Some of these recipes seem decent if you're already somewhat experienced and have developed cook's intuition. Otherwise they're way too vague. For instance, the chicken parm recipe:
- There should be a photo of how to slice the chicken breast. Saying "through their width" isn't good enough. I had to explain what "lengthwise" was once because my friend cut all the vegetables the exact opposite of it.
- Pound with what? A lot of people will come up with very bad answers to this question.
- How much flour? How much egg? I'll bet that plenty of beginners will use a tablespoon of flour or a singular egg
- Ditto with oil. Beginners do not know how much oil is necessary to fry stuff
- How high heat? You probably want to turn down the heat after the oil starts smoking.
- Is there a single mention of adding salt? Sounds like a pretty bland recipe
I don't mean to be too harsh but recipes are hard. There's a reason why professional recipe developers have developed certain standards like measurements, terms (folding batter, shimmering oil, etc.), and development procedures (cross testing).
Spoons can vary in size, so is it a tablespoon or a teaspoon? When dealing with spices you'll be adding 3 times the amount if you go with tablespoon interpretation so it'd be a pretty big difference in flavour and intensity.
> On this subject, can an American please tell me what a spoonful is?
The problem isn't with American conventions. We have no "spoonful" measure any more than you do. That website is not following any American convention by declining to specify its spice amounts.
Also relevant, spice (and salt) preferences have a high subjective component. It drives my wife crazy but I don't even read amounts any more for things like this, I just put whatever I think, and add more if it seems like it needs it after I taste it. Conveniently its also the best, and perhaps only, way to develop in to a good cook because it teaches you how ingredients impact the flavour of your meal, and in turn how that is percieved by the people consuming it.
If its helpful to anyone not well versed in cooking, focus on salt first. IME its by far the most important component in most dishes.
I'm European. There is no issue here in what a teaspoon or a tablespoon is. A tablespoon is three times the size of a teaspoon and I have dedicate measuring spoons for each size.
The issue is what a "spoonful" constitutes. Check the link to the recipe.
A tablespoon is called a tablespoon because table spoons — the medium-sized spoons that come in flatware sets — have a mostly-standardized capacity, and this capacity comes out to around 1tbsp.
Why? As it happens, a 1tbsp basin on a utensil, with loose food (e.g. rice, corn, pudding, whatever) heaped atop the basin to its sloughing point, constitutes pretty much exactly a “mouthful” of food (for almost all human skull+jaw sizes age ≥6yo.)
Soup spoons are larger than table spoons, because you can’t heap soup, so you need a larger basin to get a mouthful of soup.
Likewise, 1tsp is the traditional heaped-to-sloughing capacity of a tea spoon—a spoon given with a tea cup+saucer, used for measuring sugar into your tea, and then stirring said tea. These are actually rather uncommon today, as they aren’t sold in flatware sets, but rather must be purchased separately. You may not have ever seen a true tea spoon. If you’ve ever seen a bar spoon, that’s an elongated tea spoon — both have a 1tsp basin.
Sorry, I wrote a conclusion section for my post as an edit, but I guess I never hit submit on it:
> The idea is that when someone says "spoonful", they mean "one unit of the thing as you'd normally apportion that thing, using the spoon you'd normally use when interacting with that thing."
> So, one "spoonful of sugar" (or most spices) is a teaspoonful, because you use tea spoons when interacting with sugar in everyday life; while one "spoonful of honey" (or soup stock, or reserved pasta water, or any other thing that you only tend interact with in the context of cooking) is a tablespoonful. (Or actually, a wooden-mixing-spoon-ful, since that's what cooks had on hand to measure with — but as it turns out, wooden mixing spoons usually had the same level liquid capacity as table-spoons. The heaping measures weren't equivalent between wooden mixing spoons and tablespoons, though, and this has caused much numerical error when modernizing old recipes!)
Spoonful is approximately 20ml, but the recipe author is saying the exact measurement is not important and that this is a particular lever to adjust for taste. (A spoonful of sugar means that some people will prefer this sweeter and some more savory, and that you should use judgement based on you or your audience.)
Sorry for misreading your question. In the video he's pretty clearly using a tablespoon, but also heaps it, so measurements for the spices are a bit in the "whatever you see fit" category, as he says.
I'm from NY if it matters. When I hear 'spoonful' in a recipe, I generally think of a regular spoon (one for cereal, but not an oversized one) with a heaping amount of whatever the ingredient is. 'spoonful' also implies the quantity is to taste, otherwise they would be more specific.
If I had to hazard a guess, our table cutlery (i.e. the stuff people eat meals with) has somehow managed to get really bizarrely standardized. There are basically only two sizes of spoon in the normal set - a regular spoon, which has a fairly consistent size, and then a "soup spoon", which is a bit inconsistent (sometimes it's a larger size, sometimes it's round rather than teardrop-shaped, etc).
So most likely they're relying on the "incidental standardizing" of normal silverware, and making a guess that most people's regular eating spoons are bizarrely similar in size.
Since we're on HN, there's probably a really interesting philosophical rabbit hole one could go down, concerning the idea of things that aren't officially standardized (by some standard-setting body), but end up gravitating towards almost being so, due to industrial pressures and consumer expectations.
Yeah, there's sort of an "expanded set" like you describe, but there's definitely a thing where there's a very standardized subset of "normal fork, normal spoon, normal knife".
(Which is to say you're not wrong at all, I'm just stressing how standardized that subset is).
You can really see it with plastic utensils. If you get them from a restaurant, the spoons and so on are pretty consistent - not absolutely so, but it's interesting how often they'll be a certain type.
Bad advice not only for beginners, but also for any dough recipe, because amounts often need to be exact for a dough to work properly. In this case, cooking really is a science experiment.
Also, I do not like 'salt to taste', particularly for raw egg or raw meat mixtures. Just tell me the amount of salt, whynot?
My experience is the opposite. Most bread recipes for example are both incredibly tolerant of mistakes. Also — flour varies so much in capacity to absorb water and gluten content between brands that I'd say precision is very much illusory unless you are after industrial-style consistency.
Small changes in how you handle doughs of different hydration, and changes in timing/temperature thereafter have a much bigger difference to the outcome. I think it's better to develop an intuition for what the right consistency is and work towards that.
I agree entirely. I feel like this myth of "baking is science, cooking is art" got started and I don't really understand it.
100% reproducible results for both is definitely "science".
The processes that happen to make the flavors and textures and results you're looking for - absolutely "science".
Some very finicky food types require a lot more precision than others, so some (very small percentage of) recipes you absolutely do have to follow very strict recipes and procedures.
But the majority of stuff - baking or "cooking" - you can wing a lot and get great results. You just might not get exactly the results you thought you'd get.
In my experience in a house that doesn't have strict climate control (no humidity control, windows often open, inexact temperature control), intuition on yeast-based dough is actually really important. Two days in a row the same exact simple bread dough recipe can behave very differently due to factors like ambient temperature and humidity.
The trick is getting from a recipe cook to an intuitive cook. For me, I feel like that leap came primarily from a single book (and years of prior absorbed "Good Eats" knowledge):
I also developed intuition after methodically working through a Ruhlman book (Ruhlman's 20, in my case). Just wanted to add it seems to be his style, focusing on imparting intuition rather than recipe mastery. For anyone wanting to become a more intuitive cook, one of his books will carry you very very far.
Bread made with yeast is an exception though. For most baking projects (cookies, cakes, brownies, etc), there are at least two very important things I know about (and I'm far from an expert):
1. The chemical reaction to make it raise. As I said, yeast is different; but if you're using soda, you need the right amount of all the ingredients (soda, acid, salt, etc), at the right time (water starts the reaction, which will fizzle out after a certain amount of time), at the right consistency (over-mixing will screw things up too).
2. You need to balance wet and dry ingredients. So you can't (for instance) just remove sugar or add flour without also removing or adding something "wet", or the balance gets thrown of and everything changes.
For yeast-based bread you're right -- I normally just dump in water until it seems about the right consistency.
I agree with you but I don't think that entirely refutes the original point. Baking does require more precision on average than cooking, but bread recipes don't give you the information you would need to be precise. Adjusting for things like local temperature and humidity or the way your oven bakes are important to the outcome but they're never mentioned in recipes. What you're describing as "intuition" sounds to me like knowledge of those factors, some sense of measuring their impact (even if just by feel) and how to adjust a recipe as needed to account for them. I think we'd do a service to the world by pushing for recipes that are less "follow these directions exactly" and more "here are the techniques this dish uses and how to work with them".
I agree that intuition is just implicit knowledge for these factors... the problem is that making these explicit in recipes would just make them boring and tedious/complex to make. I'm not going to be able to make the thermal mass/heat cycle of my house the same as yours. So unless I temperature control th dough it _is_ going to be different.
It took me a long time to understand why recipes are vague. The answer to this is because:
* Personal and cultural preferences vary widely, in particular around saltiness.
* Ingredients vary in size. A precise salt measurement for a chicken breast will be too much salt if you have a smaller breast and too little if you have a large one.
* Even ingredients of the same size vary in texture and flavor. A cheap grocery store chicken breast might need more salt to become flavorful than a free-range wild-fed chicken whose meat is naturally rich in flavor.
* Ingredients change over time. A teaspoon of dried oregano might be too much if you just got it or too little if the jar is a year old.
* Taste is experienced in context. If you're serving that chicken with heavily salted pasta and a rich cream sauce, you might want to ease off on the salt so the meal isn't overwhelming. Serving it with a salad of bitter greens and you may want to kick up the savoriness.
* Preferences change over time. Some days you're in the mood for something light, some days you want a flavor punch to the face.
Cooking is taking once-living organic things, each of which is unique with its own history, and combining them in order to please the pecularities of some arbitrary set of living organic beings. It's not assembling a LEGO set.
The only problem with salt to taste is that you need to be taught how to salt.
An additional issue with salting to a specific amount is when you're reducing a sauce. The saltiness of the final dish will depend both on the amount of salt you add and the amount of liquid that boiled off
Cooking is science, as far is "love" lol (imho), as "we are what we eat" too... (meaning at quality first: often the differencies between quality and the supercheap isn't much, while counting the real yeld).
Thanks a lot for this repositories, I'll trying to contibute.
As an engineer I want a solid core recipe and then I'll start changing it up on the 3rd or 4th go, or obviously the next time if it needs more salt or sugar or whatever. It's easy to spoil a recipe and that can be a (relatively) expensive thing to do depending on the recipe.
That's a really bad advice to give beginners. If you're lucky, you'll guess right the first time, and end up with a good dish. And then you'll use that.
If you're unlucky — and the more inexperienced you are the more unlucky you are — then you'll guess wrong, and your dish will be at best okay, and at worst inedible.
A few failed experiments like this, and you'll hate cooking, or approach cooking with fear. Recipes have to be very precise, because recipes are aimed at people who are new: new to cooking or new to the dish.
