Be sure to check out the talented food writers and video producers we interviewed for this video - their links are in the description! But the real questions is: did Melissa convince you to stop finding online recipes so annoying? Let us know :)
I've read all the backgrounds first on Third Culture Kitchen. Recipe layout is superior. Will wait until autumn to make the recipes, pretty warm here at 40.35°S at the moment.
She absolutely didn't, because it is annoying for anyone that is prioritizing trying to find ideas for things they can make, which is the majority of people. Yeah, writing is hard. Making good recipes is hard. Yes, you deserve recognition for doing either, but expecting the same people that just want to find a good recipe to care in that moment about the full experience of coming up with the recipe is...not realistic. If you had to listen to the life story of every construction worker that worked on the road you want to drive on, you'd wear ear plugs. Same goes here.
Check out Luke Smith's based cooking. He was tired of this very same issue, so recipes are only ingredients and directions. The picture has to be a real picture of the thing you made, and that's it, no trackers, no ads, etc. His video was posted 3 years ago.
I understand the value in the story. At the same time, I cannot absorb everyone’s story for every meal! Having the option to read AFTER the recipe would be amazing. Having the recipe to start would make me revisit the site more, so I’m not jumbling through tech issues with my phone blowing up as i scroll to find what I would need to make it
I agree 100%. I don’t mind a little context and history behind the recipe, but anything more than a paragraph is just over the top. Then you add the 50+ website breaking ads and pop up banners and you get the people visiting your website annoyed as hell when they just want the damn recipe with maybe a smidge of context
Or during! If the recipe has me watching the pot for 15 minutes to be there when something happens or lightly stirring, that's the perfect point to give me something to ready that is related the recipe. I am, however, not going to scroll back up and lose my place to ready that info.
@@ArtofcarissaThe ads are the true purpose of this structure. By pushing the recipe down the page you have to scroll through more ads, generating more income. Also SEO but that could probably work if the recipe was first.
Having a recipe cleaner doesn’t stop people who want to read those parts of the recipe from reading them. It does give those that of us that just want to get to the recipe the opportunity to avoid having to sift through a lot of stuff that we don’t want to look at to get to what we’re looking for. Not to mention the web design of a lot of these recipes is just horrible. Weird boxes all over the place ads stuffed in here and there, it’s visually torturous and just not conducive to enjoying anything.
Ads! Same reason google started to suck more and more at finding stuff! The sites make money through ads and the metric by which others are willing to pay for ads is how long people stay on your site and scroll through. So these google result pages are literally designed to be cumbersome and confusing so you stay and scroll longer. it`s not a bug it`s an intentional design feature 🤷♂
Because the other stuff generates the revenue to pay for the recipe you get for free. If you didn't scroll past them, the recipe makers wouldn't get ad revenue and so you wouldn't get your recipe
The problem isn't the tips and tricks and photos and story. The problem is the tips and tricks are spliced between ads far from the relevant step of the recipe and sprinkled between bits of backstory and just a few more ads. Give me the recipe. Give me the tips when relevant. Let me cook it. Then, if I enjoy it, maybe I'll actually check out why you made it. It's not complicated, but it's also a lot harder to force you to scroll passed all of their ads
yeah, the problem is the websites are eye bleeding garbage. So happy for ai answers for when you forget how long to boil an egg, etc and youtube for actual cooking instructions. Written recipes can definitely go extinct imho
@@Serai3 Brave Browser works, too. Better, I'd argue. Adblock used to glitch out the page for me or cause the thing not to load without disabling it. Use it for most online websites nowadays just because it makes me forget about the adpocalypse sprawling out everywhere.
I don't know man, I transcribed most of my family recipes for my own use and included just ingredients and very light instructions. For all the baking stuff I legit just have ingredient proportions, oven temp and baking time, no other instructions because that's all I need since I've made these recipes tons of times. It shouldn't be the job of every individually written recipe to teach you all of the fundamentals of cooking like how to dice an onion or carve a chicken. We also live in the realm of the interent where you can legit just write "carve chicken" and hyperlink to a tutorial that covers that for those who don't know how but isn't intrusive to those who do. Lastly, most of the struggles Sabrina was having with Melissa's recipe wasn't because of the missing historical context, but it was because the ingredients weren't labled and the measurments weren't standard (instead of pinch of salt, either say salt to taste or 1 tsp, instead of stewing chunk write 1 in chunks). If the individual "tips and tricks" part are essential for the result (like blooming the spices or soaking the rice), they should be included in the instructions. That's the whole point of the instructions. I think most of the commenteres here agree that we don't want these recipe writers to not get paid, and we don't want to lose the cultural significance of these recipes, but we should definitely have the ingredients, measurements and core instructions at the top.
I just tried to look up a recipe on a website without an ad blocker and my browser almost crashed. I don't have a problem with putting ads on sites, I get making money is needed, but when there is one every paragraph, that's excessive.
The autoplaying videos, popups, and floating banners...I bounce out of that page immediately. Ain't worth it lol. But yeah, 99.9% of the time I have an adblocker on.
@@Artofcarissa I also have this intuition, but it's so obvious of an idea that it must not actually work out, or people would already have made that switch. To be honest, even as a proponent of the idea I wouldn't actually sub to a recipe patreon. Would you?
I'll give a shit about your story after I've tasted the food and actually care. There is a Korean place near my house that I would *happily* spend hours interviewing the head chef if I could get their recipes. I don't give two shits about the recipe from the tea shop down the street over their 'family style, home made, traditional muffin.' Those muffins suck and I just don't care. Keep the tips and tricks. Throw out the narrative about Nana.
I'm a massive cookery book fan, but online recipes are incredibly irritating. The food writer suggesting that the only alternative is just writing 4 ingredients Is insane and completely makes me disregard his opinion. A little blurb is fine. But I haven't seen a little blurb on any recipes I've searched for recently.
@@_kowono Same. I would rather pay $10 for a book rather than looking for recipes online. The blurb should be a few sentences that describe the dish. Not the writers life. I dont care at all about how this dish came to be. Thats for after ive tasted it. Tell me how long the dish takes and what i need. Those are the two most important things when looking for a recipe and shouldnt be after scrolling down a mile. These bloggers are out of touch with whats actually important.
Recipes sites are 95% ads and bs. Soon it they all will also be 100% AI, possibly with 100% AI generated BS "family history" of the recipes. You don't need seperate "tips and tricks" outside of the directions as they should be in the directions if they are needed. Most don't even have "tips and tricks".
"The recipe goes first, and the life story stuff goes after that" is exactly the solution I personally want. I would like to NOT have to constantly scroll down when my browser decides to reload the page mid meal prep.
Oh, and don't forget when you're halfway scrolled through a long af paragraph, and the ads finally catch up and suddenly you're looking at an F150 and your paragraph is now one of ten super long paragraphs so you don't even know where you were, until, oh, hey, now it's a damned Chevy that popped up because I guess that other ad wasn't the only one still loading. But you can't even just sit and wait a minute for all of them to load because they'd rather wait and then pop up on you when you get to them.
I like the cultural backstory and personal backstory and I love the tips and tricks. I just don't want it to be a meter of scrolling only to then see that I don't have the ingredients I need and I have to find a different recipe. also if there's an ad between the ingredients list and the instructions I'm much much less likely to use that site again, I need those to be next to each other
So when I look up a recipe, I really don't have time to read a 20-page synopsis on how and where the recipe was invented. I just need the recipe. If I can't jump to the recipe, I click off that recipe and go to another. If it turns out to be a great dish, then I might go back and read.
The compromise here, put the story after the recipe not before it. Especially when the reality is most of the time its there to add important keywords for search engine optimization
Especially when so many times you scroll past all that bs and find, "adapted from: [actual recipe creator]" so they stole someone else's work and just 'tweaked' it with an extra dash of vanilla or reduced salt from 1/2tsp to 1/4tsp.
I would like to point out two things: - I would absolutely trust a recipe that is just ingredients and instructions, without anything else, no styling, no link to the overarching website, nothing. That is how I prefer my internet. - If you speak German, public broadcasters have expansive recipe libraries on the internet. Example: NDR Ratgeber Kochen. We already pay for that, so the whole "We need to make money from this" does not apply. I feel like more of culture should be like that. The revenue should be independent from the performance of individual works.
Similarly if you speak English, BBC Good Food has a ton of recipes with no blog or ads (at least within the UK - I know the BBC tends to add ads when accessing outside of the UK)
I was also confused by the idea that writing a bunch of stuff to scroll past builds credibility. Decent web design can, I guess, but a reasonably-professional looking website with just the recipe would seem incredibly legit to me, and they do exist. And even an unprofessional-looking website or a reddit post with just the recipe seems like it has potential, and if there are comments with people's positive experiences with the recipe, that would be what would build its credibility to me.
I concur. Especially if it's something simple. If I'm forgetful and can't remember how long to soft boil an egg, I don't need any additoinal information than time for each size. If I want to make a basic Tiramisu, all I need is ingredients and steps. If I want the best Tiramisu in the world, I will need additional tips, like which way to dip the ladyfingers in the coffee, maybe what coffee is the best of it, and so on, and maybe if I'm trying to make the best Tiramisu, I'm so much into it that I'm also interested in reading about its history and how the author came up with this specific way of making it, I'll happily read it. But if I'm making the simple version, that probably means I want something easy, fast and perhaps I'm not that interested in diving deep into the lore of it, and certainly not at the very moment when I'm trying to read the instructions to know if I have all the ingredients and kitchen equipment
Not only culture. Imagine a world in which the provision of housing is a communal task and not something you can make a profit from. Or the provision of an internet connection.
I wonder how much is cultural. I'm Polish in Australia, Polish are to the point, Australians beat around the bush until the leaves fall off and get mad that you didn't guess the point that they never specifcally said. It's ... confusing. But my guess is that they prefer the rambly recipe, and will trust it more. I will not. Why is your recipe so bad that you need to CONVINCE me first? No. Just give me the recipe.
The life story doesn't exist for humans to read, it's for SEO. The Web pages are essentially an inefficient ad data feed between machines that humans are a scoring mechanism for.
As someone who 1) hates when my ability to READ the recipe is thwarted by ads/website jumping around and 2) is learning to cook bc he wasn't taught to cook as a child, I have found that I benefit most from following a recipe to the letter, ignoring the context prior to the story. Then after I make it a couple of times, I start to feel comfortable playing around with more/less ingredients. I don't have the knowledge to be able to randomly grab things and randomly measure. I'm like right in the middle of the road here. I'm with Sabrina on the cutting out the "fluff", but with Melissa on the tips and tricks and like a little background to really set the scene (for both of her recipes it looked like she only had a paragraph or so explaining the context and that's fine. Love the compromise of context after the recipe! Love y'all's videos. ☺
I find the same with recipes, but I think this idea might help you if you haven't already thought of it: the ones I like the most, I like to print them out and then I can write my variations on them in pen or pencil. I've got a few recipes where I've altered the level of garlic or tomato soup or some other thing like that, or else if the recipe calls for a clove of garlic, I've written down the equivalent measure of powdered garlic, which keeps much better on my shelf. Also, congrats on teaching yourself to cook. It can be really intimidating, and I know a few people who didn't feel they learned much cooking as a kid and were too scared to try so far as adults. I hope you have much success.
If I'm a parent, who is hungry, with two children who are also hungry and it's 5:30 pm I'm not going to carefully parse through paragraphs of a diary entry and what feels like an infinite amount of ads that all seem to be videos to cook a recipe. I'm tired and hungry and need to feed folks before 7pm. Give. Me. The. Recipe. This. Is. Annoying.
gotta fundamentally disagree with the argument of "if you go to a recipe *blog* you cannot be upset when someone talks about their vacation" I clicked it because it was the top result on a search engine for the recipe I was searching for and all the keyword stuffing on that page pushed a bunch of blogs into my recipe search. that's it that's my nitpick otherwise this really good insight into how that happens
I completely agree. They know they're doing SEO to push their page to the top of results, but the content isn't actually what someone making that search wants to find. You shouldn't get a good page rank if the post is entirely irrelevant.
