Whenever I find a recipe that doesn't start like that I bookmark it. This is my gold standard for internet recipes (in Spanish): http://www.lapaella.net/receta-paella-valenciana/

Here's my Cajun mother-in-law's red beans and rice recipe. She's from Chauvin, LA and this recipe is my favorite for when my wife is away and I'm cooking for the kids.

You'll need:

1 pound red kidney beans

1 link of Hillshire Farms smoked sausage (like polish style)

1-2 bay leaves

Brown rice or long-grain white rice

Crystal brand hot sauce

Rinse 1 pound of red kidney beans, then cover with 3-4" of water and soak overnight. The next morning, dump the water and rinse them thoroughly.

Chop one medium-sized yellow onion and one celery stalk.

In your pressure cooker, go a few times around the pot with olive oil and heat until shimmering.

Add the onion and just brown the shit out of it. Seriously, I always stop too soon. My mother in law gets it all nice and browned, like chocolate. Use sauté mode on your IP and turn it up to the high heat setting. When it's about halfway browned, I add the celery to the pot for the rest of the browning.

Once the onions brown, cut the heat and add 5 cups of water. If I was doing this in the crock or regular pot, I'd add way more but since we're not losing any to steam, give is perfect.

Scrape all of the burnt crap off the bottom of the pan.

Add the beans to the pot along with a bay leaf or two and one link of smoke sausage (like Hillshire Farms polish sausage style) cut into circular slices about 1/4" thick.

Bring to pressure and then cook for 15 minutes. This is how long I did it in my Instant Pot, which may not be the same as your cookers. The IP brings it to 15 PSI and then lowers it and cycles between 10 and 11.5 PSI.

After 15 minutes of cooking, remove from fire and allow the pressure to release naturally. At about 15-20 minutes, I just manually dumped what little pressure there was left.

Salt to taste. Refrigerate overnight before reheating and serving because it just tastes better that way.

Serve over brown rice or regular long-grain white rice if you prefer.

The Cajuns put Crystal brand hot sauce on top. The regular kind (not the extra-hot). It's very tangy. I've never seen a bottle of Tabasco in a Cajun pantry.

https://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Hot-Sauce-Louisianas-Pure/dp/...

Louisiana Brand is also okay if that's all you can get

Modular cooking vs roll your own :)

Related – "The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’" on HN a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534495

Additionally, I think a lot of "traditional" recipes in the US which were passed down in families came from advertising in the 40s/50s/60s, so they specifically call for "Hellman's Mayonnaise" or "Toll House Chocolate Chips" or "Heinz 57" or whatever.

- add a few bay leaves when you add the beans and water.

- you can also add diced bell pepper when you add the chopped celery. These, along with onion, form the "Cajun Trinity", their form of mirepoix.

Enjoy!

The term “operating system” might seem overly general but I think it’s pretty apt.

I love cooking but soo many recipe sites are absolutely unusable due to ads.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Table_of_Contents

Not to mention, all the sauces are super delicious.

This makes a delicious sauce that, even without the seeds, is still much too hot for those who aren't chilli aficionados.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatalii

(It was great though)

Use gloves. Do not touch your face. Work fast.

http://www.foodthinkers.com/inner-beauty-hot-sauce/

Try it on meatloaf, a burger, or roasted some chicken marinated in it. Tooooo good!

1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry_powder

It can however also mean curry leaves which come from a tree and are usually added to a recipe whole.

Edit: nm, it looks like he meant curry powder

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14799111

How do you know Microsoft won’t steal your secret sauce?

Most pH strips I've used have only 1 color, I guess you need 4 to measure across the whole range.

Personally, I like my chilli sauce to be vinegar based. Kaitaia Fire [1] is my favourite. I'm not sure if you can buy it anywhere outside of Australia and New Zealand though.

[1] https://kaitaia-fire-ltd.myshopify.com/

Strange how such a wildly popular sauce vanished from the face of the Earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colatura_di_Alici

Also, I'd posit that Worcestershire sauce is the spiritual descendant of garum.