Experimentation is part of learning though. Heck, failing is part of learning! We really need to teach kids that just because you fail a few times at something you're not bad at it - it's part of learning.
Guessing at obtuse instructions with no prior knowledge when there are many variables in play is not experimenting and learning from it is nearly impossible. You have to have some baseline knowledge to draw on, whether you’re a total beginner or just new to the dish.
Imaging cooking was putting raw food in a box and a meal comes out of the other end. Imagine that box has a series of dials each ranging from 0-100. You don’t know what any of the dials actually do. Depending on your input, any number of settings can make a meal ranging from edible to amazing. But far more settings result in “Dubious Food.” Any individual setting can ruin the entire thing. Sure, you can power through 100 to the X combinations and ultimately, after much frustration and time and ruined food, sort of figure things out. But it’s much easier if someone says “set dial A to 53, dial B to 36,”. This lets you just tweak one dial and figure out what that dial does. Once you’ve done that you can go from dial to dial and then see how multiple dials interact. But if you just start fiddling with knobs you either get lucky or learn nothing; or you’re relying on knowledge you think everyone has even though they don’t.
I'm an adult with a busy life. I literally don't have time for failures with food. Except on a weekend. And even then I'd prefer not to fail.
Recipes should have all the ingredients in measurable quantities. All steps should be laid out in proper order, with proper technique, times and temperatures explained.
Sure. Once you're past the beginner stage, you can just glance at the description and figure out what you need. But you have to pass that beginner stage first.
People who can cook greatly underestimate how much pre-existing knowledge they possess. To a compete novice, my analogy is exactly what cooking is like.
There's time for learning and time for "I want to make this right-ish". Basically if it's a lazy weekend and I'd like to experiment, being vague would be fine. If I'm a beginner and there are people coming over tomorrow evening, I want you to guide my every step.
A beginner cook doesn't cook a new dish they've never made before for dinner guests. Hell, I've been cooking my entire life and I wouldn't cook a new dish for dinner guests in most cases.
If you’re a beginner cooking for multiple people - stick to something that you already perfected.
Even with a superdetailed recipe something can go wrong or be unexpected for a first-timer.
Failing at chicken parmesan is almost impossible with a decent recipe so the recipe should for most part not be "add a dash of this and add a dash of that, you decide!" It's a fairly predictable dish.
For a lot of ingredients this can be false precision. That fresh thing of dried ginger is going to be 5x more flavorful than the jar that has been sitting in your cabinet for two years. Saying "1 tsp" doesn't actually produce consistent results and can actually discourage people from adding more if they need it.
I think it is good to have these precise amounts but also good to tell people which amounts are critical and which amounts can survive being doubled or halved without trouble.
Halving or doubling is entirely feasible, though unless you're experienced go with 1x the first time you make the recipe.
In this case the ambiguity is a factor of 3X, the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. Or possibly more: given the quantities of the recipe he may mean some kind of personal dedicated spice spoon that could be around 1/2 tsp. In which case a tablespoon would be a factor of 6x, which is sufficient to make a recipe inedible.
If that recipe appealed, I would say that if you use a teaspoon the recipe would work (assuming he hasn't made other errors in the recipe; I didn't look that closely). But he's not following the conventions and I'd probably go looking for a difference recipe.
Once you've made a few recipes successfully you can, as you point out, easily halve or double spices. But I'd start with recipes that were better tested than this one.
If I saw "spoon", I'd assume that they meant "the actual spoon I use to eat cereal in my drawer" rather than either tsp or tbsp. The point is that the recipe author doesn't know what the right amount of that spice is. They can't know because the spice sitting in your cabinet is almost certainly much less fresh than what they have in the kitchen.
Spices tend to be flexible outside a few exceptions. I'd wager that you can just wildly change almost any spice amount in almost any recipe before you've ever made it and and have any sort of calibrated taste it'll turn out fine. Salt is a way bigger risk here and not many recipes give precise salt measurements.
Given the amounts they're talking about, it's definitely not a tablespoon. A tablespoon of cumin to a pound of chicken is almost certainly too much.
Hey may mean something else, including his own spoon of perhaps a half-teaspoon, which would also be a reasonable amount of spice. There's enough slack in spicing that a factor of 2 wouldn't be inedible, especially if you're serving it with a starch like rice. But a factor of 3 is almost certainly more than intended.
That's not an American thing, not since the 19th century. That's just failing to follow the conventions.
Also if we aren't talking about measuring spoons is it heapful or flat?
Also 30 cranks of black pepper? Are the pepper mills standardised? What is a crank full 360 degrees or less? Or some back and forth motion, but again how large motion? How does this even work with my electric grinder?
I assume that essentially means "to taste," you have the correct ratios, mix all the spices and add spice mixture slowly until dish tastes good.
Do people normally measure spices? I never do. Ever. I assume the cook's lack of exact measuring (eyeballing) is why it says "spoonful", rather than "teaspoon."
For me, no, not anymore. Recipes serve as inspiration and I rarely do more than scan the ingredients list and then go off to make something (inspired).
It's taken me a lot longer to develop a great intuition of which herbs, spices, and ingredients combine to make a great flavor than it did to develop the intuition of how /much/ to use if I know what I'm using.
I've been asked for "recipes" by people in camp #2 - and they don't know what to do with what I'm able to give them. Which is fair - my recipes are just a list of general ingredients, spices, and a method of cooking in my head. "These vegetables (sauté), these meats (brown), combine, these spices ("enough", go heavy on this particular one), this preparation (slow simmer for hours, like a chili), this finish."
Camps #1 and #2 want exactly the same thing, they just need varying level of specificity. Both would strongly prefer you give them exact measurements.
My guess is #1/#2 is the bulk of people who cook.
The recipe cards that everyone's family seems to have as heirloom keepsakes - those are all more #2 with a dash of #3 ambiguity thrown in to throw off any people trying to copy grandma's old recipe.
The recipes swapped at potlucks and family dinners - same. There's usually a (simpler or more shortcuty than the person might want to admit) recipe buried under there.
If I'm working from a recipe, yes? I don't sweat extreme precision, but I do use measuring spoons. Especially in something like a cookbook, I assume the author has put some thought into the measurements.
That... Really depends on the cookbook. I'd be very surprised if the authors of some of the more popular "celebrity chef" books had actually cooked all of the recipes in their own books. The books are often anthologies of recipes found from other sources. I've definitely encountered recipes in his that were impossible to perform the way they were written.
If it's spices, I don't even bother with a spoon. Just dump a bunch in until it looks good. Most recipes call for so small amounts of spices that you're not really going to taste it, so why bother putting it in at all?
I've started searching for "ethnic" recipes in their home languages, because the English-language ones are often so badly under-spiced that the called-for amounts aren't even useful as a rough estimate (for e.g. shopping or judging whether you have enough on-hand to make the dish), and sometimes are practically a completely different dish than the real thing. (if the dish has an English-language Wikipedia entry, clicking the link on that page for the dish's page in its native language is a great way to find the right thing to search for, and then Google Translate usually does an OK job on the recipe itself)
This is not the case with Indian food. But the main thing with this question is there is a huge difference when it comes to spoon sizes with table and tea spoon. So what is a spoonful.
The spoons in the video aren't measuring spoons, they are flatware.
Estimating, I would say he is using between 1 and 2 measuring teaspoons when he does a spoonful. So probably start with 1 tsp if you aren't sure more will work and go up from there if you feel like it. The video you've linked is as much a sketch as it is a recipe anyway.
I would say teaspoon size which is about what's in your regular eating spoon if it were bigger they'd say tablespoon which is obviously a lot bigger than what most people use to eat their dinner with. Unless it's mac and cheese and then tablespoon would make sense.
> I would say teaspoon size which is about what's in your regular eating spoon
A “regular eating spoon” is usually a tablespoon, hence the name. A teaspoon is typically used for adding sugar to, or stirring, coffee or tea, or eating desserts.
Teaspoons should not be used for eating dessert. You default to a dessert fork, and use a dessert spoon (larger than a teaspoon) for things like ice-cream.
I learned to cook a lot from the 3x5 cards my mom has in a cupboard.
They list stuff like a "pinch" of salt or a "stick" of butter.
Sometimes I'll make her dinner from her recipe and she'll be surprised and say "that's not the way I do it" and then she'll really enjoy the food anyway.
I think interpretation is what makes cooking an art, and many times, those little individual choices we make to interpret a recipe or system of cooking is what makes us proud of our dish.
> I think interpretation is what makes cooking an art, and many times, those little individual choices we make to interpret a recipe or system of cooking is what makes us proud of our dish.
Interpretation is also why many people are really bad at it (and art).
If you are reading a recipe you're doing it for a reason. If you're improvising you don't need one to begin with.
But other than that point regarding the main topic, I don't disagree.
I usually make most food I'm tangentially familiar with without a recipe. But when I'm encountering a new one from a region I'm less familiar with, I need to go through a few recipes before I get the framework for it.
> If you are reading a recipe you're doing it for a reason. If you're improvising you don't need one to begin with.
That's not fair, I practically never follow a recipe to the letter, and mostly don't use one at all. But I read them for ideas or the broad strokes behind something I haven't made before.
Eh sure, but I could see a newbie making this recipe, putting too little oil, having it start smoking, then burning the cutlets and undercooking the chicken. That's not interpretation, that's just poor instruction.
You're trying to cut out the middle man in learning how to cook.
It doesn't need to be complicated. Everyone who cooks knows the answers to these questions because they can remember that time their oil started smoking or they burnt this or undercooked that. Just start trying it, you'll learn as you go.
Serious Eats is one of the best recipe websites. Yes there is ads (have to pay the bills some how), but they dive into the how and why food is made the way it is. Not the fluffy "this is the way grandma used to make it". E.g. https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/04/how-to-make-tonkatsu-jap...
Yes it is a shame, because their recipes (especially from Kenji López-Alt) are really good. But if you keep one open to read from during cooking, you will see every video they have available playing in the little box.
I've heard that for a lot of cooking it doesn't matter, and for some it matters a lot.
A large category where it matters a lot (I've heard) is baking. If you're making a soup or a sauce or some mashed potatoes, most of your changes are predictable and linear -- less salt means less salty. Less butter means less buttery. But when you bake things interact in sharp ways, and the ingredients interact with each other in more interesting ways. Maybe "less predictably" with certain priors -- not in a strong sense (it's chemistry). But in a weaker sense, "why didn't it rise" isn't answerable by "didn't add enough X" for any fixed X, and in most recipes 2X won't mean "twice as much rising".
In lots of countries, butter isn't sold in sticks, and using measurements like "sticks", "cans", or "packs" of something is annoying if the unit sizes differ between the author's and the reader's country. I can deal with cups or ounces - they're not intuitive for me, but they can be converted. But "cans" or "packs" are just plain guesswork. That makes it unnecessarily hard to try new dishes where I don't already know what the result is supposed to look or taste like.