It's like saying "if you pick up a fiction book, you can't complain that it tells a story instead of facts" when you asked the librarian for books about dinosaur anatomy and they bring back fairy tales about dinosaurs instead of books that talk about dinosaur anatomy. If I could filter out food blogs and just see recipe pages, problem solved. But if I want a recipe for soda bread, I'm practically forced to sift through autobiographies before I can get to the recipe and that's rightfully annoying
@@generalcodsworth4417 Just to continue the analogy, I feel like in this case you blame the librarian no? It’s not the writer’s fault that their fairy tale about dinosaurs with some fun facts about anatomy sprinkled in is what the librarian decided to give. The book is what it is advertised to be, a food blog. Being annoyed that food blogs get pushed by search engines when you actually want plain recipes is understandable, but that is a SEO problem intrinsically
@@Zalda_ The blogs are using SEO optimization to show up in searches for recipes, because they wouldn't make nearly as much money if they were realistically advertised as personal story blogs. So in the analogy, the book publishers are telling the library that they are dinosaur anatomy books. Should the librarian be better at checking? Sure. But the publishers also know exactly what they're doing when taking advantage of the stupidity of the librarian.
10:30 onwards feels like the weirdest red herring that don't address the complaint of many people actually just wanting the actual recipie because that's all they need. Saying effectively "Some tips buried in the SEO slop will help people who don't know how to cook" is....baffling. Nobody wants important info left out of a recipe. The problem is that important info, including the recipe itself is berried in a massive page. You showed one of them. It was unreadable.
This is the first video i felt iffy on. We're not saying don't include a bit of your past, but it isn't IMPORTANT to how to MAKE the recipe. The tips and tricks? IMPORTANT. i don't understand how the original point sabrina had got so lost in translation. Sabrina also never advocated for vague recipes. No one does!
Sometimes those tips are like, "If your onions are browning a little too fast, you may want to add extra oil." How fast is too fast? How much extra oil? How do you even know this tip is for you? This would be a bad inclusion in the formal recipe because of those questions. I've seen pages with "tips and tricks" sections at the bottom where that could go, but you can't really include too many of them in a section like that, so it's not necessarily good to do those either, but they can help. I can also see the background info including variations could be really helpful too. These aren't necessarily all going to fit in the printable recipe, and they're not going to be valuable to every cook, but for some, they are. Also, Melissa is talking about tips and tricks here, but I also think if someone is in the mood for a whole experience, they may like to imagine this family eating this meal in some other place, at some other time. That does have value for some people. (Also, if you particularly hate an ingredient, like I do with one, you can sometimes tell from the writing that this person really likes that thing, and you can know to avoid their recipes.)
14:50 It feels disingenuous to claim that the life story will improve how you cook the food. That simply isn't the case, if there is something in the story that actually impacts how you prepare the meal it's an INSTRUCTION and should be found... in the instructions. It's fine for instructions to include things other than "put flour in the bowl" or "stir it" - they can be more complicated like "add flour until the dough isn't sticky anymore." I don't need to know about that one time as a kid when your mom made this and the dough was sticking to your hands and she told you that is because there isn't enough flour in it yet. Just explain the relevant part, leave out the story. Nobody is saying that a recipe shouldn't include information about how to perform the steps or why it's done. But it shouldn't include information that doesn't help you make the food.
These food writers complaints about not getting the specific instructions for a "pinch" or "chunk" from the instructions section, just says they don't know how to provide INSTRUCTIONS! If my math teacher gave me that level of explanation of algebra, I wouldn't know how to do it.
And it can matter a ton depending on the recipe. Yeah sometimes that extra pinch of salt is negligible. But other times even that little bit extra makes a huge difference. I get annoyed when I ask my mom for recipes and it's all a pinch of this and dash of that and then it turns out disgusting because nothing is actually measured. If there's at least a video then you can see what THEY consider a pinch or a dash or whatever.
I can understand complaining about "chunks" but for "pinch" essentially assume add to taste. Legitimately if the recipe has written "pinch" the actual quantity doesn't matter much
I've always felt like if a prominent "Skip to recipe" was standard, or the "Backstory" and "Recipe" sections were in collapsible foldouts, there would be far less to worry about. There's merit to the monologue, but sometimes you just want a recipe, and neither is right or wrong
All the tips and tricks should be included in the recipe and should not be hidden in a novel. The recipe should be written, like with any instructions, with the mindset that the reader has never done any of it before. So they need to be clear and precise. Proper measurements need to be included too. I get that in professional settings, quantities vary because there are things the chef knows about what needs adjustment, but these recipes should be for people that don't know. And once someone has made the dish a few times they will then start knowing what needs adjustments and can play around with the quantities themselves The long format instructions shouldn't deviate from the shortened bullet point ones either. Like changing the order an ingredient goes in as you have already started cooking. And a little background on the dish is appreciated, but so many online recipes contain completely useless and irrelevant ramblings that have nothing to do with the dish.
Tips and tricks may or may not be relevant depending on your ability and knowledge. Also, some things don't make sense in either ingredients or instructions. For example, common errors. Stuff like "if it looks like X, it was probably Y" needs to be separate
Sorry, but the only thing I took away from this video is that recipe writers are incredibly defensive when called out over the fact that they don't understand why people look up recipes. Put up a list of ingredients with exact measurements, nothing ambiguous and describe the steps of how to prepare the food. Your "tips" are the things you compile under "techniques", things you can apply in various situations to prepare various foods in a similar manner. Then you write that down once and link to it whenever applicable. You're on the world wide web, use the most fundamental aspect of it, hyperlinks!
That was my reaction too, awful seeing people defend what is essentially an exercise in wasting people's time, because at that point they've already admitted that the viewer doesn't want to see the background. It's people defending crappy industry practices.
this was what i got too, all their points were weird ways of phrasing "I'm bad at writing recipes so I'll blame you if you can't follow my ramble" ... what ?!
the thing is, most recipe websites aren't representative of the bloggers Melissa brought in to interview. most of them have stolen recipes and AI padding slop. when reading a recipe made by an actual human, you'll usually find that the preceding text is no longer than two paragraphs, sometimes down to a sentence, then the insights are within the body text of the instructions. you don't need a 900-word text before each recipe for it to be meaningful and human. that's only done to pad the website for ads.
The actual issue Sabrina's Website fixed was never actually addressed in the video. It is definitely important have the extra information of technique and culture, and I want the hard working chefs to get paid. But in an effort to monetize on the Chef's hard work, they create a genuinely BAD user experience. There has to be a better way than blasting you with so many adds you can't even scroll the screen down on your phone.
This glossed over ad sales. That's the reason I'm scrolling past 1000 words on their genealogy or world travels. Also the reason "jump to the recipe" literally scrolls down the page past the ads. Recipe writers and bloggers need to get paid but also the current status quo is extreme.
So the reason why I would want a recipe cleaner is because during the week, I have little time to myself, I just want to make the food, eat, watch my UA-cam videos while I eat, and then do shit that I actually want to do afterwards. If it's the weekend and I have nothing to do, I'll read the blog, If I don't have that much time I'm not reading all that.
I barely started the video but that’s what I absolutely hate about english internet recipes. You have to scroll through all that text to finally get to even see the ingredients. You can also click a barely visible button to jump to the recipe but it’s always so annoying. I’m from Poland and if polish internet recipes even have an introduction it’s very brief. You literally just scroll once and you’re there. Hopefully the video at least explains why it happens
You also don't really want to be clicking buttons because it could be an ad, I think I've basically trained myself not to see ads, which might explain why I've never seen one of those buttons 😅
Yeah that website isn't really a valid argument against the annoyance with recipe websites. The annoying ones have many obnoxious ads, and are entire novels worth of irrelevant search engine optimisation and self exposition. I will admit I never read the fluff prior to websites, I always scroll past it.
@@op4000exe The classic SEO chocolate chip cookie recipe, My grandma made the Best Chocolate Chip Cookies because she just loved finding Chocolate Chip Cookie recipes and trying out any of the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe she could find. I value that she found the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe and would always make it for me during holidays, birthdays, graduation, any time I needed the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.
Mike Rugnetta calls the tiny amount of text you get between ads on mobile websites "the content slit." If I'm making something off of a recipe website, I do not want to peer through the content slit.
I think recipe writers are being defensive to the reaction that most people don't give a crap about what they write, most people just want the recipe. They seem to believe a blog entry will ADD to people's experience, and maybe it could if that's what people were looking for, but frankly, it isn't. People want to make good food for themselves, not read about the journey to make it, or where it came from. Literally doesn't matter to most people. Certainly doesn't to me. There's a place for all that, but IMO what you're writing isn't a recipe, it's a blog with a recipe in it, and I'm not here for a blog.
Agreed! Imagine reading just about any other instructional manual written the way food blogs are written and trying to follow it ... 🤣 Sure, write about the recipe to sell the concept of it, sell the expectation with a (yes, singular) good photo, but keep the instructions in the instructions and keep them concise.
I think we live in a time when people believe that their life story has some intrinsic value. They’ve been told they’re special, so obviously everyone wants to hear about their dog, their favorite color, and every other mundane detail before they get down to the business of cooking. They forget that we’re not friends hanging out and cooking together. I came looking for a recipe, and the recipe is the only thing of value in this transaction. The rest is just pointless fluff, and I care just as much about the author’s life story as they do about mine.
@@kenrickman6697 now there's an idea. leave comments (if the site has them) with your life story, ending with why that is relevant to how much you enjoyed the recipe. Maybe they'll get the point. :p
Yep, if genuinely important aspects of the recipe or preparation process are buried in a multi-paragraph blurb, you've simply written your recipe incorrectly.
Yeah a few short paragraphs or one long paragraph is all I have patience for. Anything more than that and it’s overkill. If I scroll for more than 2 seconds and I’m not at the recipe yet that shit sucks
Nah, I also don’t care what story led to you having this recipe. I’d rather the story was a box with a “read more” button. If you can’t get everything you need from the ingredients, it was made poorly. I’ve gone through plenty with the tips and tricks being in parentheses in the instructions. Ingredient lists with an optional section.
My ideal recipe blog post has a few quick facts at the top: number of portions, prep/cook time, how well it reheats. Then one paragraph about the dish, a link to further information (e.g. the long post with the backstory, or a video, or a relevant book or restaurant) then the utensils (very important and not something that even most cookbooks do) and ingredients lists, including substitution ideas, then the steps, then a list of notes about potential mistakes. So.... I'm arguing for the middle ground.
And the best part of my ideal is that the blog author can link to a longer blog post about the dish that links back to the recipe and that boosts their placement in the search algorithms
All the people trying to get others to cook: "It's super easy, just follow a recipe, anyone can do it!" This video: "It's super elitist actually, you'll only ever ACTUALLY know how to cook through YEARS of experience and dedication, you can't cook unless you know that my grandmother in Cambodia used 3 fist fulls of canolli in her super special wonder dish, and you won't know what a fist full is unless you read my blog!" (I make this as a joke, this video actually makes some good points and I do think the compromise at the end would be a good one, but I just found the dichotomy amusing)
I have never read the extra fluff on a recipe and they always turn out great. As long as the recipe calls for actual cooking terms like, dice the onion or finely grated ginger. The point of recipes for me is a starting off point to make a dish then add/remove what you want. I found a great jambalaya recipe but when we got to the seasoning portion it didn't call for nearly enough chili powder and now my mealie recipe tracker has that extra chili powder in my version of the recipe. No notes, no long explanation about how I spent a Saturday afternoon looking for something to make with okra, just a list of ingredients and the instructions is all that is needed.
On one hand: This video did a great job of changing my mind that there is value in the blurbs that come before the recipe. On the other hand: When that blurb is actually 10 paragraphs where each paragraph is separated by a image as wide as the main column and an ad, yeah no, screw that, give me the recipe, lol. EDIT: Holy crap, I just randomly searched for jambalaya recipes to try an experiment to average how many scrolls it took me to reach the recipe, and I've thrown that out in favor of one very clear complaint: Why are so many of these images taking up almost all the vertical height of my monitor?! An image alone shouldn't add an entire scroll to the count!
I fully agree with the points in this video! Especially the food it looks delicious lol. However, I will say that to me the issue isn’t the fact that the ads are there, but rather that the ads can sometimes be so intrusive that the website breaks, which makes me not want to read the blurb or try out the recipe.
@ oh i use ad-blockers galore. But ultimately the primary place I look for recipes is on my phone, which I’m assuming is how most people are also looking for recipes. If you know a great mobile ad-blocker that doesn’t also want an insane subscription fee, please share.