Last time I was in Thailand I delved into foods made with tai pla. It's a sauce that is thicker and made from fish entrails. Based on descriptions of garum I've read, this seems to be very close.

It's tough to accurately describe taste and flavor in literature.

People's Republic of Fermentation.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDfUp9XK6kA176NN76_4v...

I know some people think it's heavy on the vinegar, but there's nothing wrong with original Tabasco – peppers, vinegar, salt. No modern food additives.

I've made all sorts of fermented foods over the years, pickles, beer, spirits, bread, etc. Haven't gotten sick yet.

The test strip is sitting on 6 but it would have to be darker to have that high a pH.

0) https://foodsafety.wisc.edu/assets/pdf_Files/Fermented_Veget...

1) https://www.healthycanning.com/acidity-low-ph-is-what-makes-...

The yeast and other lactic acid bacteria are coating (and usually inside) the produce, so you don't need to worry a lot about "the right culture". (If you want to be sure, you can collect a starter culture, but that's quite advanced.)

Source: I make beer.

More authoritative source: http://houston.afdo.org/uploads/1/5/9/4/15948626/1000_jay-ne...

Straining it changes the flavor the most, in my experience. It filters out the pepper skins, seeds, carrot bits, etc which add a significant portion of the flavor. I find it more astringent and less sweet after straining. At that point, I'd prefer to make "sport peppers" (fermented peppers and garlic left whole while the vinegar solution is used as a sauce).

Blending it to a fine paste seems to have less of an effect on the flavor, but it makes it a lot hotter. I'd assume that's because it releases more of the capsicum in the seeds. It also removes the variability you get with a chunky sauce (e.g. sweet bit, then hot bit). Whether that's good or bad is a matter of opinion, but I rather like the variability.

The fermentation produces acid though.

   git clone https://github.com/allrecipes/awesome-sauces

Recipes are nothing like software. Software can return expected results for everyone who uses it. But everyone can tell you a story of a recipe not turning out right. The hardware for compiling a recipe is way too imprecise for the micro adjustments a version control system would be useful for. Compiling a recipe is all about reading and understanding what the author is intending and then adjusting for your own equipment and tastes.

It's also just a cheap post. What, now we can upload otherwise unnoteworthy content to github, and suddenly we're on the front page of HN?

Not a bad point, I didn't think about it like that. However, I think this would be more useful to the people who are competent enough to implement nuanced recipes. Small changes in the recipe can lead to large changes in the food, much larger than the error between competent cooks. What if you have different tastes than the original recipe, and I like your taste? I'd wanna know about your changes, especially if I had the skills to implement them and I had a passion for cooking.

Plus, Generations have already been iterating and verbally passing down recipes for thousands of years. Most of that history is gone, and all we have is a thin slice which is what we know today. You only stand to gain by using version control for recipes.

But sure, Github probably won't explode as the go-to recipe database, because the intersection of git users and competent cooks is small compared the amount of cooks.

> It's also just a cheap post. What, now we can upload otherwise unnoteworthy content to github, and suddenly we're on the front page of HN?

This is not too important to me. Hey, we're all here talking about the post, so maybe it is noteworthy.

2013 jduclos.com/notes/github-for-lawyers

Previous HN Discussion on the topic from 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13446275

But yeah, there’s not much else to say about a recipe on GitHub aside from the fact that it is on GitHub. Am I the only one that finds it strange? Am I taking crazy pills?

In fact I imagine the reason you spell the vegetable one way and the recipe the other is that they're both regional variations of the same word from different places too.

I don’t go around telling britons to get rid of their Us or trade in their Zs for Ss. No point in it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botulism

Lacto-fermentation is the oldest means of food preservation aside from cooking and drying. It is used throughout the world for preserving everything from sauerkraut to pickles to kimchi to capers to fish. The garlic and the capsaicin also have antimicrobial properties that prevent especially molds from growing, making this a very easy ferment.

The fermentation converts sugars to acids. You don't add the acid to the veggies. The bacteria convert sugars into acid and lower the pH.

This is why pickles (cucumber) and sour kraut does not go bad.

https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/08/preserving-pickle-cucumb...