> They list stuff like a "pinch" of salt or a "stick" of butter.
I don't understand the complaint here. A stick of butter is half a cup, 8 tablespoons. The standardization is more ironclad than pretty much any other product you can get in a grocery store.
Not everyone on the internet lives in the USA. I have absolutely no idea what a stick of butter is without googling it. UK butter is sold in 250g blocks.
A cup means 280ml here, but 237ml in the US. A literal tablespoon varies from 7ml to 25ml, and is defined to be between 14.8ml and 20ml depending on locale.
Why not just specify in terms of litres and grams, which are the same everywhere?
Correct, one "stick" of U.S. butter is exactly 8 tbsp regardless of shape, and almost all grocery store brands will be individually-wrapped 8 tbsp blocks.
I cook a lot and follow these recipes with joy. The website is probably not intended for people that cannot estimate ingredients and personally I like it that way.
a complete beginner will fuck up the recipe no matter how much you explain and that is part of cooking. it is a skill like any other that you develop as you do. recipes are just a framework not something you follow exactly.
this being said. I much rather follow these simple recipes than try to decipher the actual recipe from a bloated site with ads and thousand word blog post by the author how a sausage reminds them of their grandparents.
There are certainly recipes which are better than others for beginners. I believe I learnt how to cook and developed an intuition for it because for 2 years I cooked every day using one of the meal boxes subscription service, and the recipes were written for people who have no idea what they are doing. Exact recipes with plenty of pictures, and there was tonnes of variety too. Compared to some cookbooks that I have which will simply say "season to taste". Like.....what do you mean? Season with what? Etc etc etc.
And yes, blog recipes are the worst, but there are still excellent cookbooks out there, or even BBC Good food website has pretty good recipes without the bloat of people telling you their entire life story first
I have been cooking for 20+ years, and i had to read that chicken parm recipe several times to make sense of it.
I have been entertaining the idea of writing a cookbook, that is not based on recipes, but defines some king of framework, describes the main criteria that you will use to judge the result and gives a definition and parameter range to the usual vague "cook until done", "salt, pepper to taste". Kind of Good Eats meets Naked Chef, but describes it all in OO, FP, C2 Wiki and Agile metaphors.
Likewise, the stroganoff recipe simply says to cook 'strips of beef' in a skillet. There are some cuts which you are not going to be very happy with the result if you do this with.
I don't see how REMOVING information benefits either a beginner or an experienced cook.
To many people, myself included, the point of cooking isn't about producing a particular end result as consistently as possible.
It's a unique form of expression, like painting or writing.
Of course, it's useful to see what other people are doing so you can expand your own skillset and create your own twist on what they were doing, and this is where recipes come in handy. But I don't _want_ to be told exactly how to create my next meal. I just want some pointers in the right direction. Too much information destroys my creative input and just makes the recipe not fun to follow.
I'm not sure if it made sense - it's difficult to explain why you enjoy something. But please understand that there are people who neither need nor want a perfectly reproducible "food production algorithm".
I understand your perspective. I love cooking as well and I like to tweak recipes and try to never make a dish exactly the same way twice.
There is a happy medium in the amount of information contained in a recipe. Certainly a recipe that says to cook 7 ounces of meat for 12 minutes so that it reaches 167F internal temperature is ridiculous and if that recipe will fail if not executed perfectly, then that is indeed stifling to my creativity. On the other hand, if a recipe doesn't tell me whether it means a tablespoon or a cup of flour, that actually makes it more difficult to be creative since it is unclear what I would be deviating from. I've never felt stymied by a recipe that says to use 1 tbsp of butter/flour for a roux - if I decide I want to add more then I will.
I guess my complaint is that the writer has removed information from the recipe such that it now contains less information than that generally accepted medium. A certain balance of information has become convention in cookbooks and I think it's for good reason. Removing that information to me smacks of a mindset that we programmers can be notorious for - something like "this other domain can't be that hard, I can improve it by removing all this extraneous complexity that seems to me to have no purpose." It brings to mind the parable of Chesterton's fence.
Thank you for your thoughts. I hope this makes the spirit of my previous comment more clear.
This was really well said. I think a big reason that our perspective is not widely-voiced is that it is very difficult to put into words. It seems obvious.
Even with the exact amounts, often the taste is very subjective to each. Often I need to adjust many of the main ingredients like salt sugar by more than halves.
The simplicity of the presentation isn’t all that simple. I thought I had clicked an entirely different recipe. I know this crowd loves minimalist design but I’ve had to correct a zillion mistakes on here because text is tiny on my phone.
I think of myself as a pretty decent cook but without some rough measurements I don’t find the recipes very useful. When I look at the gnocchi recipe I have no idea how much flour to take for an amount of potatoes for example . It is a little like watching my mom who just seems to throw things together until it’s right. Every time it’s perfect but she can’t explain what she does. You need a lot of experience for this.
The thing is that cooking, as it's (usually) based on products that have some intrinsic variability in them ( plants, dead animals... ) hence the recipe cannot be made fully deterministic. I know for gnocchis for example, the amouny of flour needed depends on the moisture content of the potatoes which depend on the variety uses, and how long they've been stored... Also depends on the flour you use. Until you get the dough texture "just right". Agree with many comments here that this makes a cooking an art.
It’s pretty much a given that in most recipes the quantities are a rough estimate. But at least you have starting point. With gnocchi I have no idea where to start and I have never seen them made so I simply don’t know what’s “just right”.
I get most of my recipes from YouTube these days. I can see the technique and result, which is valuable, but I make my own notes in a format that suits me, sometimes like Cooking for Engineers (group ingredients, do process, add next group, etc) but usually with a lot of bullet points and terse sentences.
Writing my own notes is great for understanding and retention. They get printed out, then tested to earn the right to a plastic sleeve and a place in the folder! Analogue with a digital backup.
Am I the only one who thinks that this concept is perfectly good, and all the things the site doesn't have are just great further development of the idea?
What's wrong with a "wikipedia for recipes"? I would LOVE that.
All the complaints about the quality of the recipes or the lack of more in-depth explaination of each one, some kind of voting/reputation system for the recipes and for the submitters and the voters, Yes those are all good ideas to make the db more useful than just a db.
But you have to start somewhere. How is the core idea here of a public cookbook not fundamentally awesome? I mean hello... GIT. Recipes that are living documents that can be honed over time, complete with viewable history of what changes have been made so you can decide if you agree with them. Branches and forks for all the hundred variations on any given thing. Revisions by better experts than the original submitter of some recipe.
So, today on day one it doesn't already have the benefit of years of contributions and incremental improvements and revisions, Quelle Suprise!
Maybe if such comments were heavily moderated (or edited in-place a la the exile) -- cooking is one of the things where even otherwise very reasonable people I've known have gone off the deep end over what seems absurdly trivial to me.
Things like a bagel "toasted" vs "just warmed," dishes that have a variety of regional variations (e.g. a lot of slavic dishes like borsch or stuffed cabbage rolls where I've gotten yelled at by people for pronouncing it the Russian way or making it the Slovak way instead of their own nationality's style) seem to bring up far more intensity than I'd have thought possible, but, you know, I learn more about my friends that way and we've remained friends...
in an internet comments section? Tough to maintain that kind of civility, I think. possible, but tough.
Yeah the authenticity thing especially gets a lot of people going online. I check in and catch up on r/cooking once or twice a week and there are some very strongly held opinions. The funny thing is, the one that gains traction in a post can be either side of the issue depending on the time of day that it's posted. Reddit's voting system carries so much momentum.
Yes, I don't think a wiki is really appropriate for most recipes at all for this reason. There are many different ways to do a recipe each at least close enough to equally valid that you'll have those people arguing over nitpicks for weeks while everyone else steers clear.
You could rank them or something, but the reason I like YouTube is that I can generally get a sense of a person and what they like. If they like similar things to me, I'll probably like their versions of recipes. Inauthentic adjustments or weird herb profiles included.
It would be like every recipe site with a comments section. "Good start but I deleted $X, added $Y and $Z, and added more $A" except that each of those comments would be reflected in changes to the recipe.
If that happens, whoever's in charge just puts in a line that says 'people disagree on whether salt is appropriate or not'. Or not. You can always fork the site if you feel that strongly about it!
The only thing that’s missing for me is pictures of each step, and final dish. Why photos? When I’m doing something for the first time I want to see if I fucked up along the way. :-)
A site like this is valuable for what it does not have. Hundreds of variations or a comment section is a nightmare scenario. That’s the absence of information. It’s just data.
The page needs to show the ingredients and steps so I don’t have to scroll while handling raw meat.
I entirely agree, but HN is filled with ASD savants, so what would you expect? It's not precisely correct, and affirmations about known facts are largely a neurotypical thing.
NOTE: I'm ASD, so please don't call it my "NT privilege"!
A joke I like to say is that a true geek will hear about the President caught in a sex scandal and will obsess about the fact that it was because the password was easy to guess.
There are some food writers that are good at getting to the core of a dish idea, listing out the variations. Felicity Cloake's "Perfect" column in The Guardian for example.
For the Wikipedia of food, Nikki Segnit's Lateral Cooking / Flavour Thesaurus are great -- you start out with basic "stew" technique and then a dozen usual and unusual variations.
Git might not be the best way to manage recipes, especially when you're targeting a section of users who might have never heard of what it is. Sure, the idea of 'viewable history' is nice, but the average cook would find trouble with it. A wiki seems much better suited for this.
To add a recipe, you need to a learn markdown and create a PR. Learning markdown might not be hard, but learning to create a pull request, after creating a github account might put them off.
I don't think "people who are good at cooking and bad at technology" is the target audience here. The target audience is tech people tired of ads and nonsense.
The info about salt is plain wrong. Kosher salt is used for curing meat and as a mainly decorative addition to baking, you don't need to use it for cooking, it doesn't dissolve noticably slower in liquids. In fact when most recipes specify a volumetric measurement of salt they mean table salt and if you were to use kosher or sea salt you would be under seasoning due the reduced volume, nothing to do with how quickly it dissolves.
You should definitely not be using large grain salt in baking for this reason, unless it is to decorate a finished product.
Iodine deficiencies were and are very, very real. They're also on the rise due to food deserts and rising poverty. Iodised salt largely eliminated iodine deficiencies so people with poor knowledge of the history think they just went away. Most processed food does not contained iodised salt, so table salt is an essential source or iodine for a great many people around the world.
Idosing salt was and is one of the greatest public health success stories of the 20th century, do not talk about it like some conspiracy by government.
Maybe, just maybe, in the last 10-20 years when this trend for flakey salt has taken off. Any recipe you see older than 10 years I would safely bet that they meant table salt, and I would still recommend using table salt unless otherwise specified on anything more recent, that goes triple for any baking recipes. Again, unless for finishing.