Because people use adblockers (looking at you ^^) and webpage ads pay so little, it's the only way I make it sustainable and free. If they weren't as annoying, they wouldn't pay as much, and the website wouldn't be up at all
Brave browser is built around an ad blocker, and Kiwi supports desktop browser extensions. Brave I hesitate to recommend these days because you have to turn off half a dozen things they've added to try monetizing the project, but once those items are turned off it's a great experience.
I know the reality of why the the sites want to keep you there for ads revenue. But the food writers they interviewed I think have a very insular view of the role of food in people lives. For them it`s culture and history and passion and their whole lives. For most people though food is "Lasagna yummy! I´d like to eat a Lasagna and I have an hour to make that happen before I need to return to my life!" Most people aren`t looking for a culinary and cultural food journey in their daily lives.
Also I dont' need your story, author, if I already have my own. Like a few weeks ago I wanted to try my hand making a kind of cake that I used to eat all the time when I was living in east Texas in my early 20s. I went to look up a recipe for it and every single result hand paragraph after paragraph accompanying the recipe that I had to dig through before I could even find out which type of cake it was (since there are two end results for it which are pretty different but have the same name)
yes indeed! While most will probably agree on, that eating itself can be really nice, many if these people won't agree on the act of cooking is. Like, some people may enjoy programming a custom website with handcrafted database access. Others are just happy that certain special websites exists, and use them Or setting up and configuring gameservers, while others just want to play with friends on a server. Or reparing old, broken devices.. the list goes on
If a person has as little time as you say they wouldn’t be looking at a recipe to cook a lasagna from scratch At that point they would just heat up a store bought frozen stouffer’s lasagna that only takes an hour to heat up
The "experts" are demonstrably wrong. If a recipe for grilled cheese isn't just 5 lines, one of which the title "recipe for grilled cheese", then it is an utterly untrustworthy recipe. I don't need your 10 paragraph diatribe on the Rwandan Genocide to get an air fryer time and temp for Italian sausage. Those "experts" are the problem
One of the experts in this video is Internet Shaquille. When I pull up his salmon video the first 3 seconds tell you "275 until it reads 120. When you come back this is what you'll need". Honestly, I don't think that the 'experts' are wrong themselves, they would probably agree that most recipe blog design is terrible. I think the video is just using their thoughts on added value to understanding cooking fundamentals to justify the bad design that exists for other reasons.
I'm with Sabrina on this one.. I'm a home cook and studied a bit of cooking, but I'm mainly a developer, and all I have to say is: if you need context, tips and tricks, then the recipe is not correctly written. You can let go of the recipe when you know the recipe as the back of your hand. You have done it SO MANY TIMES that you no longer think about measuring, you can see the proper amount. And it is then that you can modify the recipe to make it your own. But (yes, there is a but), one point is made in the video, someone needs to be paid if you make a website. That is the only point I agree with having ads (though annoying). Other than that, if I want the history, the background, and the context of why the recipe exists, I rather watch cooking shows.
There's a weird arrogance of recipe writers thinking their personal family history is interesting to anyone else, or will have any significance to their cooking.
As someone who just started to learn how to cook in the last year, I can confirm, that the tips and photos buried in all the other stuff up top CAN be helpful. That said, when the post is so long, the pictures are so numerous, the tips & tricks section is there, the recommended other recipes are there, AND there's ads spliced throughout, a lot of the blogs become nearly unusable. I have an ad blocker and even still I have to simply give up on the site. I agree bloggers need to make money, there just needs to be a better way. Because you aren't going to make money if I simply cannot use the site.
My reason for not enjoying the "tips and tricks" is that I approach recipes much like I do home cooking - at 14:00 Frankie and Joanne mention grabbing things, and throwing things into a wok -- that's how a lot of people use recipes as well - grab 4-5-6 different recipes for the same thing, pick out the parts they like better and make something different. Having the tips and tricks in that case feels like a disorganized home kitchen - you need to go through a ton of pots and pans to get to the spices you want to throw in the wok.
I hope 'they' reply with, "Cookbooks are free at your local library" because cookbooks are a GREAT way to learn about cooking! No ads! True, they're expensive, but they're free at from the library. fr, it's one of my favorite hobbies, reading cookbooks and never making anything from them lol
I don't usually write comments before I finish the video in case my thought or question gets mentioned and discussed later on, but I can't wait for that. I think Melissa missed the point of what Sabrina is proposing and why she and Taha think it's a good idea. Sabrina is proposing a TOOL that is OPTIONAL TO USE for those that just want to skip straight to the recipe. When I look up recipes, I'm either a) really hungry or b) planning ahead. I don't stop to read the story behind the recipe because it will not help me achieve my goal of finding something I can make later (or immediately in the case of situation "a") and I'm normally not interested in reading that wall of text. I don't think Sabrina and Taha are saying the fluff piece, story, explanation of the food, etc. should be eliminated (Edit: I was partially wrong). I think they just want to create a tool that ppl like me would find extremely useful. If ppl want to read the wall of text that comes before a recipe, then they can totally do that and not use the tool (recipe cleaner website). The tool is there if you want to use it, not to force others into a certain way of thinking. Edit: The compromise to put the background/story after the recipe is a great one. Personally, I think understanding where food came from and hearing how it relates to a person and their culture is cool. But in the narrow context of recipe searching, I do not care. It be different if I was cooking with a friend and they had a story related to the food we were making, for example.
I think the recipe writers who adds alot of this stuff is misunderstanding the purpose of a recipe. It is a much more utilitarian medium is the vast majority of people.
@@beefymcskillet5601 If they do that, nobody wants to pay for "below the fold" ad spots. Melissa doesn't seem to understand that for most recipe sites, they really are trying to pad for ad space, and weave the recipe into the rest of the BS just to make it so you HAVE to scroll. Pay-per-impression ads know if they've been seen.
I would absolutely love to see someone butcher a whole chicken for the first time with only the instructions found in a recipe that was written for SEO, like almost every recipe online is.
For food preparation like that I would say a recipe is not useful. Even the extra fluff isn't going to get you the details needed for how to prepare things properly. But once you learn how to quarter a chicken, dice an onion, mince some garlic then the recipes that call for 1 diced onion and a whole quartered chicken make a lot more sense. Like if I need to learn how to julienne a carrot properly, I'm not going to the recipe fluff, I'm finding a youtube video to watch the technique.
The thing is, if you're a first timer in butchering a chicken. Regardless of the layout and content of the recipe, you're not gonna do it perfectly. It is a skill you gained through time
That truce at the end is the best part, and I agree with the spirit of it. Give me a short paragraph with a "read below for tips, tricks, and recipe development background", and maybe a picture of what the final dish is supposed to look like, and then the recipe. I promise that over 85% of the time, I'll read all that other stuff...AFTER I've determined that I have all the ingredients I need, don't need to go to the grocery store first, and my slow-ass oven is pre-heating to the temperature it needs to be at.
My usual gripe with annoying recipe websites stems down to the usability of the website goes down the drain super hard when I can barely touch the screen to scroll because new adds keeps popping up in places, moving text around or jumping to different places on the page. I love to learn where food comes from, and I do research that regulary without even looking at specific recipes, but if I am looking up recipes and many of them are actively wasting my time in almost predatory adds and making their sites really hard to use - then I stop caring for their story and how they got their recipe. If I don't find your recipe page easy to read, comfortable to use, then I will just close it down almost immediatly
I still wish the website existed. Nothing is stopping me from reading the blurb but then having a clean place to read the recipe without ads everywhere.
This video title is spot on ! I’ve been asking myself why do online recipes look so elaborate (some ingredients are very optional in there) and a tad overcomplicated. My theory : probably the recipe looks nicer that way ? Another group of people would be annoyed if a very easy recipe was posted. Will come back to watch your video later to see your explanations !
real reason is the ads. recipe blogs are infested by ads. just google any dish + recipe and you'll find everything that makes it to the top of the google search has 10+ ads. sometimes even 20+ ads. just on one page. the excruciatingly long backstories are space to fill with seo terms and every pararaph break is space for an ad.
Learning to make a new dish and learning the history and inspiration for that dish are two different things. When I’m doing one of those, I just don’t care about the other.
The people were definitely trying to guilt trip you into reading their articles before the recipe. If I wanted to read anything except the recipe, I would. Don't try and act like your copied-copied-copied recipe deserves to be preceded by your expensive honeymoon story while also your story is God's gift.
So, while I like the idea of this video, this blurred the line between an actual interesting video, and just an ad for hostinger. It was borderline violating fcc guidelines for advertising. An absolute disappointment from a group I’ve really come to respect.
I actually agree with Sabrina here, because these kind of back story paragraphs don't exist in my country. We just have the ingredients and the instructions on the website and I would be very upset if some kind of this just appeared in front of every recipe I'm trying to make. And we do have measurements like stew size, but you just have to figure it out yourself.
The guests not only complain about people not reading their pre-recipe story, but also that writing recipes is SOOO difficult because of their *expertise*. OK, don't measure it out exactly then - give me units to convert, give me ratios, give me steps to find out when enough is good. Or, since they are experts, they should be able to estimate, measure their estimate, then stick with it. A pinch of salt for you, recipe writer, is consistently 56g per 3 cup water. SAY SO! You need a pinch of this (30g), a pinch of that (3g), maybe you should figure out a better way to explain!
I also find most cooking blogs unreadable but Melissa made very strong points. I guess it’s a matter of finding GOOD cooking blogs. And for creators to keep website usability in mind. I’ve fallen back on vintage books I find them more enjoyable and user friendly.
Same. If I don't have a recipe I might use an online one as a starting point but if I plan on reusing it I write my own version with variations to make it work for me in keep notes. A lot of online recipes are just bad even if you can read them through all the ads.
You hit one of my grinds my gears with this. I absolutely cannot stand reading garbage (usually slop strewn out to get as many spots for ads). I started cooking every meal at home a few years ago and my biggest complaint about becoming a better cook is having to read a story every time I just want to know how to make a meatloaf. If I'm trying to cook I'm not in the mood to read about someone's life story I'm in the mood to see clearly defined instructions and ingredients list. If instructions are complete then a story is not needed. If you need to tell me a story to tell me how big to cut my potatoes then I think the problem lies with the recipe writer. I don't mind ads. I would love a compromise that cleans the story but still displays their ads because they do deserve compensation I just don't want to read about their life story for them to get it. Come on Sabrina.. Make me an extension!
I'm heavily split on this. I do think artists absolutely deserve to make money and have credit for there work - and chefs are absolutely artists. But from a consumer perspective, when you pay for a service (and I believe consuming advertisement ABSOLUTELY counts as payment in this case), you do it with the expectation of a certain experience. If you go to a nice restaurant, and they serve you absolutely terrible food, or you have a truly awful experience, they will not make you pay for it, because that's NOT what you were paying for. We don't have that option online, we've already paid by the time we access the recipe. We can't know if it's any good BEFORE we make it. Complicating the matter EVEN FURTHER: As acknowledged towards the end of the video, skill of the individual person making the food is a HUGE factor. This makes it truly difficult to judge the recipe. Even with the tips, the person using it can seriously struggle. I really think that a well-written recipe takes into account the potential skill level of the person reading it. It feels like an experiment in communication - part of which is on the recipe writer, part of which is on the recipe reader. But I honestly don't know whose part is larger.
The skill level thing is so true. Online recipes can’t really teach you how to cook if you don’t know the basics. But for people who have a lot of experience, reading through basic cooking information is a waste of time. It would make way more sense to have that after the instructions (though having a blurb and stuff before the recipe is fine imo)
This is exactly why I’m limiting my online recipes to only a few trusted sources with a reliable track record of having tasty food. Websites like serious eats, NYT cooking, bon appetit, thewoksoflife, Epicurious etc are most of the only ones I go to now for recipes because they are done by professional chefs with years of experience cooking food. I only trust primarily online websites when they have a bunch of comments from people giving tips on how to make the recipe better, or I’ve cooked a bunch from and they’ve all been tasty/given me no problems. But yeah once I made a recipe from a website with zero reviews on it and it tasted horrible and I’ve never looked back since. Not gonna trust any random Blog anymore
We can argue that the problem is how things are currently done. The recipe writers and cooks are trying to make a living doing what they love while us consumers are reaching out with a certain expectation (within reasons). The way the system has morphed into [the growing dependence on ads, popular search engines putting out sponsored ads first and results that may not even be relevant, the overall difficulty of finding (accurate and factual) information now a days] makes it unnecessarily harder for the recipe writers/bloggers/chefs and the consumer. We're both trying to do our thing, but the internet now feels unfriendly towards its users in different ways.
