Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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fandomsecrets2015-01-18 03:36 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2015-01-18 03:36 pm
[ SECRET POST #2937 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2937 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 056 secrets from Secret Submission Post #420.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Aaaaaargh Recipes
(Anonymous) 2015-01-19 12:31 am (UTC)(link)I should clarify, I guess. The difficult thing is not finding recipes. Finding recipes is really easy. The problem is that there's a million recipes, and it's really hard to find ones that I feel like I can trust. This is compounded, I think, by the fact that most recipes on the Internet seem to come from two kinds of sources.
First, you have the professional recipe sites - your cooking channel recipes, your allrecipes, your epicurious, etc. Now, the problem that I have with this is that some of the recipes on here are really good. But some of them are not - and there's no real well to tell in advance which recipes are anywhere close to good, and which ones have been made with an audience of people who have no idea how to cook and find cumin exotic in mind. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But I'm not going to like recipes made for those people.
Second, you have your food blogs - the kind that seem to be as concerned with gorgeous, massive money shots of the finished dish, and lots of set-up about how the author first tried this food when traveling to some exotic place, and how tasty and authentic all the spices are, and how important it is to get fresh food for everything, and maybe some shots of them thoughtfully perusing a farmer's market, or the way they cook it for their family and shots of the family sitting down to a hearty meal. And, again, I'm not saying these things are bad, and many of these recipes are good. But I'm suspicious of anything that's so focused on what I guess you could call the fashionable qualities of food.
There is a kind of recipe site that I do basically instinctively trust: the kind with a no-nonsense, scientific tone, lots of information that seems to come from extensive research, explanations about different variations, and explanations about what parts of the recipe are really central to the dish, and what parts aren't. Unfortunately, these seem to be fairly rare. Especially in terms of 'things that come up when you google for recipes'.
Maybe I should just buy more cookbooks.
Have you tried these?
(Anonymous) 2015-01-19 01:58 am (UTC)(link)http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/
This one is more home cooks, but the recipes do have ratings
http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes
Re: Aaaaaargh Recipes
(Anonymous) 2015-01-19 02:18 am (UTC)(link)The other thing that bugs me - especially when looking for dessert recipes, since I love baking - is how OTT a lot of the American recipes are. DEAR GOD they use more sugar than flour and then you might as well just be eating actual sugar cubes because it doesn't taste like anything else! I'd love to find more subtle dessert recipes but everything is in pounds instead of grams and Fahrenheit instead of Celcius.
Do you have any links to that third kind of recipe site?
Re: Aaaaaargh Recipes
Allrecipes has a rating system, as does epicurious. It's useful to look at ratings and find out what people in general thought of the recipe. It's also useful to read reviews and see what people have substituted; I find that about 80% of the time if a recipe calls for sugar, it calls for WAY TOO MUCH SUGAR. Likewise for amounts of oil called for in recipes that give amounts for sautéing.
The better place to search for recipes is on youtube, that way you can look at trusted sources for ethnic food and see how something comes out before you try it yourself.
Lastly, you can never trust ONE recipe for something. You need to look at several before deciding for yourself which components of something are necessary and which are beyond the norm.
Re: Aaaaaargh Recipes
(Anonymous) 2015-01-19 05:05 am (UTC)(link)Food blogs... ahh, they can be nice food porn once in a while, but a lot of them are trying to do this for a living and it shows. Too many product placements, too made magazine-cover photo shoots for ingredients (goddammit I know what eggs, cream and butter look like no need to show me AGAIN) and too much navel gazing prose before you get to the actual recipe.
One possibility:
http://www.cookingforengineers.com/
Likewise, Cook's Illustrated is painstakingly scientific but most of their recipes are too long and fussy for everyday cooking, IMO. Cook's Country is done by the same people but it's more accessible. To be honest, unless you already know you love a particular writer's work or it comes from an impeccable source, cookbooks will have the exact same issues. You'd think that because they're published, someone's tested all the recipes and it'll be great, but no.
Re: Aaaaaargh Recipes
(Anonymous) 2015-01-19 12:22 pm (UTC)(link)http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes
All her recipes are checked over and over again, and they give full instructions and options for variations.
I've never tried any of her recipes for them not to work or end up horrible. I definitely can't say that for every food writer.
Re: Aaaaaargh Recipes
(Anonymous) 2015-01-19 12:41 pm (UTC)(link)