Of course if the recipe specifies weight rather than volume, the point is moot.
And speaking as a former fine dining line cook, any food writer specifying kosher for anything other than fininshing/curing is a dolt IMO :)
Flakey salt is not the same as kosher salt. I just flipped through my four most used cookbooks and they all say "salt measurements are for kosher salt" in the preface somewhere. Three of them specify diamond crystal.
I've also got a coffee table book written in 1999 that says the same.
Agreed. Kosher salt is mainly not flaky, it just has slightly larger granules than table salt. I think the poster above might be conflating some of the flakier salts you can get which might also be kosher with standard kosher salt.
I think the main reason people go for kosher salt in recipes, cooking, and even baking is that it doesn’t taste of iodine. Table salt with iodine tastes slightly metallic, which will basically make your food taste worse. I’m an amateur cool, but you can simply taste the difference, so why make food taste worse/weirdly metallic?
I defy you to taste the difference between iodized and not in a blind test. All else being equal of course, size and shape differences would be a giveaway. So equal mass dissolved in water.
You can taste a slight difference between iodized and non iodized salt on its own but I very strongly doubt anyone would be able to detect that difference once the salt has been added to anything.
In the UK the term isn't used, iodine is not (or it's so rare I've never seen/heard of it, and can't find an example now) added ever, and anti-caking agent is only added if it's marketed as a table salt.
In the UK, iodine is added to cattle feed instead of salt, so it's contained in dairy products. No idea whether this can be a problem for vegans.
"Kosher salt" isn't a thing this side of the pond (at least in Germany). Even regular coarse salt is not something you can expect to find in an average kitchen.
Exactly, same here (also Suisse). It boggles my mind why would anybody use any other type of salt for anything, I guess lessons from primary school about iodine and its roles are long forgotten.
I never ever felt any bad taste from iodized salts. Had to actually google what kosher salt means, the connection with real kosher food is 0 and it seems purely US term.
There are whole articles about why you should never use iodized salts... seriously wtf
You typically use different types of salt based on the size/shape of the grains. You want something larger and hollow for finishing, because it gives a nice texture, as an example.
Every time I get the chance, I take a small amount of kosher salt (which is just salt used for koshering, not salt that is kosher) and a small amount of iodized salt and have visitors do a taste test. I've never had someone prefer the iodized salt, and they can always tell the difference between the two.
Maybe they have different labels in different countries, though.
> Kosher salt is used for curing meat [...] you don't need to use it for cooking
It is highly useful when salting meat, or any large piece of food because you can see how much salt you are applying, unlike table salt, which dissolves almost immediately.
In my opinion seasoning meat is just short term curing, i.e. I do recommend flakey salt for that. It's useful less for being able to see the seasoning but the larger grains draw out more moisture/season deeper.
Huh, I would have guessed that "kosher" had something to do with that blood was sometimes used in the boiling pans to clean the salt back when salt was produced by evaporating sea water. But apparently not.
You know why all these sites have pages of effluvia accompanying their recipes? Because lists of ingredients and steps are not copyrightable. A book of recipes, however, is copyrightable. On the web, to make the content copyrightable, they have to add stuff.
"A mere listing of ingredients is not protected under copyright law. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a collection of recipes as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection. " https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html
I was under the impression this was mainly to track user engagement for ad networks and search engines. Navigating to a page and leaving it open doesn't rank as highly for engagement; navigating to a page, scrolling through an article (which contains possible ads), and skipping back and forth between the ingredients list, steps, and explanatory text, is interpreted as higher engagement
This discussion is following every discussion of online recipes. Let me add my own argument: When I am looking for a specific recipe I am not interested in the extra content. However, when I am following a person's recipe blog I want to have that extra content. Having just a feed of recipes is just not that interesting as a collection of stories and accompanying recipes. The stories make it personal and it's nice to get glimpses into the life of the person doing the cooking. As a blogger it's also more fun to share more than recipes - you are writing a blog after all, not just a cookbook. If the ad revenue rises as a result of that - it's a nice bonus.
it's not really that. it's because of google's arcane search requirements. these authors want their results to appear high up in google search results and one of the ways to do it is to have all this accompanying text.
because their list of ingredients and steps are still not copyrightable even if all the surrounding text is.
If you search for "Chicken Parmesan Recipe", what you get is the website optimized for appearing at the top of the search result list for "Chicken Parmesan Recipe". You don't get the best website, you don't get the best recipe, you don't even get something with unique content. The only way copyright helps is it allows you to send nastygrams to Google in your fight to remain on top. Doesn't seem to me to be all that important compared to the SEO and ad-based monetization to afford to work on SEO. You'd probably get the same kind of sites and the exact same recipes in search results if copyright wasn't a thing. Only difference is that the fluff would be copied outright and the copy-and-SEO-optimize site might place above the "original" source.
Interesting thing is that more or less the same applies to electronic schematics, that's why companies no longer add them to service manuals as the connections between components can be freely copied. Only thing that you can copyright is the layout or PCB traces, but not as a schematic but as painting. There is an exception if a certain component configuration is patented, but that's rare.
So essentially you can copy any electronic device provided you will not use the same layout and traces.
* I am not a lawyer, just my personal research
> A mere listing of ingredients is not protected under copyright law. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions
Very few recipes are just a minimal list of ingredients and steps though? I don't think this means you have to add your life story above it, just add enough explanation about the steps and it will be copyrightable. The recipes on Based Cooking will surely pass this.
It's not like many recipe websites have 100% original recipes they're trying to stop you stealing anyway. A website of unattributed stolen recipes probably isn't worth much as it won't have a reputation or branding.
There are plenty of recipe sites out there that are mostly just ingredients/instructions like allrecipes.com, Epicurious, etc. If people are allergic to sites that try to provide more of a story or context around a given recipe, they should just avoid those sites and stick to the more "just the facts" ones. There's no shortage of those.
> Very few recipes are just a minimal list of ingredients and steps though?
If you look in a traditional cookbook, yes. The online world is different, for all the reasons discussed here.
> unattributed stolen recipes probably isn't worth much as it won't have a reputation or branding.
That's the point, though, you can't "steal" a recipe. It can be a trade secret, like the original formula for Coca-Cola, but if that recipe were to get out anyone could make the same stuff, not call it Coca-Cola, and the Coca-Cola company couldn't do anything about it. At best they could try to find out how it leaked and pursue action under theft of trade secrets law.
This website actually proves why everyone's favourite punching bag, the picture heavy SEO laden, anecdote about my mother's neighbors rabbi style cooking blogs exist.
These recipes would be totally un-followable unless you've made them before, especially without pictures. Some of them are terrible recipes, particularly the "curry". And maybe there are good reasons for them being very basic (e.g. they're traditional or they're meant to be simple or for beginners), but because there's very little in the way of explanation in them, who knows.
Hard pass. This website is just a pure html version of the first google link when you search for a recipe. Much like that first google link, these recipes will also be boring and flavorless.
Punching bag for a reason. Terrible sites especially on mobile, have to scroll through what feels like an infinite amount of pictures and “fluff” text about how this recipe reminds the author about a warm childhood memory, which you can’t even read cause ads are popping up all over the place. The recent “jump to recipe” buttons don’t help. You jump to the recipe, but some late loading ad just pushes the recipe out of view or some ad hovers right over it.
I just don’t bother with these kinds of sites anymore. Even when I was inexperienced with cooking, I felt none of the stories or pictures (often delicately staged much like commercial photoshoot) helped me with making the recipe.
You're generalizing too far I think. Yes, a lot of recipes have fluff that doesn't add anything. But some don't, some have crucial information that helps you understand techniques, ingredients or thought processes. If you use recipes like the link, or like the top Google links, you're guaranteed to get zero info.
You shouldn't bother with _most_ long format recipe sites, but you should with some.
You should also realise that the fluff doesn't mean it's a bad recipe. I have a few sites that have amazing, innovative and bulletproof recipes, with lots of fluff. Those recipes aren't anywhere else. Your top recipe on google simply isn't going to have that level of thought put into it, because if it did, somebody would be monetizing it.
>or like the top Google links, you're guaranteed to get zero info.
I don't necessarily find that to be true. Allrecipes is often a highly ranked link and it's pretty basic. And I have a few sites I tend to like that have a fair bit of writing in addition to the recipe such as SpruceEats that pop up fairly often.
Assuming you like that style of curry, it's a decent recipe. The only trouble would be if you didn't read the whole thing first. If you didn't read ahead, you'd hit "dump all of your tomatoes and extra ingredients into a food processor" and take it literally. There would be no spinach left for the next step.
I would rather not rely on commercial curry powder. This becomes a problem if one day you can't buy the same brand.
I was about to say the same thing. For lack of pictures, it's hard to get a sense for whether they would turn out well, except in the trivially simple cases like "put some chicken and veggies in a slow cooker for 8 hours" or "bake chicken wings in a bag with Frank's RedHot".
"Based" is a positive adjective in 4chan-ese. It's roughly analogous to "redpilled," and is used primarily (but not exclusively) by reactionaries and people in that general sphere.
The owner of this website is one such person; the use of "based" is meant to be a (not so) subtle nod to his knowing audience.
Didn't "based" come from Lil B initially? I've heard the phrase "based and redpilled," but I've heard it separately. I interpret "based" as a compliment given to radical viewpoints that are completely impractical, without signaling assent. See Political Compass Memes for numerous examples.
For example: anarcho-monarchism is based. It's a ridiculous ideology, and I wouldn't support it, but it'd be cool to meet someone who actually believes in it.
Both of these viewpoints are true. While I wholeheartedly support the use of the word "based" in the sense that you put it, it is also slang in a certain online subculture and a nod to that subculture. OP was dead on about that in this case: the author's other works include "Why I don't use Cuck Licenses" and "Science vs. Soyence."
It’s a reference to freebasing cocaine. Lil B’s detractors (apocryphally) used to call him based as an insult (analogous to crackhead) and he then started calling himself the Based God.
That makes sense, thanks. I kind of like the idea of based meaning grounded... too bad I didn’t get there first.
“Should we split this out into microservices?”
“Only when we’ve identified an acute need for the increased complexity in our architecture.”
“Based thinking”
From the existence of the phrase "based and redpilled", we can see they're different things- or why mention them?
To be based is to have a certain effortless confident, self-assured fearless character and disposition towards the world. Someone who's based doesn't care if what they say is controversial, because they're too cool to care, but they won't say controversial things for the sake of it- attention-seeking is cringe, it's the act of a weakling who has to scramble for whatever power he can filch off others. The Based one simply says what he believes to be true when he wills, irrespective of social norms. He could pretend, but has no need for pretense, because he does not fear reprisal.