@Ashley-xu1lk and if you add onto that the web browser companies that are unable to handle the sheer amount of data from all the ads on that webpage too. Maybe they need to make their web browsers able to withstand all that data without the average persons computer crashing
I like how they all gave some flowery excuse as to why the blog actually brings value... and then at the end, they just go "We need it for SEO and ad revenue, deal with it". Lmao ok. I block ads and just scroll straight down anyways.
It is at least true that recipes alone cannot be copyrighted. So if you see a good recipe, you can just post it by itself anywhere. If a bot copies the recipe and also the fluff, then the original owner could get the copy taken down. I must admit, I have not ever heard of such a take down. Might be a remnant of when people bought expensive cook books, that behaviour makes more sense when there is actual money in it.
Internet myth---people speculating about this very topic, probably, and through a game of internet telephone, turned into a fact. Happens a lot now that I think about it.
It's probably also about how you see cooking as an activity. For example, I can drive a car, and I like that a car can bring me from point A to point B, but I don't particularly enjoy or dislike actually driving the car. If I could get from point A to point B without driving, I'd shrug and say, "sure, why not?". Conversely, I know a lot of people who actually find pleasure in driving: for them, getting in the car and going on a nice drive is a rewarding activity in itself. For me this is what cooking is like. I can cook at an amateur level, quite well I'd say, but for me cooking is because I want to eat a delicious meal, save money, and maybe the social aspect of cooking collaboratively. I don't really cook for the joy of cooking itself, and want my recipes straightforward with minimal frills. Also, a thing that I think was under-addressed in this video is that many recipes you can find online just aren't very good or very unique. There are really mathematically only so many ways you can assemble the ingredients of an oatmeal-chocolate-chip-cookie, and while ten-thousand home cooks can all put their unique twist or spin on the idea, they haven't ""earned"" enough respect from me to make me do something that I don't want to do (read through their life story starting). Often these recipe writers are cooks who are barely better or even worse at the thing than I am, and I find myself asking "who are you, to tell me xyz?". Of course, this is difficult with a recipe written by an actual professional. When I lug out the big physical cookbook in my kitchen and open a page, I can be assured that having spent real money on it and that the people writing the book weren't just some "internet randos", the extra text is probably "worth" reading because I know it isn't just SEO fluff text or similar, and may actually be relevant to the recipe being presented.
The human community element is def what is missing with these recipes. The moment where Sabrina is calling the tips & tricks/background part garbage and Tasha’s is conflicted by agreeing with Sabrina while seeing Melissa’s Nana’s recipe hits it on the head. Most recipe googlers wont care abt a recipe artistry or cultural impact unless it impacts someone they care abt, friends family or themselves. The ppl googling for recipes are most likely detached from the family kitchens where you’re running around with your cousins or siblings in your house with grandparent's cooking and teaching cultural/family meals. I still don’t appreciate the background being the first thing I see when I look for a recipe but maybe if I see it at the end of the page instead of in the way of my goal I’ll be more inclined to share the recipe’s story with those I am most likely sharing the meal with.
we need such cleaner for every damn page now! Cookies, pop-ups, subscribe, discount, automatically video playing, advertisement, audio-noise… I'm going crazy, I just need my information, just answer on my question! I really think it's a huge problem now with everything online. Note * placing ads for being paid at the recipe page or UA-cam channel - I understand, I agree. Photos for each cooking step is extremely useful; if in instruction written “prepare a chicken” and then next step “fry it in the pan”, it's actually not a tip how prepare a chicken, but a part of the instruction. But when on pages everything jumping at you or starts telling “full history of the potato” before giving a recipe, I see it as an issue.
As a journalist, brevity and getting to the point are critical. As an IT guy, I hate seeing ads, fluff and poor formatting keeping me from the details I need. I'm all for Sabrina's tool. Nobody says people - or AI - can't create the websites, no matter how unpopular, but I don't want to spend 20 minutes in the supermarket trying to find a list of ingredients. At that point, I'll ignore your recipe and move on to someone else's.
This is a masterclass of fallacies. It's cute how you tried to use arguments to justify the real reason why recipes are long: SEO. If your customers are majorly telling you that the reading is unnecessary, guess what - it is unnecessary
Yeah no, ketchup. I checked a few of the recipes that I cooked in the past days and all the stories are irrelevant. If tips are necessary, write them in the instructions (they actually did it like that). All the content above was total nonsense SEO garbage that I’m happy to now know about was totally worth skipping.
To me the worst crime is the cook times. I just cooked drumsticks in the air fryer and the recipe said cook fir 14minutes. At 14 they were still bloody. Cook times are always so off they might as well not give them.
Sometimes there's useful/interesting stuff in the yappin'. A recipe cleaner that throws all mention of "cups" into the nearest sea and replaces it with actually comprehensible units would be really neat tho. Doesn't even matter if it's metric or imperial. Weight measures > Volume measures.
For the majority of recipes, weight measures are really not any better. They’re often more inaccessible because many people don’t have a kitchen scale. A cup of water is going to weigh about the same amount as another cup of water. It’s very very rarely so precise that it matters. You can always just not use recipes in the imperial system
@@alexreid1173 A scale is like 10€ here... it's literally cheaper to buy a scale than a cup, a tea spoon, a table spoon and whatever other object a recipe mentions
I can see both sides of the argument. The stories and ads are annoying, but also really important to the person who wrote it. My family has a generational cookbook which has recipes and pages with stories/pictures from the family farm, and I can appreciate both the straight ingredients/instructions on one side and the story on the other.
I was drawn by the question and possible solutions but then there was so much fluff about the girl making her own recipe blog and ads i had to skip past in an effort to get to the solution....wait, is this video being visual version of the recipe blogs themselves 😂😂 Well done
The real pro tip of this video: Sabrina should consider swim goggles as proper PPE for cutting onions. Onion crying is caused by vapors released by the onions when you cut them, but swim goggles are airtight and so they keep the onion vapors out of your eyes and you don't cry.
I kinda want to write a really long comment... But ain't nobody got time for that. I just need my recipe. I don't want to hear about nana, and there are hardly ever any real tips. What's the link to that website you made?
I absolutely enjoyed this video. So well-done. I really liked that it started as if it was going to be a Sabrina video and then pivoted into a Melissa video. And, I really liked the video it turned out to be. I also enjoy reading cookbooks for the stories about the food as much as I enjoy making and eating the food. So, I'm with you on the importance of the story and the added info that go along with the recipes I look up online. I look forward to diving into Third Culture Kitchen now.
Online cooking websites be like “… so I had to die, track down this grandma from 58 years ago, beat her in a 2-of-3 Chess/Wrestling/Drawing contest, find Beetlejuice to bring be back, and here we are!”
That compromise is fine. I still disagree with all the fluff. From what I've seen here, and what I experience myself, a history might improve an understanding and appreciation of a dish, but cooking it is a separate endeavour. Having pictures to go along with the instructions is the only thing that could have helped identify the spices here, and no one was complaining about those. Also the "I deserve to be paid" angle: shush. People have and do share recipes they like for free al the time. Recipes cannot be copyrighted for a reason, and adding creative writing to go around that just rubs me the wrong way. There really ought to be a self-hosted wiki for that.
Copy Me That is a pretty useful browser extension that will just save a copy of the recipe and none of the garbage around it. Honestly the "contextual information" is now mostly AI generated slop designed to create more ad space.
the shark-tank/debate format of this video is so funny. sabrina's face at the 9:02 segment had me dead lmaooo. also not the exposé of sabrina's different youtube eras while she was being quoted -- the editing on that had me rolling. 🤣9:46 is so real. more of the 3 of yall together on video 2025 please! i think this was a rly fun and interesting video. while i don't think i necessarily learned entirely new information -- unfortunately, ads is how these food bloggers get paid, so of course they've gotta vamp for pages to get us to stay on their website for longer, even when all we really wanted was a simple recipe... -- but, i think the way that this was presented was really unique (love the interviewees' input interspersed throughout the video!!) and engaging. also melissa's food blog is so cool!!! i will definitely be trying some of her nana's recipes. 🥺Loved ending segment of sabrina trying to make the curry, and melissa having to jump in LOL. not only was it an entertaining (and also heartwarming) bit, but it also illustrated the nuances of cooking that a simple recipe card can't always fit. at the end of the day, cooking isn't just a science, it's an art, too.
The story is the copy writable part. A recipe by itself isn't copywritable; that's why resturants and companies have "secret ingredients" and trade secrets. If you managed to figure out the recipe you can just post it and it's out there. The issue is then if someone steals the recipe and posts it on their own blog with no changes, you can't tell them they can't because it's just ingredients and instructions. The story and fluff means that if someone copies your posts including the fluff that then you can file a takedown and get it removed.
Be sure to check out the talented food writers and video producers we interviewed for this video - their links are in the description!
But the real questions is: did Melissa convince you to stop finding online recipes so annoying? Let us know :)
I think I'm already subbed to TheKoreanVegan.
I've read all the backgrounds first on Third Culture Kitchen. Recipe layout is superior. Will wait until autumn to make the recipes, pretty warm here at 40.35°S at the moment.
She absolutely didn't, because it is annoying for anyone that is prioritizing trying to find ideas for things they can make, which is the majority of people. Yeah, writing is hard. Making good recipes is hard. Yes, you deserve recognition for doing either, but expecting the same people that just want to find a good recipe to care in that moment about the full experience of coming up with the recipe is...not realistic. If you had to listen to the life story of every construction worker that worked on the road you want to drive on, you'd wear ear plugs. Same goes here.
She definitely didn't. However, this video did succeed in alerting me to the existence of my new favorite thing: recipe cleaners. Thank you for that!
Check out Luke Smith's based cooking. He was tired of this very same issue, so recipes are only ingredients and directions. The picture has to be a real picture of the thing you made, and that's it, no trackers, no ads, etc. His video was posted 3 years ago.
I understand the value in the story. At the same time, I cannot absorb everyone’s story for every meal! Having the option to read AFTER the recipe would be amazing. Having the recipe to start would make me revisit the site more, so I’m not jumbling through tech issues with my phone blowing up as i scroll to find what I would need to make it
I agree 100%. I don’t mind a little context and history behind the recipe, but anything more than a paragraph is just over the top.
Then you add the 50+ website breaking ads and pop up banners and you get the people visiting your website annoyed as hell when they just want the damn recipe with maybe a smidge of context
Or during! If the recipe has me watching the pot for 15 minutes to be there when something happens or lightly stirring, that's the perfect point to give me something to ready that is related the recipe. I am, however, not going to scroll back up and lose my place to ready that info.
@@ArtofcarissaThe ads are the true purpose of this structure. By pushing the recipe down the page you have to scroll through more ads, generating more income. Also SEO but that could probably work if the recipe was first.
Having a recipe cleaner doesn’t stop people who want to read those parts of the recipe from reading them. It does give those that of us that just want to get to the recipe the opportunity to avoid having to sift through a lot of stuff that we don’t want to look at to get to what we’re looking for. Not to mention the web design of a lot of these recipes is just horrible. Weird boxes all over the place ads stuffed in here and there, it’s visually torturous and just not conducive to enjoying anything.
There's always the Jump to Recipe button!
A lot of them have skip to the recipe buttons now which is very nice but makes you wonder why its not at the top to begin with
So they can serve you the ads
Ads! Same reason google started to suck more and more at finding stuff! The sites make money through ads and the metric by which others are willing to pay for ads is how long people stay on your site and scroll through.
