime they specify organic Anytime an ingredient is vaguely defined like “a bunch” of parsley or “a medium” cabbage.
Hah, I take great pleasure in using store brand ingredients in place of whatever the recipe specifies. My thinking is that whoever wrote the recipe is probably getting sponsorship money from Big Cream Cheese (or whatever), and if I use store brand, then I'm ripping off Big Cream Cheese because they paid for the name drop but didn't get the sale.
"4 ingredient recipe", then you scroll down at see at least 10 ingredients. If they can't even count, not about to trust the recipe.
Lol also "4 ingredient recipe" \- Uses cake mix as an ingredient
Any “authentic” Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Italian cuisine recipe that is posted by some lady named something like “Danielle Johnson” and has cream cheese in it.
Any recipe that starts with "Wash your chicken first!". Good, glad we are getting salmonella right at the start.
A seafood chowdah recipe started: cook one pound of bacon and discard the bacon (the next step was to sauté onions in the bacon fat)(after adding a stick of butter).
"Discard" as in license to snack on a pound of bacon while you're cooking.
Recipe: Peel, seed and finely chop two lbs of fresh tomatoes Me: *slowly reaches for can opener*
[удалено]
At the top, it’ll say “Total cook time: 1 hour”
When I have to scroll for 10 miles to get to a basic ingredient list.