Being red-pilled is something else; it's a certain kind of enlightenment, a disturbing revelation about the nature of the world. When you take the red pill, you're throwing aside comforting lies and confronting the hidden/evil truth.
What exactly that enlightenment is varies from subculture to subculture- the imagery of the red pill has been used by lots of people, and there's a whole range of pills now; the bluepilled are normal people who still accept the lie, blackpilled people are redpillers who have fallen into despair and hopelessness (where it's implied that the red pill usually implies a call to action, the black pill implies apathy- 'just let it all burn', and blackpillers view redpillers as naive in their desire towards action, which will be pointless at best and counterproductive at worst), the white pill which is a hopeful rejoinder to the black pill, the iron pill which says you should work out more...
A lot of these pills act as revelations to previous revelations that recontextualize the previous pill's lessons and worldview, and in the face of all this uncertainty and flux, you can imagine there's a lot of anxiety.
This is where 'based and redpilled' comes in. The based attitude quenches the neurotic anxiety of the pill-seeker's revelation, while the information in the revelation itself- paired with the confidence, self-assurence, and courage to act on it- lets the Based and Redpilled avoid the pitfalls others fall into, and stride forth as more than their peers, as the union of chad and virgin, as the guy who says the n-word on twitter and doesn't get fired because he's his own boss.
The word "based" in slang has come to mean "not caring what others think", usually applied to being outrageous, controversial, or in some cases just outright offensive. So based cooking would be "I cook what I want". I offer up, as an example, "sketti": https://www.bakespace.com/recipes/detail/Honey-Boo-Boo-Skett... as "based" cooking.
"based and redpilled" is quite literally the opposite of "cringe and bluepilled" in common usage. Based definitely is not a synonym for cringe. It often shows approval of some sort, or being impressed when someone acts like a "mad lad".
I'm sure interpretations differ, but yours seemed a bit too far off the mark.
FWIW, that video doesn't change the meaning of the word to me. Still means cringe/unpleasant/racist to me. Every time I've seen 'based' used, it is nearly always followed by something cringe, unpleasant, or racist.
I do understand words have multiple meanings and people interpret things differently. I'm willing to accept that other people interpret 'based' as 'cool', but that is not what the word means to me, or to a lot of other people, I'm sure.
That’s not what the word means to you, that’s how you feel about content that the word is associated with. Just like “homeopathy” generally makes me think “pseudoscience” but really means “dilute a bunch of stuff and use it as medicine”. It’s natural to feel that content that is “based” to people who use that word is “cringe” to you because you disagree with their opinions on what is “based”, but it doesn’t change the meaning of based but instead means “I just think that thing is cringe myself”.
I think you've got the definition of homeopathy incorrect. I checked wikipedia and it says, "Homeopathy or homoeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine." It does mean pseudoscience, specifically medicine, just like your association with it.
As far as I can tell from on the usage of based I've seen, it means cringe/unpleasant/racist (depending on context).
> As far as I can tell from on the usage of based I've seen, it means cringe/unpleasant/racist (depending on context).
Again, you need to separate your feelings about the things being described as “based” with the meaning intended by the people using the word. If I hate hippies and think anything they call “groovy” is really ugly and uncool, that doesn’t mean I get to just declare that “groovy means ugly and uncool”. That’s what you’re doing.
Wikipedia is not a dictionary. It mentions that homeopathy is a pseudoscience because it would be a glaring omission for an encyclopedia if it didn’t. Homeopathy is a medical system that works as I described above, and it just so happens that it’s totally junk as well. Its usage in the context of those that practice homeopathy is not the definition that describes it as being bunk.
Similarly, “based” is used to mean the opposite of “cringe”. It just so happens that most “based” content is what others might call cringe; the video I posted above is satire of exactly this. However, it doesn’t change the meaning of the word, and in fact the joke falls apart if you redefine it this way.
I don't know. You cited a youtube clip with usage of a word as a definition of a word, which I accept, actually, as an interesting and useful source. But you deny the wikipedia language I quoted as acceptable input to this conversation? Why is your youtube context more right than my wikipedia context?
Words have multiple meanings. Clearly based is one of them.
I cited it as usage of the word in context, not as a definition. I rejected your Wikipedia link because it was not an example of usage, but rather an explanation of what the thing is rather than its definition (I would expect a Wikipedia article on "based", if there ever was one, to mention that it's associated with the far right, etc. Words do have multiple meanings, but those meanings grow organically from their usage; you can't just come along and say "I associate this word with xyz therefore it means xyz". That's just how you feel about the word.
If someone calls a "cringe/unpleasant/racist" thing "cool", then does that mean that one of the meaning of the word "cool" is something "cringe/unpleasant/racist"?
It does not just mean "cool". What you think is cool I might think is stupid or offensive. Either way, we do what we want, we are based. The fact that Honey Boo Boo is reviled just shows that she epitomizes based.
Based is in the eye of the beholder, yes, exactly like what's 'cool' or not. Two different groups can disagree about which words apply to particular things or people while still holding the same usage/meaning for the words themselves. Like 'cool' and 'lame'.
You’ve made this exact comment more than once - you seem to have a pretty personal bone to pick with Luke, given that your assessment of “alt-right unabomber” is about as hilariously off the mark as it gets.
Everyone's using 'redpilled' & 'bluepilled' to explain 'based'.. I think it's just too long since I've seen The Matrix for it to be clear how that applies to cooking, or even to a person's attitude towards cooking.
> Being "redpilled" means you've come to accept some reality that differs from the mainstream interpretation, but is the factual and correct one. This can range from more serious issues ("there are only two genders") to more shitposty/comedic ones ("The Room is a cinematic masterpiece"). Whereas "bluepilled" is the opposite--you failed to understand the true reality of things and are stuck believing a false idea.
> Redpill and Bluepill are just another way of saying "My personal opinion is objective fact and what you think is objectively wrong"
It still seems like an odd adjective ('objectively correct') for cooking though, to me.
Based is really hard to define if we're being honest. It kind of means a Libertarian sort of self-righteous fearlessness of going against the grain. Like being anti lockdown because lockdowns are unconstitutional? Based. In this example there's a certain macho-ness to this site, there's no fluff, narrative, ads, CSS, or pictures, just recipes, dammit! Based.
Kenji Lopez (MIT grad chef who is reasonably famous on YouTube and for writing for Serious Eats for years and for writing this amazing cookbook https://www.amazon.com/Food-Lab-Cooking-Through-Science/dp/0...) gives the exact opposite advice of this blog for salt where he recommends using large flake salt for finishing and "table salt" for cooking.
Both table salt and kosher salt are perfectly fine for seasoning or decorating -- michelin starred restaurants use both for each purpose. The only important thing to note is that they have different saltiness grades. Table salt is finer and thus saltier. Real problems emerge when not distinguishing between the two -- either a dish is far too salty or completely under seasoned.
Just specify what you're using and how much and the person using the other one can adjust. 3 parts kosher is about 1 part table salt.
It gets way more confusing if you go to Japan -- instead of 3 or 4 salts. There are 00s. The Japanese are big in to salts.
I'm late here, but I just wanted to post that this is either outdated or incorrect info. Here is a post from 2013 where he says he uses diamond crystal kosher for cooking https://www.seriouseats.com/2013/03/ask-the-food-lab-do-i-ne... and you can see in all his recent youtube videos he uses the larger kosher salt.
I'm not 100% sure this is what the author intends but 'based' has been used for quite a long time on imageboards as an adjective describing something that is unpopular or contentious but nonetheless correct.
> J.K. Rowling is actually better that Hemingway
> > based
From here it spread to other communities (largely non-mainstream political communities on both the left and right). Its strongest assiociation is still with 4chan (and by extension the alt-right) though.
Edit: I just noticed this is Luke Smith's project. He's an esoteric fascist with an embarrassing love of 4chan memes. So yeah, that's where it comes from.
As a non native speaker, the only times I have ever seen people using the word outside of its dictionary definitions when I was reading a bit of MAGA/Q sites out of boredom last year. I took it to just mean something based on US style christian/conservative values.
But usage seems to be broader according to what you wrote. I reckon the most common usage will be, that something is based, when it is unpopular or contentious, but you happen to agree with it.
The usage on MAGA/Q sites is entirely a consequence of the huge cultural influence that boards like /pol/ have exerted on the online far-right. After all, the entire Qanon movement basically sprung out of a /pol/ fairytale.
Thanks for explaining "based" - I didn't know what it was. But I don't understand how your example is actually an example of that. "Rowling is better than Hemingway" is a matter of opinion, so it can't be "unpopular but correct".
When I say 'correct', I mean correct in the eyes of the person using the word 'based'. It's worth bearing in mind here that imageboards for the most part have a wilful cultural neglect of the difference between 'my opinion' and 'objective truth' :-)
> unpopular or contentious but nonetheless correct.
I agree with that, but regard it as an evolution from my other answer meaning "established." The reference to contentious or unpopular comes because a based person has earned the ability to present unpopular ideas without repercussion.
I think you're right that the term originates in hip-hop culture but when it was borrowed by imageboard culture it evolved into a descriptor of ideas and not of people - for the simple reason that imageboards are mostly anonymous.
Now when I see the term used online it's mostly in the imageboard sense of some idea or concept being 'correct' or 'agreeable' rather than the person who originates it. I think the term is undergoing a certain amount of semantic broadening too - more and more often I see it simply as a synonym for 'cool' rather than in the narrower meaning of 'this is controversial but I agree with it'.
It's a hip-hop term meaning established, self-sufficient, or independent, e.g. through fame or business. Because it is desirable, it's used here as a synonym of good/awesome, suggesting this is how based people cook.
(slang, of a person) Not caring what others think about one's personality, style, or behavior; focused on maintaining individuality.
(Internet slang, 4chan) Praiseworthy and admirable, often through exhibiting independence and security.
The explanation I heard is that it is derived from "debased". As in the opposite of debased is "based". I don't think this is strictly correct[0], but it does give a good definition.
[0]: I think the original term comes from street slang and has something to do with freebase cocaine and evolved from there through various online communities.
Based ultimately comes from hip-hop jargon (ex: Lil B the Based God). It is an older form of the newer 'Chad' meme and an antonym of 'cringe'. It is often used on 4chan with many layers of irony. In fact, using based unironically (like based.cooking) is kind of cringe since MAGA boomers co-opted it.
I was just looking up some recipes the other day and my goodness, does this website feel like a breath of fresh air.
Today's web just utterly buries even the simplest content underneath a mountain of shit, whether it's ads or fancy banners or a long-winded speech about god-knows-what before getting to the point.
It was made by a linux youtuber who occasionally (often) complains about bloat, the the point that 'bloat' became an overused meme by commenters on his channel. Looks like he practices what he preaches!
I love thermomix [0] recipes because of their simplicity. Most recipes are 5 or 6 lines, each with symbol, ingredient, time, temperature. Super tight shorthand.