So these google result pages are literally designed to be cumbersome and confusing so you stay and scroll longer. it`s not a bug it`s an intentional design feature 🤷♂
The button doesn't work half the time for me 😂 I'm grateful for the ones that do though
Because the other stuff generates the revenue to pay for the recipe you get for free. If you didn't scroll past them, the recipe makers wouldn't get ad revenue and so you wouldn't get your recipe
Why would people want to make money from a thing that costs money to make? Yeah I’m stumped, it’s a mystery
The problem isn't the tips and tricks and photos and story. The problem is the tips and tricks are spliced between ads far from the relevant step of the recipe and sprinkled between bits of backstory and just a few more ads. Give me the recipe. Give me the tips when relevant. Let me cook it. Then, if I enjoy it, maybe I'll actually check out why you made it. It's not complicated, but it's also a lot harder to force you to scroll passed all of their ads
Adblock is your friend.
yeah, the problem is the websites are eye bleeding garbage. So happy for ai answers for when you forget how long to boil an egg, etc and youtube for actual cooking instructions. Written recipes can definitely go extinct imho
@@Serai3 so instead of scrolling past a lot of ads, i'll scroll past 50 blank spots. and also docking some random blogger's revenue over it.
@@durdleduc8520 actually a good blocker just makes ads disappear. No blank spots, it's more like they never existed
@@Serai3 Brave Browser works, too. Better, I'd argue. Adblock used to glitch out the page for me or cause the thing not to load without disabling it. Use it for most online websites nowadays just because it makes me forget about the adpocalypse sprawling out everywhere.
I don't know man, I transcribed most of my family recipes for my own use and included just ingredients and very light instructions. For all the baking stuff I legit just have ingredient proportions, oven temp and baking time, no other instructions because that's all I need since I've made these recipes tons of times.
It shouldn't be the job of every individually written recipe to teach you all of the fundamentals of cooking like how to dice an onion or carve a chicken. We also live in the realm of the interent where you can legit just write "carve chicken" and hyperlink to a tutorial that covers that for those who don't know how but isn't intrusive to those who do.
Lastly, most of the struggles Sabrina was having with Melissa's recipe wasn't because of the missing historical context, but it was because the ingredients weren't labled and the measurments weren't standard (instead of pinch of salt, either say salt to taste or 1 tsp, instead of stewing chunk write 1 in chunks). If the individual "tips and tricks" part are essential for the result (like blooming the spices or soaking the rice), they should be included in the instructions. That's the whole point of the instructions.
I think most of the commenteres here agree that we don't want these recipe writers to not get paid, and we don't want to lose the cultural significance of these recipes, but we should definitely have the ingredients, measurements and core instructions at the top.
Yeah if you know how to cook, you can pretty much look at the ingredients and figure it out
And yet, when I Google how to “fold in the cheese”, I get a very unhelpful Canadian television show.
Fold in the cheese..in what???
yesyeswonderfulWHEREISTHERECIPECLEANER
I just tried to look up a recipe on a website without an ad blocker and my browser almost crashed. I don't have a problem with putting ads on sites, I get making money is needed, but when there is one every paragraph, that's excessive.
Yeah if they’re adding so many ads that your website browser crashes and can’t handle it, they’re taking it waaaay overboard
Unfortunately, website ad revenue is garbage these days, so the amount they're putting is probably the minimum feasible amount.
@ which is why a patreon or direct donate link would probably be more feasible and yield more $$$
Plus it would take up less screen space
The autoplaying videos, popups, and floating banners...I bounce out of that page immediately. Ain't worth it lol. But yeah, 99.9% of the time I have an adblocker on.
@@Artofcarissa I also have this intuition, but it's so obvious of an idea that it must not actually work out, or people would already have made that switch.
To be honest, even as a proponent of the idea I wouldn't actually sub to a recipe patreon. Would you?
They’ll tell you their entire life story and how this recipe was passed down 69.2 generations before they say you need 7 eggs
😂😂
I'll give a shit about your story after I've tasted the food and actually care.
There is a Korean place near my house that I would *happily* spend hours interviewing the head chef if I could get their recipes.
I don't give two shits about the recipe from the tea shop down the street over their 'family style, home made, traditional muffin.' Those muffins suck and I just don't care.
Keep the tips and tricks. Throw out the narrative about Nana.
I'm a massive cookery book fan, but online recipes are incredibly irritating.
The food writer suggesting that the only alternative is just writing 4 ingredients Is insane and completely makes me disregard his opinion.
A little blurb is fine. But I haven't seen a little blurb on any recipes I've searched for recently.
@@_kowono Same. I would rather pay $10 for a book rather than looking for recipes online. The blurb should be a few sentences that describe the dish. Not the writers life. I dont care at all about how this dish came to be. Thats for after ive tasted it. Tell me how long the dish takes and what i need. Those are the two most important things when looking for a recipe and shouldnt be after scrolling down a mile. These bloggers are out of touch with whats actually important.
Assuming a generational time of 20 years that recipe would be from the early Middle Ages!
Recipes sites are 95% ads and bs. Soon it they all will also be 100% AI, possibly with 100% AI generated BS "family history" of the recipes.
You don't need seperate "tips and tricks" outside of the directions as they should be in the directions if they are needed. Most don't even have "tips and tricks".
It's perfectly fine to add glue and maybe three pebbles to your lasagna
AI recipe sites of the future. Probably.
definitely.
I love how this whole thing was essentially a Sabrina video and a Melissa video butting heads and having to battle it out
It's that one image where two kids are fighting and another one is eating popcorn.
@@Multibe150 the one eating popcorn is Taha (?)
"The recipe goes first, and the life story stuff goes after that" is exactly the solution I personally want. I would like to NOT have to constantly scroll down when my browser decides to reload the page mid meal prep.
Why does your browser keep doing that?
I mean, that's usually how it's set up in cookbooks or the stories are in their own separate section.
Oh, and don't forget when you're halfway scrolled through a long af paragraph, and the ads finally catch up and suddenly you're looking at an F150 and your paragraph is now one of ten super long paragraphs so you don't even know where you were, until, oh, hey, now it's a damned Chevy that popped up because I guess that other ad wasn't the only one still loading. But you can't even just sit and wait a minute for all of them to load because they'd rather wait and then pop up on you when you get to them.
I like the cultural backstory and personal backstory and I love the tips and tricks. I just don't want it to be a meter of scrolling only to then see that I don't have the ingredients I need and I have to find a different recipe. also if there's an ad between the ingredients list and the instructions I'm much much less likely to use that site again, I need those to be next to each other
So when I look up a recipe, I really don't have time to read a 20-page synopsis on how and where the recipe was invented. I just need the recipe. If I can't jump to the recipe, I click off that recipe and go to another. If it turns out to be a great dish, then I might go back and read.
The compromise here, put the story after the recipe not before it.
Especially when the reality is most of the time its there to add important keywords for search engine optimization
Yeah, I have a feeling that recipe writers, including those featured in the video, do not understand why (many) people look for a recipe.
Especially when so many times you scroll past all that bs and find, "adapted from: [actual recipe creator]" so they stole someone else's work and just 'tweaked' it with an extra dash of vanilla or reduced salt from 1/2tsp to 1/4tsp.
I would like to point out two things:
- I would absolutely trust a recipe that is just ingredients and instructions, without anything else, no styling, no link to the overarching website, nothing. That is how I prefer my internet.
- If you speak German, public broadcasters have expansive recipe libraries on the internet. Example: NDR Ratgeber Kochen. We already pay for that, so the whole "We need to make money from this" does not apply. I feel like more of culture should be like that. The revenue should be independent from the performance of individual works.
Similarly if you speak English, BBC Good Food has a ton of recipes with no blog or ads (at least within the UK - I know the BBC tends to add ads when accessing outside of the UK)
I was also confused by the idea that writing a bunch of stuff to scroll past builds credibility. Decent web design can, I guess, but a reasonably-professional looking website with just the recipe would seem incredibly legit to me, and they do exist. And even an unprofessional-looking website or a reddit post with just the recipe seems like it has potential, and if there are comments with people's positive experiences with the recipe, that would be what would build its credibility to me.
I concur. Especially if it's something simple. If I'm forgetful and can't remember how long to soft boil an egg, I don't need any additoinal information than time for each size. If I want to make a basic Tiramisu, all I need is ingredients and steps. If I want the best Tiramisu in the world, I will need additional tips, like which way to dip the ladyfingers in the coffee, maybe what coffee is the best of it, and so on, and maybe if I'm trying to make the best Tiramisu, I'm so much into it that I'm also interested in reading about its history and how the author came up with this specific way of making it, I'll happily read it. But if I'm making the simple version, that probably means I want something easy, fast and perhaps I'm not that interested in diving deep into the lore of it, and certainly not at the very moment when I'm trying to read the instructions to know if I have all the ingredients and kitchen equipment
Not only culture. Imagine a world in which the provision of housing is a communal task and not something you can make a profit from. Or the provision of an internet connection.
I wonder how much is cultural. I'm Polish in Australia, Polish are to the point, Australians beat around the bush until the leaves fall off and get mad that you didn't guess the point that they never specifcally said.
It's ... confusing. But my guess is that they prefer the rambly recipe, and will trust it more.
I will not.
Why is your recipe so bad that you need to CONVINCE me first? No. Just give me the recipe.
It never occurred to me the blurb before the recipe could be "real". I always assumed it was SEO and AI word salad.
It often is lol
It's not real
Thats 100% what it is haha
recipe blogs predate easy access to ai??
They do mostly predate AI but they don’t predate paying other people to write your shit, which is a job being taken by AI now.
The life story doesn't exist for humans to read, it's for SEO. The Web pages are essentially an inefficient ad data feed between machines that humans are a scoring mechanism for.
As someone who 1) hates when my ability to READ the recipe is thwarted by ads/website jumping around and 2) is learning to cook bc he wasn't taught to cook as a child, I have found that I benefit most from following a recipe to the letter, ignoring the context prior to the story. Then after I make it a couple of times, I start to feel comfortable playing around with more/less ingredients. I don't have the knowledge to be able to randomly grab things and randomly measure.
I'm like right in the middle of the road here. I'm with Sabrina on the cutting out the "fluff", but with Melissa on the tips and tricks and like a little background to really set the scene (for both of her recipes it looked like she only had a paragraph or so explaining the context and that's fine. Love the compromise of context after the recipe! Love y'all's videos. ☺
I find the same with recipes, but I think this idea might help you if you haven't already thought of it: the ones I like the most, I like to print them out and then I can write my variations on them in pen or pencil. I've got a few recipes where I've altered the level of garlic or tomato soup or some other thing like that, or else if the recipe calls for a clove of garlic, I've written down the equivalent measure of powdered garlic, which keeps much better on my shelf.
Also, congrats on teaching yourself to cook. It can be really intimidating, and I know a few people who didn't feel they learned much cooking as a kid and were too scared to try so far as adults. I hope you have much success.
If I'm a parent, who is hungry, with two children who are also hungry and it's 5:30 pm I'm not going to carefully parse through paragraphs of a diary entry and what feels like an infinite amount of ads that all seem to be videos to cook a recipe. I'm tired and hungry and need to feed folks before 7pm. Give. Me. The. Recipe. This. Is. Annoying.
gotta fundamentally disagree with the argument of "if you go to a recipe *blog* you cannot be upset when someone talks about their vacation" I clicked it because it was the top result on a search engine for the recipe I was searching for and all the keyword stuffing on that page pushed a bunch of blogs into my recipe search. that's it that's my nitpick otherwise this really good insight into how that happens
I completely agree. They know they're doing SEO to push their page to the top of results, but the content isn't actually what someone making that search wants to find. You shouldn't get a good page rank if the post is entirely irrelevant.
It's like saying "if you pick up a fiction book, you can't complain that it tells a story instead of facts" when you asked the librarian for books about dinosaur anatomy and they bring back fairy tales about dinosaurs instead of books that talk about dinosaur anatomy. If I could filter out food blogs and just see recipe pages, problem solved. But if I want a recipe for soda bread, I'm practically forced to sift through autobiographies before I can get to the recipe and that's rightfully annoying
@@generalcodsworth4417 Just to continue the analogy, I feel like in this case you blame the librarian no? It’s not the writer’s fault that their fairy tale about dinosaurs with some fun facts about anatomy sprinkled in is what the librarian decided to give. The book is what it is advertised to be, a food blog. Being annoyed that food blogs get pushed by search engines when you actually want plain recipes is understandable, but that is a SEO problem intrinsically
I agree; most of these sites are branded as an online recipe WEBSITE not a blog.
@@Zalda_ The blogs are using SEO optimization to show up in searches for recipes, because they wouldn't make nearly as much money if they were realistically advertised as personal story blogs. So in the analogy, the book publishers are telling the library that they are dinosaur anatomy books. Should the librarian be better at checking? Sure. But the publishers also know exactly what they're doing when taking advantage of the stupidity of the librarian.
