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.”
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.
Recipe blogs were already a problem.
I knew my short phase of collecting cookbooks would pay off one-day!
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.”
You know, if those AI recipe pages don’t have millions of kilometers of backstory to scroll through before you get to the actual recipe written comprehensively, I can at least understand it a little bit. So I hope none of the food bloggers who did that are complaining, because you drove people to this.
Aside from that, damn, I hope it is easy to spot if something is AI in terms of recipes. Guess it is time to buy some old cookbooks to be sure.
Some food bloggers understand this and have a button to take you straight to the recipe. So many don’t, though.
I just want a recipe for peanut butter cookies, not a web novel, Jan. If I want a story with the recipe, I’ll go watch “Good Eats.”
Search engine algorithms drove people to write stories before recipes, unfortunately. Pages that just had recipes were deprioritized
SEO started killing the internet long before the genAI wave yeah. I was also always a bit mad at the concept in general. Surely search engine optimization is something for… search engines, not websites? I hate that we ended up changing the way we create websites in order to appease The Machine, instead of it getting better at surfacing quality content
In theory, Google should fight all attempts at SEO.
But they infamously stopped doing that to bump some quarterly result (as sifting through them generates more clicks), and here we are.
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 AI we need.
Thanks for sharing! Imma cook this bitch up sometime soonI hope so, I’ve had 2 heart attacks and technically died a couple of times. I don’t want the recipe ending with me.
Once you do enough cooking, you start to realize that most recipes can be rendered down to a few basic components and combinations … and it all depends on what region of the world you’re in, what culture, what foods are available and what you grew up with.
Cooking, preparing, cutting and serving a turkey/chicken is fairly simple if you stick to just the basics … and use a digital thermometer to monitor the internal temperatures
Gravy is a bit of a trick but do it enough times and you get the hang of it … if all else fails, have a packet of instant gravy mix handy (it makes gravy in about ten minutes)
Everything else with the Thanksgiving dinner is basically just boiled vegetables … if you plan on anything more complicated than this, then you are spending the entire day in the kitchen.
Dessert can be very simple or very complicated … depending on how masochistic you want to be … but it’s best to prepare the sweet stuff a day or two ahead of time.
Whatever you do … stay in the kitchen and pay attention to everything that is cooking, baking, frying or boiling … if it’s roasting for hours, stay nearby and be ready to act on it if anything changes or goes bad … in your off time when nothing needs to be done in the kitchen, wash the dishes and clean the space, because you’ll be making a mess again as soon as you start processing food again anyway.
If you’re not cooking, you’re cleaning. If you’re not cleaning, you’re cooking.
Thermometer! Always a thermometer! Not even meats, it’s great for breads, and also temping oil for deep frying.
This year, my family decided on a big get together. I have no idea who all is coming.
My plan is to start Wednesday with cranberry sauce so it has time to sit in the fridge overnight.
Thursday morning I have it all planned out…
2 loaves of banana bread (350°)
Scalloped potatoes (350°)
3 loaves of bread, white, medium wheat, dark wheat (425° oven, internal to 180°)
Sweet potatoes with toasted pecan topping. (stovetop +450° in the oven for toasting).If I start by 10:00 it should all be done by 4:00 which gives me time to clean up, pack up, and get to the house.
Can I come too? Do you have room for uninvited guests? I won’t talk to anyone or bother anyone … I’ll just eat :)
LOL - Hey, if you’re willing to help haul food, sure! 😉 Seriously, loading and unloading the car I think will be the trick…
Don’t worry bloggers, soon Ai will have affiliate links and SEO and people will move on to the next new thing until it becomes a soulless money Hussle.
The only AI generated recipe I would ever purposely make is the cake from Portal.
Except I don’t know where I am gonna get alpha resins… Whatever those are.
I tried making roasted plantains the other week after getting a ridiculous deal on 40 pounds of them. ($6!) I’ve only ever made chips before, so I looked up a video recipe with a great looking finished product. By the time they had finished baking, they were still basically raw, and I had to up the temp to something reasonable. If a recipe came out on or after 2023, I’m ignoring it forever.
Slop it up!
enjoy your dinner with glue, rocks and rat poison!
Maybe controversial, but if I ask AI for a recipe I get one. If I search for something and go to a website there’s a fucking novel to trawl through before I find the actual recipe. Even then it’s in weird units half the time.
90% of the time I’m only looking for advice on a single aspect. How long to cook X at Y? Can I put X in Y? List required ingredients. etc.
Just makes sense to add gemini to the search and get the answer I’m looking for immediately.
Yeah I hear you there. Quick recipes are the singular reason I find AI useful.
I’m so glad i nabbed my families cook books. I’ll be needing them in the near future.