[0] thermomix is basically the non American alternative to the Vitamix blender. Except that it has a scale and has temperature control built in.
The advice to eschew iodized salt in favor of kosher salt is dangerous. Iodo-deficiency is a significant number of IQ points, and in the first world, iodized salt costs the same as non-iodized. It helps thyroid function too, please do not go out of your way to avoid free iodine in your diet!
Fun fact: Australia, quite by accident, had iodized milk up to the 80s, because of the sanitisers used in dairy processing which contained iodophors. And now that we have started phasing them out, it turns out that iodine deficiency has started occurring again.
Little heads up for all searching vegan receipts there. The author has an article named "Veganism is the Pinnacle of Bugmanism" on his personal webpage: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/vegan
IMO TMR is the best font for any kind of pure technical documentation. To me a document written in TNR feels like pure and useful form of information without trying to sell something or force some opinion on me.
Take a look at the author's blogposts and videos. It's a cross between a /g/ poster and an alt-right unabomber, complete with an obsession about tradition and a hate of "modern degenerate marxist egalitarian values".
What is “based” cooking? It’s not explained on the site. A web search obviously leads to [something-]based cooking.
I was hoping that there was something to this about minimizing nonsense around online recipes, but the first one I read (stroganoff) had ingredients in the instructions not included in the ingredients list.
I’m not trying to trash this, I just don’t know what it’s trying to accomplish.
"Based" is a slang word that means the opposite of "cringe", which is the feeling you experience when you go to a recipe site and get treated to 500 words about how much the author loves winter.
Worth throwing out there that 'based' is a new-ish word and means different things to different people. As I have been discussing in this thread, my understanding of the definition of 'based' is something equal to cringe, or 'unpleasant', and sometimes 'racist'.
> 500 words about how much the author loves winter
Also discussed in this thread, but it is far from agreed-upon that those extra words are 'cringe'; at least some people here seem to enjoy that content.
And regardless, the existence of that content is an interesting discussion; is it a legal concern, or a result of capitalism and algorithms and SEO? Or something else entirely?
"Based" is a term that is often used in alt-right circles (and 4chan, and some other places too). It isn't exclusive to these communities, but using it signals to readers what one's political beliefs (or at least community associations) are.
The author of this page has some... questionable beliefs. And the use of this term is part of signaling that without sticking "a fascist-adjacent person's guide to cooking" on the header.
Oh got it! This is actually helpful thank you. I’m usually quick to recognize their code but it was so inundating the last few years I couldn’t keep up.
1. I have no idea what I’m supposed to associate with your “imagine” scenario. I associate “lit” with drunk or high, but I doubt that’s what you meant?
2. I didn’t denigrate anything, I asked what something meant.
3. My... bigotry? Excuse me but what? I didn’t recognize a slang term.
4. I’m not gonna guess which 60% was sarcastic. But more than that was defensive.
5. To the extent it was important and valuable to me to have it identified, I couldn’t care less about “othering” a group of people that have murdered people I care about and expressed wanting me and my loved ones dead. Yep you read between the lines, I’m biased against people who want to do violence against me and my loved ones. What a fucking revelation.
6. I wish a cooking site could be something that doesn’t attract this bullshit. But since it can’t. How fucking dare you call me a bigot.
7. Edit: I’m 0% sarcastic here, I don’t need to put up a facade to be sincere.
Modern blog-y recipe websites do tend to go and on about things I really do not care about (e.g. the worst I've seen is a recipe that included 68 wedding pictures before anything related to the recipe came up [0]), but they also tend to include some helpful hints/tips/pictures of some of the techniques used.
There's a good middle point to be struck between the starkly minimalist based.cooking and the excessively backstory heavy recipe blogs.
I like the idea of a simple recipe site generally, but I also like reading the user feedback on recipe sites. Is a recipe any good? Are there improvements? There is no way to tell on this site.
IMO it's not worth the hassle to add user feedback, because A) it takes a lot of work from the website admin B) it's usually extremely low (maybe negative) value.
A friend of mine who frequents recipe sites pointed out to me once how often the comments are some variation of "I made this except I didn't have any X, Y, or Z so I used M, N, and O", which is great for them but it doesn't really tell you if the recipe, as written, is any good.
I suspect the recipe sites care about comments and other user-generate stuff because that's how they track "engagement" and collect data to feed into their SEO/ad targeting/sales pipeline.
Yes, unless the recipe called for sugar and the "chef" who tried it was clueless and subbed something dumb like sweet curry powder and then complained the recipe sucked.
having read through them all i’d say the recipes range from ‘fine’ to ‘probably not that great but if you’ve just moved out of your parents home its not a bad place to start’. most of the recipes seem robust and would be hard to really mess up. the salt thing as others have pointed out is nonsense.
having spent many hours scrolling through ad laden recipe sites though i really do appreciate the straight forward approach.
One place that I find has surprisingly good recipes is Wikipedia. Take paella [0] or the basic French sauces [1] for instance. It gives context and standard preparations as a great starting point with useful related items.
It’s more advanced than a YouTube video for someone who hasn’t cooked much yet (similar to a technical topic), but I like the additional information and encyclopedia style discussing variations rather than choosing a single truth and just trying to sell ads on a site.
I see a lot of complaints about the state of recipe blogs in this thread. My solution was to look for better sources. NYT Cooking, Serious Eats, King Arthur, Bon Appetit, WaPo's Voraciously, etc. The recipes are well written and tested, and often have separate articles that go into more detail for the curious or confused.
Maybe I'm in a minority, because everyone always hoots and hollers about how they hate modern recipe web sites -- and I get it, 6 pages of memories of trips to grandma or whatever is ridiculous -- but I can't see myself ever using a plain-text recipe with no clue as to who the author is and no reason to suspect that they know what they're talking about. At that point I would probably go to SimplyRecipes, where at least recipes are voted on.
The sites that keep me are the ones that don't blather on about grandmas but do subtly give me some reason for why I should trust them, they explain that this technique makes the most sense, they describe how they've tweaked it from this cookbook or whatever. I also read the comments. In the end, though, my pre-existing trust of the site and author makes the most difference.
> but I can't see myself ever using a plain-text recipe with no clue as to who the author is and no reason to suspect that they know what they're talking about.
Isn't this how recipes - outside of friends and family - have worked forever?
Celebrity chefs are the minority. People normally just Google "air fryer fried okra" and click on one of the first three.
A meandering SEO tale doesn't prove this person cook, it proves they know how to game Google.
> Nope, people got recipes from books and magazines, which were considered reliable gatekeepers.
You're making my point - they were gatekeepers because they were discoverable and promoted. That's what gave them credibility. Just as showing in search results does now.
People didn't pick cookbooks because they had the most aimless stories that hid the actual recipe.
They were gate keepers because there was an editorial standard to uphold. That's what gave them credibility.
If you run the magazine Food & Wine and you just publish random recipes that you found for free in church-ladies' xeroxed recipe pamphlet, you're going to lose your readership pretty fast.
Of course, some magazines applied more standards than others, and so that's when the reader learns to trust the recipe in Food & Wine (or whatever, I'm not recommending them) over Reader's Digest.
These days? Sure, but I was specially talking about pre internet. This is a rather new phenomenon that i believe comes mostly from SEO and a shift to things like cooking and organizing becoming commoditized "lifestyle" genres.
>> "Looking back at some of the gelatin casseroles of the 60s, of course, casts doubt on some of that reliability."
The most convincing theory I heard was that the gelatin obsession was about status since it required refrigeration. Hosting a party where you served the latest, most elaborate gelatin dish said something about you.
If it's status I'd probably pick a different reason. Before commercial gelatin, making aspic was a fairly long and complicated process and it was part of high cuisine, especially in Europe. So that may have carried over to using it in middle class home-cooked dished when commercial gelatin became available.
It's not that recipes with meandering SEO tales necessarily have better recipes. It's that recipes without any explanation usually suck. If you pick something with a meandering SEO tale, it _might_ not be terrible. Possibly not terrible is better than definitely terrible.
I'd argue that recipes themselves are why a lot of people's cooking sucks. The recipes tell you what how much and how long but fail to account for the basics of seasoning, preparation and tool selection.
If people apply a formal or acquired training to recipes they'd usually vary a lot from person to person much less the original recipe
The cookbooks I have I acquired thinking they were good sources of recipes, and they kind of are. But the real value I found, is the sections on "how to cook". Everything in those books on technique: from knowing how to convert tablespoons to volumetric ounces (yes, I'm American) to how to temper eggs. My favorite bread recipe book, for example, isn't my favorite because the recipes are the best, but because it taught me how to make bread, including things like creating a sourdough starter from scratch.
Recipes are easy to find, especially now with the internet.
Yeah, I’ve had the same experience. I really like the Salt Fat Acid Heat [0] book for this.
It does have a section on recipes, but a solid half or more of the book is on technique, why certain ways work and others don’t, etc.
Lots of stuff that I imagine one would pick up by working in a kitchen or going to school for it, but could take a long time to figure out on your own.
I don't think OP talkes about polished SEO blogs or celebrities, but about experience and knowing the basics. If you e.g. quote Escoffier or Harold McGee etc, I trust you did your research.[0] Also, OP mentions techniques, which I agree are interesting and worth to share.
[0] (Of course you don't have to read and quote books, and a lot of good chefs didn't as well, but that is just one factor for me to decide how much experience you have/how trustworthy you are. Just showing some recipes don't tell me that much.)
I see what you mean, but one thing that site could use is to have the "Jump to the recipe" button follow you down the page. I mean, my god, I had scrolled to the equivalent of about page 30 when I suddenly really "how long does this thing go on for?" and had to scroll all the way back up to be able to jump back down to the recipe.
Besides, people looking for recipes are getting something of real value, sometimes hard won. That is hard to know, unless all that is shared too.
I play it like you do. The better sites offer context and serve up whatever AD helps them pay their way. Totally equitable.
One can always start really learning to cook too. Reasonable food is not too tough and being able to spiff up a recipe or substitute is the reward.
Great food is harder. I am getting there myself and I have a two generation body of recpies and notes to draw on.
My grannie was very sharp. Approached cooking like she did many things. She often had real mastery of stuff she wanted to do or was interested in. Similar values were present in my wife's side of the fam. A couple of those are over 100 years old! (Brought over on a boat from Europe)
In those books are notes, context, other info. Those are where the great was noted down, passed down.
That experience has given me a perspective on all this. People who share are doing something pretty damn high value.
It should be appreciated, funded, etc.
And no, our family books are getting scanned, but are not going online just yet. The women consider it personal.
I suppose it is.
It is also the food that brings people home every year too. I grok that.
Maybe the better people can end up on substack. Deliver the good recipes and context needed for people to get the great in them.
I may subscribe. Pretty sure my wife would, if it were someone she values somehow.
To me, being unable to be bothered some means maybe also not being all the concerned about the food.