10:30 onwards feels like the weirdest red herring that don't address the complaint of many people actually just wanting the actual recipie because that's all they need.
Saying effectively "Some tips buried in the SEO slop will help people who don't know how to cook" is....baffling.
Nobody wants important info left out of a recipe. The problem is that important info, including the recipe itself is berried in a massive page. You showed one of them. It was unreadable.
This is the first video i felt iffy on. We're not saying don't include a bit of your past, but it isn't IMPORTANT to how to MAKE the recipe. The tips and tricks? IMPORTANT. i don't understand how the original point sabrina had got so lost in translation. Sabrina also never advocated for vague recipes. No one does!
Sometimes those tips are like, "If your onions are browning a little too fast, you may want to add extra oil." How fast is too fast? How much extra oil? How do you even know this tip is for you? This would be a bad inclusion in the formal recipe because of those questions. I've seen pages with "tips and tricks" sections at the bottom where that could go, but you can't really include too many of them in a section like that, so it's not necessarily good to do those either, but they can help. I can also see the background info including variations could be really helpful too. These aren't necessarily all going to fit in the printable recipe, and they're not going to be valuable to every cook, but for some, they are.
Also, Melissa is talking about tips and tricks here, but I also think if someone is in the mood for a whole experience, they may like to imagine this family eating this meal in some other place, at some other time. That does have value for some people. (Also, if you particularly hate an ingredient, like I do with one, you can sometimes tell from the writing that this person really likes that thing, and you can know to avoid their recipes.)
14:50 It feels disingenuous to claim that the life story will improve how you cook the food. That simply isn't the case, if there is something in the story that actually impacts how you prepare the meal it's an INSTRUCTION and should be found... in the instructions. It's fine for instructions to include things other than "put flour in the bowl" or "stir it" - they can be more complicated like "add flour until the dough isn't sticky anymore." I don't need to know about that one time as a kid when your mom made this and the dough was sticking to your hands and she told you that is because there isn't enough flour in it yet. Just explain the relevant part, leave out the story. Nobody is saying that a recipe shouldn't include information about how to perform the steps or why it's done. But it shouldn't include information that doesn't help you make the food.
These food writers complaints about not getting the specific instructions for a "pinch" or "chunk" from the instructions section, just says they don't know how to provide INSTRUCTIONS! If my math teacher gave me that level of explanation of algebra, I wouldn't know how to do it.
Yes! I have plenty of recipes that say things like 1/2 inch pieces or whatever. You can give size instructions!
"Add an amount of flour"
And it can matter a ton depending on the recipe. Yeah sometimes that extra pinch of salt is negligible. But other times even that little bit extra makes a huge difference. I get annoyed when I ask my mom for recipes and it's all a pinch of this and dash of that and then it turns out disgusting because nothing is actually measured. If there's at least a video then you can see what THEY consider a pinch or a dash or whatever.
Exactly. If your recipe isn't sufficient for me to prepare the dish, then it's badly written.
I can understand complaining about "chunks" but for "pinch" essentially assume add to taste. Legitimately if the recipe has written "pinch" the actual quantity doesn't matter much
I've always felt like if a prominent "Skip to recipe" was standard, or the "Backstory" and "Recipe" sections were in collapsible foldouts, there would be far less to worry about.
There's merit to the monologue, but sometimes you just want a recipe, and neither is right or wrong
All the tips and tricks should be included in the recipe and should not be hidden in a novel.
The recipe should be written, like with any instructions, with the mindset that the reader has never done any of it before. So they need to be clear and precise. Proper measurements need to be included too. I get that in professional settings, quantities vary because there are things the chef knows about what needs adjustment, but these recipes should be for people that don't know. And once someone has made the dish a few times they will then start knowing what needs adjustments and can play around with the quantities themselves
The long format instructions shouldn't deviate from the shortened bullet point ones either. Like changing the order an ingredient goes in as you have already started cooking.
And a little background on the dish is appreciated, but so many online recipes contain completely useless and irrelevant ramblings that have nothing to do with the dish.
Tips and tricks may or may not be relevant depending on your ability and knowledge. Also, some things don't make sense in either ingredients or instructions. For example, common errors. Stuff like "if it looks like X, it was probably Y" needs to be separate
Sorry, but the only thing I took away from this video is that recipe writers are incredibly defensive when called out over the fact that they don't understand why people look up recipes. Put up a list of ingredients with exact measurements, nothing ambiguous and describe the steps of how to prepare the food. Your "tips" are the things you compile under "techniques", things you can apply in various situations to prepare various foods in a similar manner. Then you write that down once and link to it whenever applicable. You're on the world wide web, use the most fundamental aspect of it, hyperlinks!
That was my reaction too, awful seeing people defend what is essentially an exercise in wasting people's time, because at that point they've already admitted that the viewer doesn't want to see the background. It's people defending crappy industry practices.
this was what i got too, all their points were weird ways of phrasing "I'm bad at writing recipes so I'll blame you if you can't follow my ramble" ... what ?!
the thing is, most recipe websites aren't representative of the bloggers Melissa brought in to interview. most of them have stolen recipes and AI padding slop.
when reading a recipe made by an actual human, you'll usually find that the preceding text is no longer than two paragraphs, sometimes down to a sentence, then the insights are within the body text of the instructions.
you don't need a 900-word text before each recipe for it to be meaningful and human. that's only done to pad the website for ads.
The actual issue Sabrina's Website fixed was never actually addressed in the video. It is definitely important have the extra information of technique and culture, and I want the hard working chefs to get paid. But in an effort to monetize on the Chef's hard work, they create a genuinely BAD user experience. There has to be a better way than blasting you with so many adds you can't even scroll the screen down on your phone.
This glossed over ad sales. That's the reason I'm scrolling past 1000 words on their genealogy or world travels. Also the reason "jump to the recipe" literally scrolls down the page past the ads.
Recipe writers and bloggers need to get paid but also the current status quo is extreme.
So the reason why I would want a recipe cleaner is because during the week, I have little time to myself, I just want to make the food, eat, watch my UA-cam videos while I eat, and then do shit that I actually want to do afterwards. If it's the weekend and I have nothing to do, I'll read the blog, If I don't have that much time I'm not reading all that.
There is a site called just the recipe for this purpose if you need
I barely started the video but that’s what I absolutely hate about english internet recipes. You have to scroll through all that text to finally get to even see the ingredients. You can also click a barely visible button to jump to the recipe but it’s always so annoying. I’m from Poland and if polish internet recipes even have an introduction it’s very brief. You literally just scroll once and you’re there. Hopefully the video at least explains why it happens
You also don't really want to be clicking buttons because it could be an ad, I think I've basically trained myself not to see ads, which might explain why I've never seen one of those buttons 😅
I'm going to learn Polish so I can browse these recipes you speak of XD
Just checked out Melissa's website, and I gotta say, if all the recipe websites look like this, this video might not even exist.
Yeah that website isn't really a valid argument against the annoyance with recipe websites. The annoying ones have many obnoxious ads, and are entire novels worth of irrelevant search engine optimisation and self exposition.
I will admit I never read the fluff prior to websites, I always scroll past it.
@@op4000exe The classic SEO chocolate chip cookie recipe,
My grandma made the Best Chocolate Chip Cookies because she just loved finding Chocolate Chip Cookie recipes and trying out any of the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe she could find. I value that she found the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe and would always make it for me during holidays, birthdays, graduation, any time I needed the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.
Mike Rugnetta calls the tiny amount of text you get between ads on mobile websites "the content slit." If I'm making something off of a recipe website, I do not want to peer through the content slit.
Yeah her website is what recipe websites SHOULD be; recipe first, background later, and not too long either.
@@talkgoodenglish7500I loved the ideas channel. Is Mike still making content?
I think recipe writers are being defensive to the reaction that most people don't give a crap about what they write, most people just want the recipe. They seem to believe a blog entry will ADD to people's experience, and maybe it could if that's what people were looking for, but frankly, it isn't. People want to make good food for themselves, not read about the journey to make it, or where it came from. Literally doesn't matter to most people. Certainly doesn't to me. There's a place for all that, but IMO what you're writing isn't a recipe, it's a blog with a recipe in it, and I'm not here for a blog.
Agreed! Imagine reading just about any other instructional manual written the way food blogs are written and trying to follow it ... 🤣
Sure, write about the recipe to sell the concept of it, sell the expectation with a (yes, singular) good photo, but keep the instructions in the instructions and keep them concise.
I think we live in a time when people believe that their life story has some intrinsic value. They’ve been told they’re special, so obviously everyone wants to hear about their dog, their favorite color, and every other mundane detail before they get down to the business of cooking. They forget that we’re not friends hanging out and cooking together. I came looking for a recipe, and the recipe is the only thing of value in this transaction. The rest is just pointless fluff, and I care just as much about the author’s life story as they do about mine.
@@kenrickman6697 now there's an idea. leave comments (if the site has them) with your life story, ending with why that is relevant to how much you enjoyed the recipe. Maybe they'll get the point. :p
You can add tips and tricks without writing 10 irrelevant paragraphs. Not to mention the 100 pop-up ads. Yeah, no I'm with Sabrina on this.
Yep, if genuinely important aspects of the recipe or preparation process are buried in a multi-paragraph blurb, you've simply written your recipe incorrectly.
Yeah a few short paragraphs or one long paragraph is all I have patience for. Anything more than that and it’s overkill.
If I scroll for more than 2 seconds and I’m not at the recipe yet that shit sucks
Nah, I also don’t care what story led to you having this recipe. I’d rather the story was a box with a “read more” button. If you can’t get everything you need from the ingredients, it was made poorly. I’ve gone through plenty with the tips and tricks being in parentheses in the instructions. Ingredient lists with an optional section.
It's so compelling how the video starts off from Sabrina's point of view, and then she turns into the villain. Love the storytelling
My ideal recipe blog post has a few quick facts at the top: number of portions, prep/cook time, how well it reheats. Then one paragraph about the dish, a link to further information (e.g. the long post with the backstory, or a video, or a relevant book or restaurant) then the utensils (very important and not something that even most cookbooks do) and ingredients lists, including substitution ideas, then the steps, then a list of notes about potential mistakes. So.... I'm arguing for the middle ground.
And the best part of my ideal is that the blog author can link to a longer blog post about the dish that links back to the recipe and that boosts their placement in the search algorithms
I would be quite happy if online recipes followed that structure
How well it reheats would be such a helpful piece of info. So mnay foods change after being refrigerated
All the people trying to get others to cook: "It's super easy, just follow a recipe, anyone can do it!"
This video: "It's super elitist actually, you'll only ever ACTUALLY know how to cook through YEARS of experience and dedication, you can't cook unless you know that my grandmother in Cambodia used 3 fist fulls of canolli in her super special wonder dish, and you won't know what a fist full is unless you read my blog!"
(I make this as a joke, this video actually makes some good points and I do think the compromise at the end would be a good one, but I just found the dichotomy amusing)
Thank you for the last bit. Helped my nurodivergant butt out with understanding lol
I have never read the extra fluff on a recipe and they always turn out great. As long as the recipe calls for actual cooking terms like, dice the onion or finely grated ginger. The point of recipes for me is a starting off point to make a dish then add/remove what you want. I found a great jambalaya recipe but when we got to the seasoning portion it didn't call for nearly enough chili powder and now my mealie recipe tracker has that extra chili powder in my version of the recipe. No notes, no long explanation about how I spent a Saturday afternoon looking for something to make with okra, just a list of ingredients and the instructions is all that is needed.
On one hand: This video did a great job of changing my mind that there is value in the blurbs that come before the recipe.
On the other hand: When that blurb is actually 10 paragraphs where each paragraph is separated by a image as wide as the main column and an ad, yeah no, screw that, give me the recipe, lol.
EDIT: Holy crap, I just randomly searched for jambalaya recipes to try an experiment to average how many scrolls it took me to reach the recipe, and I've thrown that out in favor of one very clear complaint: Why are so many of these images taking up almost all the vertical height of my monitor?! An image alone shouldn't add an entire scroll to the count!
0:17:00 BEST COMPROMISE!!
The problem is that everybody needs to eat, and most people don't want to read a stranger's art.
