I find it easier to manage a bunch of markdown files than anything else.
Also rewriting them lets me list ingredients as groups as far as what goes together in a bowl or whatever ...the laundry list of ingredients so many sites list drives me crazy.
Outside of America's Test Kitchen... I've never found a blog's exposition on why they did what they did helpful. More often than not their description actually makes me question if they actually cooked the recipe often enough (or at all).
The aggressive SEO tactics, more than anything, are what drives me crazy.
I mainly use BBC Good Food. Being taxpayer funded and having unlimited google juice means they don’t need to play this game.
BBC Food was the publicly funded website, but I think that was shut down a few years ago.
I think the main problem with 'recipe websites' is that people don't want 'recipe websites'. They want 'cookbook websites', i.e. some editorial oversight over recipe quality, some standardization in units, style of directions, have a picture with each recipe, etc. What am I going to do with 100k crappy half-asses notes on everything someone somewhere ever threw together in a kitchen somewhere? I'd much rather have 2000 quality recipes that I know I can rely on.
Org counterpart (single file), but similar story. Static html export is handy also.
> Also rewriting them lets me list ingredients as groups as far as what goes together in a bowl or whatever
Lol. Ingredient grouping. Nice to hear it’s not just me.
https://xenodium.com/cheese-cake-recipe-no-crust https://xenodium.com/oatmeal-cookie-recipe https://xenodium.com/dal-makhani-black-lentils-recipe
One of them being that it's called "Spahetti Carbonara".
Separately, the recipe calls for whole eggs rather than egg yolks. This is a somewhat contentious issue, and many chefs have opinions one way or another. This recipe appears like it's The Definitive Spa(g)hetti Carbonara, but doesn't acknowledge that many consider it to be incorrect.
For me this is an issue with all recipe sites – my level of cooking ability, my ingredient preferences, how "authentic" I want to be, opinions I've formed on particular dishes – these are all very personal to me and unlikely to be fully represented in recipe sites.
I've started keeping my own recipe collection comprised of recipes I've made and enjoyed, I make no attempt to make them publishable, and I edit them as much as I feel necessary.
Whereas a site like this I reckon would aim for having definite versions of recipes, which is a) I think impossible for any dish and b) pretty much useless if you don’t happen to live in the exact region where it is from.
E.g. I have 3 different versions of the recipe for a Finnish blueberry pie. The original (well nothing original about it, just how my mother learned to make it), a Swiss version and a Colombian one. Because for the latter two I need different substitutes for the filling and slightly different measurements and baking time over all.
For me, recipe sites are just a starting point and inspiration for the personal collection. And I prefer having many different versions, some traditional, some sacrilegious available to compare and try rather than trying to get them into a single lowest common denominator version.
Even the base issue of at least ranking recipe blogs by quality isn't solved by other aggregators such as Google / Yummly which are more of a recipe dump.
If you or anyone else is interested I'm planning to release a version in the coming weeks - email is in profile.
Basics are "how to bind soup", "choosing and cooking pasta", or "frying onions". Common recipes are then "bound vegetable soup" or "maccharoni with tomatosause (and fried onions)". Specialities would be those recipes you try for christmas, or when the in-laws come over next month.
It's highly frustrating to find a recipe that says "bind the soup with starch" without going into how to do this (or even worse: what ingredients this needs!). But for someone more experienced, it is highly frustrating to have to read through five lines explaining how to fry the onions.
As with most education, cooking is layered: you build on top of existing knowledge, without repeating it each and every time. I presume this is partly a classification issue and organisation challenge. You don't want "how to bind soup without milk or eggs" to turn up when someone is searching "vegan tomato-soup". The web has hyperlinks, which would probably be a very good way to organize recipes.
And most importantly start your own recipe book.
You can buy The Essential New York Times Cookbook for $2.99 right now which has 1,000+ recipes from decades of The New York Times.
And even without special pricing you can get something like The Joy of Cooking or How to Cook Everything for $20. Just one of those books is, realistically, all you need for a lifetime of cooking and will give you far more recipes and far better instruction than the website in the OP.
So I cook. I have good equipment. I'm pretty darn good. I don't do "modern techniques" such as sous vide, tho David Chang might convince me yet. The partner manages the kitchen garden (tonight was the final batch of 2020 eggplants). But the real intellectual property for the various cuisines is to buy the good cookbooks, and READ them. I'm not kidding. Read through entire sections over time. The really good ones have a theme, often not explicit. And cook out of them! Make mistakes. Make glorious successes.
I will not elaborate here, but I find these these English Language authors essential:
"Chinese": Fuchsia Dunlop, for Hunan and Sichuan. I have 6 more for mostly other regional cuisines but none so uniformly excellent.
"Mexican": Diana Kennedy, Rick Bayless, and some Sante Fe, NM, US authors whose books are annoying because errors, though pretty awesome overall.
"Indian": Maya Kaimal, utterly essential. But I dip into Neelam Batra slightly less often. I have to because she is encyclopediac.
"Southern/Eastern Mediterranean": Claudia Roden (Oh you really should try out her felafel recipe, but be sure to dry out the surface of the beans after soaking. And um I made absolutely killer moussaka tonight mostly based on her recipe)
"Italian": Marcella Hazan. There are many others. Keep it simple and honest.
"French": Well I am sorry, I am going to go with the classics by Richard Olney and Julia, but I note that I only usually use "Mastering... V1" and "Simple French Cooking".
"American/Anglo": Oh this is too annoying for too many. I use the "The Joy of Cooking" as a starter. My version is copyright 1980, given to me as a going away to college gift that same year. In there is wisdom, that I have only appreciated as I have grown older and more experienced. "The Meat Book". You wonder how an Englishman could have cross cultural accuracy on Anglo sourced materials... and he does! Uhh, sure, Fuschia. Anyway, I love Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. For vegetarian dishes, my goto author is Deborah Madison. She is perfect. Right in the tradition that is implicit in the authors I reference above, but for vegetarians. And now, I want to emphasize two authors: Michael Rhulman & Brian Polcyn, who changed the way I think about food by introducing me to real charcuterie. But I had to read it through and make a bunch of things to understand it, and then, I began to understand how a lot of other cuisines work.
Do I have my own recipe book? I do! But it is not so essential to me as the above authors.
Does BBC Food count? It's ad-free if you are in the UK (possibly not if you're outside the UK). It has a wealth of recipes and food-related content:
Alas, not free -- but for my money, well worth it.
Also looking at step-by-step instructions allows me to quickly understand the recipe if i know most techniques involved. This way i sometimes just need a few seconds to absorb a new recipe or put it into mental cache while constructing my own based of multiple ones from the internet.
Edit: The Spaghetti Carbonara recipe actually has multiple mistakes. it says the cook time is 0 minutes, it tells you to add the beaten eggs but never tells you to beat them, the recipe includes butter as an ingredient but the recipe tells you to heat the oil, and never says to grate the cheese. If this was a wiki or something I could try to fix those issues, but as it currently is I don't see any way to even flag it. It's also tagged as Banana and Greasy.