Unless it's something I never tried to make before and isn't like anything I have tried before, I just want an ingredient list and the directions with a color pic of the final dish to entice me.
When deciding between competing recipes I want the ingredient list and a pic of the final product to decide.
I don't want to have to browse and search through the clutter of irrelevant things. I like Punchfork[1] for this. Easy to search, it presents the ingredient list and a pic then you can click through to the site for the instructions --unfortunately the actual sites are usually cluttered with few exceptions.
I'm on your side. I need the author of a recipe to explain why their recipe is interesting, different, or better than others. And I need that to match with my own culinary reasoning and knowledge. Otherwise it's likely to be bland, boring, both, or worse.
That said, we are in the minority. Most people just Google the recipe they want to make and use the first result. This very very very rarely produces a good result. Most people don't care. And yet they wonder why their food sucks.
There's definitely some skill to cooking, but 80% of why I'm considering a good cook among my friends is because I only use recipes from people I trust, and I try to follow them as closely as possible.
> There's definitely some skill to cooking, but 80% of why I'm considering a good cook among my friends is because I only use recipes from people I trust
I strongly agree with this. I consider myself a fairly accomplished cook, I've been cooking since I was tall enough to see over the table, but one of the big things that helps is that I will take the time to find the right recipe, mostly by looking at the recipe itself and being able to visualize and taste the food before I make it, but also but reading what the author writes and deciding if I trust them.
> Most people just Google the recipe they want to make and use the first result. This very very very rarely produces a good result.
It depends on your skill level / experience. Some people have a knack for cooking and just need a rough list of ingredients to figure out a dish.
Some people need detailed instructions and rely more on recipes. I don't have any idea how to season things apart from a liberal use of buillon cubes, so my best dishes are when I closely follow recipe instructions from good cookbooks.
Since you mentioned seasoning, and I’ve got this in my clipboard from another reply...
Check out Salt Fat Acid Heat [0] if you haven’t seen it. It totally changed my idea of how to season things, to the point that I feel a lot more confident modifying existing recipes now.
One of the most eye opening things also sounds the most silly in retrospect: taste as you go. It makes such a huge difference! For whatever reason, I would always blindly follow a recipe until the very end, and hope that the “big reveal” turned out how I hoped. Now, I try to taste as I go (add a little salt; try it; add more). A related tip that blew my mind recently: if you’re making meatballs and want to check the seasoning, cook a tiny chunk of it and taste it before committing to a whole batch.
Sure, people who just need a rough recipe will be fine. But most people don't fall into this category.
And more importantly, lots of people really _think_ they fall into a category where they don't need recipes to "cook well". In reality, they started off following shitty recipes, and so now their "expertise" is built on shoddy foundations.
plug for Felicity Cloake’s “how to cook the perfect” recipes in the guardian. she makes multiple versions of common recipes talking about the effects of the different ingredients and methods before giving her take on it. you learn about how the recipe works and are able to make substitutions/ changes much more easily. of course you can always skip to the last section where she gives her version concisely and with note a word about her grandmother.
Yeah, sometimes at least basic images are incredibly helpful. First time I tried to make mac and cheese from scratch I struggled finding decent instructions on how to make the roux as I had never made or seen a roux before. Eventually I kinda figured it out after piecing together pictures from like 4-5 recipe sites.
In the last few years I’ve learnt that there really is nothing better than a good cook book. Vibrant colors, techniques, stories - these can all really add to your experience if their presence is not solely for the purpose of including additional ads. I’ve also found that the recipe alone is truly not enough - the techniques and background are incredibly important !
> the techniques and background are incredibly important
As someone who admittedly loathes _and_ is bad at cooking - it sounds like you are describing a combination recipe book _and_ cooking-instruction/cooking-history book. I wonder if people are frustrated because the two are getting conflated - they _just_ want the recipe, but they are being given both recipes and background?
Often people are deeply frustrated because they're getting pages and pages of irrelevant SEO-bait and then the recipe. It's rarely meaningful, substantive, informative, educational, or helpful. I don't care how much someone's son/partner/dog loves this gluten-free/low-carb/vegan recipe, and most people seem to also not care.
I genuinely truly wouldn’t mind it if all the filler were easy to skip if the reader so desires. Some (and increasingly more) sites offer a “skip to recipe” link but for a long long LONG time that wasn’t the case.
Couldn't agree more. A good cookbook is well laid out and organized in a logical manner, rather than organized to optimize search rankings.
And while I'm grateful for youtube, blogs, reddit, etc for reducing the barriers for folks to share information about topics like cooking and home improvement, they've also taught me to appreciate a good editor.
I was a professional chef for 17 years, 11 in Michelin star restaurants and 6 as a private yacht chef. I used Cooks Illustrated America's Test Kitchen's[0] cookbooks on the yacht, mostly The Best Recipe. [1] That set of recipes was perfect for what I was doing and freed me from having to think about what to make. There are was so much available I was doing a different dish every night and day for months on end. I always enjoy doing stuff I haven't done before. Bobbing around in the ocean one week in from the last supermarket and another week before access to another decent one, it is nice to have a reliable source of new recipes to plan with. What is really important is that it is one thing that every recipe in a cookbook works, often they don't, and it is another thing that not only does every recipe work but they always have fantastic results. More or less that set of cookbooks made my life so easy, I found a new hobby on the yacht writing code. As for a monthly source, Cook Illustrated and Cooking Light are my favorite sources. As a private chef, I can't make restaurant food everyday for my clients because restaurant food is more or less an unhealthy drug that makes people fat so I'd use Cooking Light for inspiration although the recipes are not as guaranteed for perfect results as the Cooks Illustrated recipes.
Second the recommendation. It's been my go to recipe book for a good decade now. Nothing too adventurous but very solid and reliable. (I think ATK has generally pushed a little further out of a traditional American comfort zone since Kimball departed.)
If I have a criticism of them, it's that they make some things more complex than they need to be for little gain in the final product. They have you cook everything three different ways as a friend puts it. I think they've probably gotten a bit better on this front as well.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4901819-la-cuisine-raiso... , it's in French and I don't know of a translation but if you can read it, it is one of the best book on cooking. It covers techniques and timeless traditional French and French Canadian recipes. It's a reference as much as it is a cookbook and it's a lot cheaper, and accessible than Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking from Nathan Myhrvold
The first edition is over 100year old, my grandmother gave the second edition of that book to my mother who gave it to my sister.
I got mildly obsessed with modernist cooking a few years back and got a copy of Myhrvold's At Home book.
It's a beautiful book and is an interesting read. That said, I don't really use it much although I have a few go tos. A lot of the recipes are way more work than I'm going to put in for, say, an omelette.
- Every grain of rice ( Fuschia Dunlop ) is close to what I’d consider a perfect cookbook.
- Franklin BBQ ( Aaron Franklin ) is a definitive guide to how to use an offset smoker. I’ve read through portions over and over again - it’s only got about 10 recipes.
- My two south’s ( Asha Gomez ) - A wonderful collection of recipes inspired by South India, the south.
A good cook book will usually have a section that introduces new ingredients, tells you how to source them, introduces new techniques or methods, and also introduce some shorter recipes that can be used as dependencies for others. At the end of the day - you want good building blocks.
I have Dunlop's Hunan and Szechuan books which I really like, especially the latter. The one caveat I have is that, if you don't live somewhere with a good Oriental supermarket, you're probably going to be frustrated.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat is great, as is The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez Alt. I also love The Food of Sichuan by Fuchsia Dunlop but that's more Sichuan cuisine than general cooking.
To learn the techniques, history and scientific background, "On Food and Cooking" [0] is great. His second book, "The Curious Cook" [1] is entertaining and interesting as well.
I also became frustrated with recipes sites and made my own: https://nononsense.recipes - free to browse, or you can make an account to add your own recipes, curate a list of favorites, and leave and read comments.
I had the same idea last year but i wanted to try dhall so I used that instead of markdown files for the recipe format. There is no content, but the structure is there.
Does anyone else absolutely loath recipes? Using measuring spoons and shit make me feel like I’m doing a homework assignment. No recipes, no measuring for me. Just pour in the shit, do what you think it needs, eat it when you’re done.
Today, that was brown rice, some fried onions and bell peppers, a can of tomatoes, salt and pepper, cayenne, birds-eye, fish sauce, tamari, red wine vinegar, and garlic in the instant pot for 30 minutes.
You clearly didn't think your comment through. Let's say it's your first time cooking. If you have no idea how much of each ingredient you should add, how in the world are you supposed to make a decent meal? I personally fudged a few myself putting too little spice or too many pickles.
I’m a good cook now but I really didn’t start with recipes. I started out cooking the items according to the directions on the package (yes, a recipe of sorts) and then combining the stuff I liked.
Not everything is for everyone, and I feel like I have learned a lot about what HN thinks about cooking from this.
Most here seem to approach cooking as programming, maybe someone wants to make a meal compiler. I can't imagine cooking so strictly, if anything it's time away from the terminal to work with my hands and maybe create something I can enjoy or share with others. I did not expect so much rigor and seriousness! :D
Not having glossy images makes the recipe easier to read.
I am also using markdown to create recipes and some other documentation.
Like the idea of using github to manage the recipes.
You would probably need to use indexing if the data became large.
Some sort of user review system might help maintain quality.
Website won't load for me in Firefox, keep getting security warnings about the site not being secure. Ignoring the security warnings just redirects me to another page with another warning.
Maybe hard to find online as recipes tend to be fairly barebones or they're by experienced cooks mostly for experienced cooks.
You'd probably be better off with a book from Alton Brown or someone like that. America's Test Kitchen stuff has pretty careful instructions as well although they're not necessarily pitched at complete novices. You could also do worse than Cooking for Geeks by Jeff Potter from O'Reilly.
An ad-free recipe website is a great idea. Though I've no desire to make it political, and it can be user-friendly but still light on code. So I've been working on https://recipeasly.org/ though it is a work in progress.
Comes from 4chan slag. It's the opposite of cucked. Hence the term `based and redpilled` to `cringe and bluepilled`. It's also typically used to endorse extreme views ironically: "beating women is based" or endorsement to strange ideas "monarchism is based". A discussion above mentions some rapped coining the word, but often words occur spontaneously in multiple communities and both can claim invention of a term.
This is not at all what the OP link is using the word to mean. "Based" has become a meme word to mean good, agreeable, against the norms, and often controversial.
It's something teenagers say, or used to say, so i wouldn't judge the author just yet.
It _may_ become something only far right nuts say, same as with frogs and other 4chan stuff -- young people invent something, culture drifts, dumber or isolated people are least likely to drift with it and most likely to have violent views, eventually mostly violent people say something and the rest stops saying it because they don't want to be taken for one of the violent group -- but i don't think it has happened already.