This is like cancer making the case for why you should experience the cancer before you get the chemo.
Ah yes, unlabeled spices is very indicative of the needs of home cooks looking for new recipes
Real video starts at 9:52 when he says the thing. You're welcome everyone.
Thanks. I only came here to learn the facts of the matter.
Ketchup
this comments section could really use some self-awareness re: the 9:46 timestamp lmao....
This didn't feel like an AnswersInProgress video, it felt like a 17 minute long ad
It's heavily integrated yeah, but I don't feel like they would have changed much about the video without the ad
I fully agree with the points in this video! Especially the food it looks delicious lol. However, I will say that to me the issue isn’t the fact that the ads are there, but rather that the ads can sometimes be so intrusive that the website breaks, which makes me not want to read the blurb or try out the recipe.
meanwhile, in ad-blocker country...
@ oh i use ad-blockers galore. But ultimately the primary place I look for recipes is on my phone, which I’m assuming is how most people are also looking for recipes. If you know a great mobile ad-blocker that doesn’t also want an insane subscription fee, please share.
@electricaaaaaaa3260 Firefox on Android with unblock origin
Because people use adblockers (looking at you ^^) and webpage ads pay so little, it's the only way I make it sustainable and free.
If they weren't as annoying, they wouldn't pay as much, and the website wouldn't be up at all
Brave browser is built around an ad blocker, and Kiwi supports desktop browser extensions. Brave I hesitate to recommend these days because you have to turn off half a dozen things they've added to try monetizing the project, but once those items are turned off it's a great experience.
recipe sites literally crash my phone browser now. someone needs to stop them.
0:18 The names in the video call:
"Answer in Progress"
"Answer in Progress"
"Taha"
I know the reality of why the the sites want to keep you there for ads revenue. But the food writers they interviewed I think have a very insular view of the role of food in people lives. For them it`s culture and history and passion and their whole lives. For most people though food is "Lasagna yummy! I´d like to eat a Lasagna and I have an hour to make that happen before I need to return to my life!" Most people aren`t looking for a culinary and cultural food journey in their daily lives.
But it would be neat if we had the time to go on those journeys.
Lasagna in an hour is stressfull
Also I dont' need your story, author, if I already have my own.
Like a few weeks ago I wanted to try my hand making a kind of cake that I used to eat all the time when I was living in east Texas in my early 20s. I went to look up a recipe for it and every single result hand paragraph after paragraph accompanying the recipe that I had to dig through before I could even find out which type of cake it was (since there are two end results for it which are pretty different but have the same name)
yes indeed! While most will probably agree on, that eating itself can be really nice, many if these people won't agree on the act of cooking is.
Like, some people may enjoy programming a custom website with handcrafted database access.
Others are just happy that certain special websites exists, and use them
Or setting up and configuring gameservers, while others just want to play with friends on a server.
Or reparing old, broken devices.. the list goes on
If a person has as little time as you say they wouldn’t be looking at a recipe to cook a lasagna from scratch
At that point they would just heat up a store bought frozen stouffer’s lasagna that only takes an hour to heat up
The "experts" are demonstrably wrong. If a recipe for grilled cheese isn't just 5 lines, one of which the title "recipe for grilled cheese", then it is an utterly untrustworthy recipe. I don't need your 10 paragraph diatribe on the Rwandan Genocide to get an air fryer time and temp for Italian sausage. Those "experts" are the problem
One of the experts in this video is Internet Shaquille. When I pull up his salmon video the first 3 seconds tell you "275 until it reads 120. When you come back this is what you'll need". Honestly, I don't think that the 'experts' are wrong themselves, they would probably agree that most recipe blog design is terrible. I think the video is just using their thoughts on added value to understanding cooking fundamentals to justify the bad design that exists for other reasons.
My cooking tip. Don't make my sister's mistake. When they say "grease the bottom of the pan" they mean the bottom of the inside
Have she ever cooked before?
@@larry_face_uwu at that time no.
Is your last name Bedelia by any chance 😅
@Farimira no
I'm with Sabrina on this one.. I'm a home cook and studied a bit of cooking, but I'm mainly a developer, and all I have to say is: if you need context, tips and tricks, then the recipe is not correctly written. You can let go of the recipe when you know the recipe as the back of your hand. You have done it SO MANY TIMES that you no longer think about measuring, you can see the proper amount. And it is then that you can modify the recipe to make it your own. But (yes, there is a but), one point is made in the video, someone needs to be paid if you make a website. That is the only point I agree with having ads (though annoying). Other than that, if I want the history, the background, and the context of why the recipe exists, I rather watch cooking shows.
There's a weird arrogance of recipe writers thinking their personal family history is interesting to anyone else, or will have any significance to their cooking.
As someone who just started to learn how to cook in the last year, I can confirm, that the tips and photos buried in all the other stuff up top CAN be helpful. That said, when the post is so long, the pictures are so numerous, the tips & tricks section is there, the recommended other recipes are there, AND there's ads spliced throughout, a lot of the blogs become nearly unusable. I have an ad blocker and even still I have to simply give up on the site. I agree bloggers need to make money, there just needs to be a better way. Because you aren't going to make money if I simply cannot use the site.
My reason for not enjoying the "tips and tricks" is that I approach recipes much like I do home cooking - at 14:00 Frankie and Joanne mention grabbing things, and throwing things into a wok -- that's how a lot of people use recipes as well - grab 4-5-6 different recipes for the same thing, pick out the parts they like better and make something different. Having the tips and tricks in that case feels like a disorganized home kitchen - you need to go through a ton of pots and pans to get to the spices you want to throw in the wok.
"Just learn to cook. It's not hard" they say. I tell them "have you tried online recipes? They suck!"
I hope 'they' reply with, "Cookbooks are free at your local library" because cookbooks are a GREAT way to learn about cooking! No ads! True, they're expensive, but they're free at from the library.
fr, it's one of my favorite hobbies, reading cookbooks and never making anything from them lol
Sometimes I need to read the comments to see what went wrong when other people tried it.
I don't usually write comments before I finish the video in case my thought or question gets mentioned and discussed later on, but I can't wait for that.
I think Melissa missed the point of what Sabrina is proposing and why she and Taha think it's a good idea. Sabrina is proposing a TOOL that is OPTIONAL TO USE for those that just want to skip straight to the recipe. When I look up recipes, I'm either a) really hungry or b) planning ahead. I don't stop to read the story behind the recipe because it will not help me achieve my goal of finding something I can make later (or immediately in the case of situation "a") and I'm normally not interested in reading that wall of text.
I don't think Sabrina and Taha are saying the fluff piece, story, explanation of the food, etc. should be eliminated (Edit: I was partially wrong). I think they just want to create a tool that ppl like me would find extremely useful. If ppl want to read the wall of text that comes before a recipe, then they can totally do that and not use the tool (recipe cleaner website). The tool is there if you want to use it, not to force others into a certain way of thinking.
Edit: The compromise to put the background/story after the recipe is a great one. Personally, I think understanding where food came from and hearing how it relates to a person and their culture is cool. But in the narrow context of recipe searching, I do not care. It be different if I was cooking with a friend and they had a story related to the food we were making, for example.
this. If I'm looking for a recipe and there is just fluff-- I'VE HIT THE BACK BUTTON
I think the recipe writers who adds alot of this stuff is misunderstanding the purpose of a recipe. It is a much more utilitarian medium is the vast majority of people.
My rebuttal to the recipe writers- that’s great you have creative outlet, but what’s stopping you from ingredients and instructions first
@@beefymcskillet5601 If they do that, nobody wants to pay for "below the fold" ad spots. Melissa doesn't seem to understand that for most recipe sites, they really are trying to pad for ad space, and weave the recipe into the rest of the BS just to make it so you HAVE to scroll. Pay-per-impression ads know if they've been seen.
"We talked to a bunch of people who make annoying recipe websites. And they said it's okay to do the annoying thing. Case closed."
I would absolutely love to see someone butcher a whole chicken for the first time with only the instructions found in a recipe that was written for SEO, like almost every recipe online is.
For food preparation like that I would say a recipe is not useful. Even the extra fluff isn't going to get you the details needed for how to prepare things properly. But once you learn how to quarter a chicken, dice an onion, mince some garlic then the recipes that call for 1 diced onion and a whole quartered chicken make a lot more sense. Like if I need to learn how to julienne a carrot properly, I'm not going to the recipe fluff, I'm finding a youtube video to watch the technique.
The thing is, if you're a first timer in butchering a chicken. Regardless of the layout and content of the recipe, you're not gonna do it perfectly. It is a skill you gained through time
You guys heard of the "print this recipe" link? It's basically a recipe cleaner.
That truce at the end is the best part, and I agree with the spirit of it. Give me a short paragraph with a "read below for tips, tricks, and recipe development background", and maybe a picture of what the final dish is supposed to look like, and then the recipe. I promise that over 85% of the time, I'll read all that other stuff...AFTER I've determined that I have all the ingredients I need, don't need to go to the grocery store first, and my slow-ass oven is pre-heating to the temperature it needs to be at.
My usual gripe with annoying recipe websites stems down to the usability of the website goes down the drain super hard when I can barely touch the screen to scroll because new adds keeps popping up in places, moving text around or jumping to different places on the page. I love to learn where food comes from, and I do research that regulary without even looking at specific recipes, but if I am looking up recipes and many of them are actively wasting my time in almost predatory adds and making their sites really hard to use - then I stop caring for their story and how they got their recipe. If I don't find your recipe page easy to read, comfortable to use, then I will just close it down almost immediatly
I still wish the website existed. Nothing is stopping me from reading the blurb but then having a clean place to read the recipe without ads everywhere.
I do have a firefox extension that does nearly exactly that. Its nice since you don't need to go to an external site.
This video title is spot on ! I’ve been asking myself why do online recipes look so elaborate (some ingredients are very optional in there) and a tad overcomplicated.
My theory : probably the recipe looks nicer that way ? Another group of people would be annoyed if a very easy recipe was posted. Will come back to watch your video later to see your explanations !
I think it's ads. The longer the page, the more ads you can make people scroll through.
real reason is the ads. recipe blogs are infested by ads. just google any dish + recipe and you'll find everything that makes it to the top of the google search has 10+ ads. sometimes even 20+ ads. just on one page. the excruciatingly long backstories are space to fill with seo terms and every pararaph break is space for an ad.
Learning to make a new dish and learning the history and inspiration for that dish are two different things. When I’m doing one of those, I just don’t care about the other.
The people were definitely trying to guilt trip you into reading their articles before the recipe. If I wanted to read anything except the recipe, I would. Don't try and act like your copied-copied-copied recipe deserves to be preceded by your expensive honeymoon story while also your story is God's gift.
So, while I like the idea of this video, this blurred the line between an actual interesting video, and just an ad for hostinger. It was borderline violating fcc guidelines for advertising. An absolute disappointment from a group I’ve really come to respect.
Hmmm. At least the sponsor is decent unlike honey and betterhelp
I actually agree with Sabrina here, because these kind of back story paragraphs don't exist in my country. We just have the ingredients and the instructions on the website and I would be very upset if some kind of this just appeared in front of every recipe I'm trying to make. And we do have measurements like stew size, but you just have to figure it out yourself.
The guests not only complain about people not reading their pre-recipe story, but also that writing recipes is SOOO difficult because of their *expertise*. OK, don't measure it out exactly then - give me units to convert, give me ratios, give me steps to find out when enough is good. Or, since they are experts, they should be able to estimate, measure their estimate, then stick with it. A pinch of salt for you, recipe writer, is consistently 56g per 3 cup water. SAY SO! You need a pinch of this (30g), a pinch of that (3g), maybe you should figure out a better way to explain!
I also find most cooking blogs unreadable but Melissa made very strong points. I guess it’s a matter of finding GOOD cooking blogs. And for creators to keep website usability in mind.
I’ve fallen back on vintage books I find them more enjoyable and user friendly.
Same. If I don't have a recipe I might use an online one as a starting point but if I plan on reusing it I write my own version with variations to make it work for me in keep notes. A lot of online recipes are just bad even if you can read them through all the ads.
You hit one of my grinds my gears with this. I absolutely cannot stand reading garbage (usually slop strewn out to get as many spots for ads). I started cooking every meal at home a few years ago and my biggest complaint about becoming a better cook is having to read a story every time I just want to know how to make a meatloaf. If I'm trying to cook I'm not in the mood to read about someone's life story I'm in the mood to see clearly defined instructions and ingredients list.
If instructions are complete then a story is not needed. If you need to tell me a story to tell me how big to cut my potatoes then I think the problem lies with the recipe writer.
I don't mind ads. I would love a compromise that cleans the story but still displays their ads because they do deserve compensation I just don't want to read about their life story for them to get it.
Come on Sabrina.. Make me an extension!
I'm heavily split on this. I do think artists absolutely deserve to make money and have credit for there work - and chefs are absolutely artists.
But from a consumer perspective, when you pay for a service (and I believe consuming advertisement ABSOLUTELY counts as payment in this case), you do it with the expectation of a certain experience. If you go to a nice restaurant, and they serve you absolutely terrible food, or you have a truly awful experience, they will not make you pay for it, because that's NOT what you were paying for. We don't have that option online, we've already paid by the time we access the recipe. We can't know if it's any good BEFORE we make it.
Complicating the matter EVEN FURTHER: As acknowledged towards the end of the video, skill of the individual person making the food is a HUGE factor. This makes it truly difficult to judge the recipe. Even with the tips, the person using it can seriously struggle.
I really think that a well-written recipe takes into account the potential skill level of the person reading it. It feels like an experiment in communication - part of which is on the recipe writer, part of which is on the recipe reader. But I honestly don't know whose part is larger.
The skill level thing is so true. Online recipes can’t really teach you how to cook if you don’t know the basics. But for people who have a lot of experience, reading through basic cooking information is a waste of time. It would make way more sense to have that after the instructions (though having a blurb and stuff before the recipe is fine imo)
This is exactly why I’m limiting my online recipes to only a few trusted sources with a reliable track record of having tasty food.
Websites like serious eats, NYT cooking, bon appetit, thewoksoflife, Epicurious etc are most of the only ones I go to now for recipes because they are done by professional chefs with years of experience cooking food.
I only trust primarily online websites when they have a bunch of comments from people giving tips on how to make the recipe better, or I’ve cooked a bunch from and they’ve all been tasty/given me no problems.
But yeah once I made a recipe from a website with zero reviews on it and it tasted horrible and I’ve never looked back since. Not gonna trust any random
Blog anymore
We can argue that the problem is how things are currently done. The recipe writers and cooks are trying to make a living doing what they love while us consumers are reaching out with a certain expectation (within reasons). The way the system has morphed into [the growing dependence on ads, popular search engines putting out sponsored ads first and results that may not even be relevant, the overall difficulty of finding (accurate and factual) information now a days] makes it unnecessarily harder for the recipe writers/bloggers/chefs and the consumer.
We're both trying to do our thing, but the internet now feels unfriendly towards its users in different ways.
@Ashley-xu1lk and if you add onto that the web browser companies that are unable to handle the sheer amount of data from all the ads on that webpage too. Maybe they need to make their web browsers able to withstand all that data without the average persons computer crashing
I like how they all gave some flowery excuse as to why the blog actually brings value... and then at the end, they just go "We need it for SEO and ad revenue, deal with it".
Lmao ok. I block ads and just scroll straight down anyways.
I thought the reason recipe blogs added all the fluff was because they couldn't copyright the plain recipe. might be one of those internet myths
It is at least true that recipes alone cannot be copyrighted. So if you see a good recipe, you can just post it by itself anywhere. If a bot copies the recipe and also the fluff, then the original owner could get the copy taken down.
I must admit, I have not ever heard of such a take down. Might be a remnant of when people bought expensive cook books, that behaviour makes more sense when there is actual money in it.
Internet myth---people speculating about this very topic, probably, and through a game of internet telephone, turned into a fact. Happens a lot now that I think about it.
It's probably also about how you see cooking as an activity. For example, I can drive a car, and I like that a car can bring me from point A to point B, but I don't particularly enjoy or dislike actually driving the car. If I could get from point A to point B without driving, I'd shrug and say, "sure, why not?". Conversely, I know a lot of people who actually find pleasure in driving: for them, getting in the car and going on a nice drive is a rewarding activity in itself.
For me this is what cooking is like. I can cook at an amateur level, quite well I'd say, but for me cooking is because I want to eat a delicious meal, save money, and maybe the social aspect of cooking collaboratively. I don't really cook for the joy of cooking itself, and want my recipes straightforward with minimal frills.
Also, a thing that I think was under-addressed in this video is that many recipes you can find online just aren't very good or very unique. There are really mathematically only so many ways you can assemble the ingredients of an oatmeal-chocolate-chip-cookie, and while ten-thousand home cooks can all put their unique twist or spin on the idea, they haven't ""earned"" enough respect from me to make me do something that I don't want to do (read through their life story starting). Often these recipe writers are cooks who are barely better or even worse at the thing than I am, and I find myself asking "who are you, to tell me xyz?".
Of course, this is difficult with a recipe written by an actual professional. When I lug out the big physical cookbook in my kitchen and open a page, I can be assured that having spent real money on it and that the people writing the book weren't just some "internet randos", the extra text is probably "worth" reading because I know it isn't just SEO fluff text or similar, and may actually be relevant to the recipe being presented.
The human community element is def what is missing with these recipes. The moment where Sabrina is calling the tips & tricks/background part garbage and Tasha’s is conflicted by agreeing with Sabrina while seeing Melissa’s Nana’s recipe hits it on the head. Most recipe googlers wont care abt a recipe artistry or cultural impact unless it impacts someone they care abt, friends family or themselves. The ppl googling for recipes are most likely detached from the family kitchens where you’re running around with your cousins or siblings in your house with grandparent's cooking and teaching cultural/family meals. I still don’t appreciate the background being the first thing I see when I look for a recipe but maybe if I see it at the end of the page instead of in the way of my goal I’ll be more inclined to share the recipe’s story with those I am most likely sharing the meal with.
we need such cleaner for every damn page now! Cookies, pop-ups, subscribe, discount, automatically video playing, advertisement, audio-noise… I'm going crazy, I just need my information, just answer on my question! I really think it's a huge problem now with everything online.
Note *
placing ads for being paid at the recipe page or UA-cam channel - I understand, I agree. Photos for each cooking step is extremely useful; if in instruction written “prepare a chicken” and then next step “fry it in the pan”, it's actually not a tip how prepare a chicken, but a part of the instruction. But when on pages everything jumping at you or starts telling “full history of the potato” before giving a recipe, I see it as an issue.
If a recipe doesn't use measurements I typically don't use it, it's a filter for me.
As a journalist, brevity and getting to the point are critical. As an IT guy, I hate seeing ads, fluff and poor formatting keeping me from the details I need.
I'm all for Sabrina's tool. Nobody says people - or AI - can't create the websites, no matter how unpopular, but I don't want to spend 20 minutes in the supermarket trying to find a list of ingredients. At that point, I'll ignore your recipe and move on to someone else's.
This is a masterclass of fallacies. It's cute how you tried to use arguments to justify the real reason why recipes are long: SEO. If your customers are majorly telling you that the reading is unnecessary, guess what - it is unnecessary
thank you
This needs to be higher up - this is the real reason.
I think you missed the point
Yeah no, ketchup. I checked a few of the recipes that I cooked in the past days and all the stories are irrelevant. If tips are necessary, write them in the instructions (they actually did it like that). All the content above was total nonsense SEO garbage that I’m happy to now know about was totally worth skipping.
To me the worst crime is the cook times. I just cooked drumsticks in the air fryer and the recipe said cook fir 14minutes.
At 14 they were still bloody. Cook times are always so off they might as well not give them.
Sometimes there's useful/interesting stuff in the yappin'.
A recipe cleaner that throws all mention of "cups" into the nearest sea and replaces it with actually comprehensible units would be really neat tho.
Doesn't even matter if it's metric or imperial. Weight measures > Volume measures.
i dont want to buy and use a scale to make a recipe lol
For the majority of recipes, weight measures are really not any better. They’re often more inaccessible because many people don’t have a kitchen scale. A cup of water is going to weigh about the same amount as another cup of water. It’s very very rarely so precise that it matters. You can always just not use recipes in the imperial system
@@alexreid1173 A scale is like 10€ here... it's literally cheaper to buy a scale than a cup, a tea spoon, a table spoon and whatever other object a recipe mentions
Thing is, on many websites the 'story' is just AI/SEO garbage. It's not something an author put any actual effort into.
My immediate thought is "I want to make a wikipedia for recipes"
0% chance I'd use hostinger to host it.
I can see both sides of the argument. The stories and ads are annoying, but also really important to the person who wrote it. My family has a generational cookbook which has recipes and pages with stories/pictures from the family farm, and I can appreciate both the straight ingredients/instructions on one side and the story on the other.
I was drawn by the question and possible solutions but then there was so much fluff about the girl making her own recipe blog and ads i had to skip past in an effort to get to the solution....wait, is this video being visual version of the recipe blogs themselves 😂😂
Well done
The real pro tip of this video: Sabrina should consider swim goggles as proper PPE for cutting onions. Onion crying is caused by vapors released by the onions when you cut them, but swim goggles are airtight and so they keep the onion vapors out of your eyes and you don't cry.
I kinda want to write a really long comment... But ain't nobody got time for that. I just need my recipe. I don't want to hear about nana, and there are hardly ever any real tips. What's the link to that website you made?
BTW, the site Sabrina was making already exists and is called Just the Recipe, they also made it into an app
I absolutely enjoyed this video. So well-done. I really liked that it started as if it was going to be a Sabrina video and then pivoted into a Melissa video. And, I really liked the video it turned out to be. I also enjoy reading cookbooks for the stories about the food as much as I enjoy making and eating the food. So, I'm with you on the importance of the story and the added info that go along with the recipes I look up online. I look forward to diving into Third Culture Kitchen now.
Online cooking websites be like “… so I had to die, track down this grandma from 58 years ago, beat her in a 2-of-3 Chess/Wrestling/Drawing contest, find Beetlejuice to bring be back, and here we are!”
That compromise is fine.
I still disagree with all the fluff. From what I've seen here, and what I experience myself, a history might improve an understanding and appreciation of a dish, but cooking it is a separate endeavour. Having pictures to go along with the instructions is the only thing that could have helped identify the spices here, and no one was complaining about those.
Also the "I deserve to be paid" angle: shush. People have and do share recipes they like for free al the time. Recipes cannot be copyrighted for a reason, and adding creative writing to go around that just rubs me the wrong way. There really ought to be a self-hosted wiki for that.
1:50 "what if there's something very important--" maybe, just maybe, the recipe writer wrote cries of help there. maybe?
I have never felt more validated in my life, I love websites that have a skip button. It feels like I have to ketchup everyday with these.
I have never seen such a smooth sponsorship transition in my entire life.
Copy Me That is a pretty useful browser extension that will just save a copy of the recipe and none of the garbage around it. Honestly the "contextual information" is now mostly AI generated slop designed to create more ad space.
the shark-tank/debate format of this video is so funny. sabrina's face at the 9:02 segment had me dead lmaooo. also not the exposé of sabrina's different youtube eras while she was being quoted -- the editing on that had me rolling. 🤣9:46 is so real. more of the 3 of yall together on video 2025 please!
i think this was a rly fun and interesting video. while i don't think i necessarily learned entirely new information -- unfortunately, ads is how these food bloggers get paid, so of course they've gotta vamp for pages to get us to stay on their website for longer, even when all we really wanted was a simple recipe... -- but, i think the way that this was presented was really unique (love the interviewees' input interspersed throughout the video!!) and engaging.
also melissa's food blog is so cool!!! i will definitely be trying some of her nana's recipes. 🥺Loved ending segment of sabrina trying to make the curry, and melissa having to jump in LOL. not only was it an entertaining (and also heartwarming) bit, but it also illustrated the nuances of cooking that a simple recipe card can't always fit. at the end of the day, cooking isn't just a science, it's an art, too.
The story is the copy writable part. A recipe by itself isn't copywritable; that's why resturants and companies have "secret ingredients" and trade secrets. If you managed to figure out the recipe you can just post it and it's out there. The issue is then if someone steals the recipe and posts it on their own blog with no changes, you can't tell them they can't because it's just ingredients and instructions. The story and fluff means that if someone copies your posts including the fluff that then you can file a takedown and get it removed.