In related news you just found out why many adults treat anything and everything teenagers do is something rude and offensive that needs to be suppressed. Teenagers are loud and annoying so their stuff is something loud and annoying people do. It's something you need to control.
Or i might be wrong, this can change quickly, but then the author can be wrong too.
Put the toilet paper rolls off your eyes and go take a look at his other work, primarily his Youtube channel. Based is not a word that is owned and primarily used by white nationalists; it's used by many different people. It's undeniable that he has controversial and non-conformist opinions(which is what "being based" usually means), but none of them are based on or related to racial discrimination.
The owner of this website is a reactionary with a relatively popular YouTube channel in which he openly espouses and trades in racist talking points[1].
Source on the racist thing? I’ve watched a number of his videos, mostly to learn various Linux tools. I’ve generally enjoyed his content and found it inoffensive; just way off the beaten path.
> Long story short, a bugman is someone who rejects the purpose and role of humans in their natural environment. They reject tradition, religion, their family, gender roles.
Ah, I can smell the rank mold from here.
> you're given for your acceptance some inane religious platitudes like "equality" and "rights" along with vaguely Marxist notions of "exploitation" and "slavery" and "oppressed classes,"
Plus the usual inane stuff about vegans being fundamentalist skinny soybois who will die at 40 and become impotent from their diet. Oh, and also global warming is a myth. Lovely stuff.
Well surely the author is the one pushing identity politics into his videos about technology, complete with an obsession about "modernist degenerate marxist egalitarian values" (I'm paraphrasing)
I don't care what other things the author does. I came for the recipes and that's all that matters.
It used to be pretty common to find independent sites that had all sorts of interesting information and if you dug further you'd find the author has very extremist political or religious views, which you mostly ignored. Now it's all gone or replaced with a fake politically-correct "personality" out of fear of offending anyone.
I’m always fascinated by people complaining about ‘woke identity politics’ usually when coming in defense of people who define their whole identity... as anti-woke. Maybe let’s admit that everyone is playing identity politics, it’s just that one side is too embarrassed to admit it after decades of virtue signaling ‘independent thought’.
The term 'based' is only used by a very tiny group of people. I'll let you figure out why one of their heroes was a guy they called 'based stickman' that ended in prison for assaulting people with a weapon.
I know what 'based' means. The term originated in hip-hop and now it's used by all sorts of people ranging from nationalists, through moderate conservatives and apolitical people, all the way to communists, in places like imageboards, twitter and social media in general. It's just like the term 'thot'. It's generally used by young people on the internet.
Please, when you start with a bad faith attempt at whitewashing Luke's YouTube as not being full of edgelord shit trying to 'own the libs', I don't think I can take your opinion seriously about what people do to define their identity.
With such great things as having a picture of 'soydevs', or such titles as 'Schooling a beta GNUTard', 'Virgin social media vs. chad RSS', 'Orderly dissolution of the United States into its component parts' and you know, about half of his videos having thumbnails with pepes and the kind of alt-right shit you used to see in r/TheDonald'... I'm sure he's just a nice Linux nerd who would never associate with the kind of people that idolized 'based stickman'.
I'm not denying the memes and the edginess, as you can just look at the YouTube channel. But believe it or not, not everything is about you and the 'wokeness'. You think too much of yourself if you think everyone has to define himself as in how do they relate to you.
> Right?
Actually yes, I've seen plenty of people like that. You're missing a relevant fact that it's funny. Just to give an example, another Linux channel, MentalOutlaw.
ROFL, you think too much of yourself if you don't realize that the whole 'I don't care about your feelings, I'm gonna be a very aggressive boy, you just watch me!' isn't a cry for attention. In fact, that kind of behavior is all about people's wokeness or whatever you wanna call it.
Most people get over that kind of mentality by the time they are 20 something and working. Some don't, I guess.
Yeah, I understand how it can be confusing that a community that defines itself by being an explicit rejection of the norms of society and calls people they disagree with 'normies' could possibly concern itself with what other people think. It's OK, if you haven't figured it out by now, there's nothing I can do to help you. Have a good one.
I don't see that he's trying to own the libs. He points out what problems he sees with aspects of modernity- we all do that- in a comedic way, in the style of internet subculture, and advocates seperation from that modernity and its problems. Hence moving out of cities to small towns, moving off of big tech platforms and having your own personal website, growing and cooking your own food, etc. In general, becoming progressively more independent from macroscopic society.
This stickman guy seems to be the opposite of that. Hanging around in cities, headbutting with antifa losers, makes you just as much of a loser. None of it's real, it's all performative- it's all cringe, a waste of time, a distraction when you could be building something better. LS definitely wouldn't consider stickman 'based'.
I don't see the edginess, either. Something edgy is trying to be transgressive and out there, but LS's thumbnails and titles are just standard /g/ vernacular. To his audience- internet-goers who are used to /g/-style vernacular- there's nothing edgy or transgressive about the language/imagery used, it's just standard memes.
Speaking your subculture's language to your subculture isn't edgy. Black rappers don't say digger to offend white suburban moms, LS isn't going to left-wing people's facebook/twitter pages and posting soyboy memes at them; he's mocking those people in his own space, among his subculture. Of course they can be edgy and offensive to you, but you're the suburban white woman in this scenario.
I certainly don't think anyone should aspire to being 'a nice linux nerd', or to go out of their way to appease suburban white moms' overactive sensitivities and imaginations, for that matter. That would be very cringe and bluepilled, so to speak.
That's a lot of text to try to justify being a shithead.
My favorite ridiculous bit is when you pretend that all the stupid /g/ slang isn't designed around shock value. By your own argument, I guess pedophilia is acceptable and not transgressive of social norms as long as your audience is a group of pedophiles. I wish I could kiss that juicy multi-dimensional galaxy brain of yours!
BTW, there's nothing wrong about trying to be nice. Like, literally there's nothing more acceptable than being agreeable. But I guess that's too much to ask from someone like you who is clearly too cool for school and 'so based'.
I used to think like that when I was an edgy teen. I'm so glad I grew the fuck up.
If all the time I've wasted on 4chan has taught me anything, it's that calling people shitheads, or more colorful variants, does little to change their mind.
The problem with pedophilia isn't that it's offensive, it's the harm caused. As you well know... If you can make a good case that soydev memes are as bad as, you know, molesting kids, then please do.
The point about niceness is that agreeableness alone isn't indicative of morality. The bureaucrats managing the death trains were as agreeable as anyone. Niceness is nice to have, and some degree of agreeableness is needed to operate in society, but niceness for niceness' sake is just vapid. Successful sociopaths are nice. Niceness, politeness, these are all social ceasefires/tools. Nothing wrong with that, but they shouldn't be the fundament of your personality- there should be something more to you than "I'm a nice guy". And "I'm a nice linux nerd" just sounds especially vapid.
If I met you in real life, I'd be nice and polite (according to the social rules of our current culture), of course. And LS is being nice and polite according to the social rules of /g/ culture. That space isn't really meant for you and doesn't have to conform to the rules of politeness of mainstream culture, much as you wouldn't go into, I don't know, a punk rock concert and ask them to tone down their language a bit. Would you deny these weirdos their safe space, where they can joke about wagecucks and gnutards?
That language was born of attempts to be edgy, yes, but once it became fixed it was no longer mutually offensive to interlocutors.
Ironically, you're being more interpersonally combative/abrasive than anyone I've seen on LS's channel!
Less nice, in other words.
With your attitude, and your sailor's mouth, you might belong on 4chan, after all.
> If all the time I've wasted on 4chan has taught me anything, it's that calling people shitheads, or more colorful variants, does little to change their mind.
I'm not here to convert anyone. Catharsis is also a perfectly valid reason to do something.
> The problem with pedophilia isn't that it's offensive, it's the harm caused. As you well know... If you can make a good case that soydev memes are as bad as, you know, molesting kids, then please do.
Filling people's heads with 'edgy' stuff has led us to the current situation were we have self-declared incels shooting up public places while live-streaming their violence 'for the lulz'. The Christchurch massacre was the perfect example of the logical conclusion of the nihilistic onanism that is 4chan shitposting.
I'd argue that setting people into the edgy -> racist to be edgy -> conspiracy theories about replacement -> violence sausage machine, on the premise of laughing at 'soydevs' (whatever that is supposed to mean) has real-life consequences just as bad as pedophilia.
> That space isn't really meant for you and doesn't have to conform to the rules of politeness of mainstream culture, much as you wouldn't go into, I don't know, a punk rock concert and ask them to tone down their language a bit.
> Would you deny these weirdos their safe space, where they can joke about wagecucks and gnutards?
As I said, the problem with these weirdos' safe-space is that it is increasingly leading to consequences in the real world. They can say whatever the hell they want in their safe-space, but you can't ask me to not tell them how stupid and/or deranged they sound when they come to my space. That's the only way to adjust their expectations ``
> Ironically, you're being more interpersonally combative/abrasive than anyone I've seen on LS's channel! Less nice, in other words. With your attitude, and your sailor's mouth, you might belong on 4chan, after all.
Almost like people can have strong opinions without having to resort to calling others 'soydevs' and 'suburban white women'.
>Catharsis is a perfectly valid reason to do something
Yes, /b/, /pol/ and /g/ agree completely. Like I said, you'd fit in there- the emotional zealotry, the insults, you're a 4chan poster in spirit already.
>Almost like people can have strong opinions without having to resort to calling others 'soydevs' and 'suburban white women'.
I'd take being called a soydev or a suburban white woman over being called a shithead or being compared to pedophiles, thanks! Are those really the most horrible words you can accuse me of using...? They seem pretty tame.
I'm not here to convert either, and I leave filled with a sense of relief that you aren't able to more strongly impose your will on the world and others.
Again, you view those culturally/politically opposed to you as a monolith, and so lump people together who don't fit together, like a southerner saying all muslims are terrorists. There's a difference between your local imam and an al-qaeda follower who murders a bunch of people, and in the same way there's a difference between LS and and the christchurch shooter. Lumping them together is inaccurate, and if you think the latter is a pipeline to the former, well, 'islamophobe' is a word. I guess 'chanophobe' is next...
- There should be a photo of how to slice the chicken breast. Saying "through their width" isn't good enough. I had to explain what "lengthwise" was once because my friend cut all the vegetables the exact opposite of it.
- Pound with what? A lot of people will come up with very bad answers to this question.
- How much flour? How much egg? I'll bet that plenty of beginners will use a tablespoon of flour or a singular egg
- Ditto with oil. Beginners do not know how much oil is necessary to fry stuff
- How high heat? You probably want to turn down the heat after the oil starts smoking.
- Is there a single mention of adding salt? Sounds like a pretty bland recipe
I don't mean to be too harsh but recipes are hard. There's a reason why professional recipe developers have developed certain standards like measurements, terms (folding batter, shimmering oil, etc.), and development procedures (cross testing).