FOOD is on the INTERNET

Here's how you find decent recipes online:


Skip the egg advisory board

The absolute worst recipes I’ve seen posted on the internet are from websites like the South Carolina Department of Agriculture or the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. They want you to use pre-made French onion soup packets and frozen pre mixed whatever crap. They’re designed for the overworked overburdened overmedicated housewife. If you want to respect the ingredients they’re trying to hawk, there are tons of better places to look.

On the plus side, these kind of websites tend to have pretty decent charts on cuts and the like. Study them if you’ve got the free time.

Wiki recipes is useless.

It’s disorganized. That’s my main gripe, the Wiki format as adopted by the recipes wiki just doesn’t cut it. The disorganization shows: where easy appetizer recipes range from mixing strawberries and yogurt for a ‘dip’ to using a pressure cooker (for those beginners out there remember this line from the simpsons: “How do I use the Pressure Cooker?” - “Don’t!”) In addition to that, a great deal of the recipes are retreads - either copied from celebrity cook books, the egg advisory council (see above) - basically, you spend a lot of time sifting through useless information to find something useful.

Which is sort of the opposite of Wikipedia - where you can click on one link and keep finding interesting links until your face melts off and your bones decay. It’s a shame, really, but skip the recipe wikis.


Use websites that have a consistent format.

I can’t stress how important that is in the whole “cooking edible food” process. Hopping between standards of measurement, having everything crunched together in one “process” paragraph, alternating between words to describe the same technique, yada, yada, yada… it all spells out one general theme: you will fuck up this recipe.

This is the one time where I might actually suggest using a resource provided by the Food Network, their website, along with websites like Allrecipes and Epicurious provide a nice ‘launching’ point for people who aren’t really quite sure what they’re doing. In the case of Epicurious and Allrecipes, I’ve known at least a couple of Executive Chefs who’ve told me just to pull recipes off of those particular sites when they don’t have a ready-made recipe they want to use.

Add “authentic” to whatever you’re googling.

This is how I’ve found my favorite food related website. Chances are there’s someone out there who has spent a great deal of their free time cataloguing traditional family recipes from their own respective ‘home’ country or region. My favorite go-to websites for tips in cooking classic Italian, German, or really any Ethnic Cuisine are either someone’s own personal website or blog.

Some of my favorite examples include:

Binnur’s Turkish Cookbook

And

Tasty German Recipes


Now that I've told you that: umm... continue to rely on me for creative, fun, and easy recipes your kids will crave! or something like that. I don't know... but keep reading my blog.

You Do Not Need to Ever Buy a Cook Book Ever Again.

I humbly submit to you: my reasoning.

1. Google It!

Every recipe ever is available online. Ever. There was a point where I’d get cook books every Christmas from my extended family because … well, it’s the laziest gift to give someone who “wants to get into cooking.” With the exception of the Star Trek Cookbook, which is more of a food prop guide than a cook book (because the recipes are terrible), I never much cared. Sure, I kept thinking “Oh, this’ll be neat” whenever I’d get one “I’m sure I can use it sometime to think up something” but when it really came down to it I’m way too lazy to thumb through a book when I can just type “Chocolate Cheesecake Recipe” into the Google and have a generally passable recipe in about 2 minutes.

Like This!

2. The Technique is More Important than the Ingredients.

What Cook Books I have kept and read are the professional textbooks like Gisslen’s Professional Cooking and Professional Baking which have a lot more to do with the technique than the recipe. If I want to remind myself how to fold butter and dough together to make Puff Pastry, or how to put together an obscure sauce I’ve not made in a while, I hop to one of those two books. It’s a great deal more like a technical manual than a “list of 30 dinner ideas your kids will love!” Once I’ve got the basics down, it’s (and keep in mind, everything I write here is strictly scientific*) at least a dozen times more fun to start improvising from that point.

3. Your Friends and Family Have Better Ideas.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations - except that co-opting cultures is easier when you get paid to do it - it’s that big fancy chef type people love home-made food. For what it’s worth, some of my most successful dishes in the restaurant world have been adaptations of recipes I picked out of old family recipes. Same with the meals I’ve eaten. It’s why every ad for food in the history of ever has bragged about the product being “Just like Grandma Used to Make!” (I for one remember marching down on Christmas morning to find my grandmother standing over a hot stove of hydrogenated corn oil, high fructose corn syrup, and baker’s ammonia... [as for marching on Christmas, well, I'm from a German family.] )

4. Cook Books Cover the Same Territory Over and Over and Over…

With the exception of “Natural Harvest” cook books tend to tread over the same territory. Want an example?

Try here.
Or here.
Or here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Or, alternatively:
here, here, or here.

… There’s about 391 more of those, btw.

5. The Gimmicks, Oh Lord, The Gimmicks.

We’ve already touched on Natural Harvest which is probably the grossest, and Grilling and Cooking Healthy For Kids, but  let’s not forget that just about everyone you’ve seen on TV has their own cook book. Should you learn to Grill from Bobby Flay’s book, or Emeril’s? How about Al Roker?

Insert joke about weather men

A quick browse around Amazon finds the following counts by genre:

Outdoor Cooking (that would be Grilling and Barbeque, by the by) : 262
Special Diet (Not like, Special Brownies Special): 20
Vegetables & Vegetarian: 18 (Green Beans and Bacon are vegetarian, right?)
Reference: 18 [Citation Needed]
Quick and Easy (Hey, just like your mom!): 33
Culinary Arts & Techniques: 20 (okay, some of these might be practical, but you probably don’t need 20 of them)
Regional & International: 41 (one for every country and region… that sounds right)
Special Occasions: 85 (“Grandma’s Funeral Burger” is my favorite)
Cooking by Ingredient: 72 (Why stop with Natural Harvest when your body produces so many more fluids?)
Special Appliances: 13 (Nobody ever wants to eat anything you cooked using a fleshlight)
Meals: 21 (if this is the section for meals, in what other context are you supposed to eat the other stuff?)
Baking: 19

… you’re getting the point of this.

Oh Wait: Those are just the books that have to do with Grilling. As in, There are 18 grilling reference books out there. Take into consideration then things like Fad Diets (In case you’ve never bothered to look it up, Atkins and South Beach are the EXACT SAME DIET), celebrity cookbooks, and other niche markets  designed for the kind of people who “burn water" and all the remainder of the 107,000+ cook books on Amazon.com and you'll see I’ve developed an irrefutable demonstration that every cookbook ever is a cheap gimmick to make a buck. EVERY COOKBOOK IS THE SAME.

*as certified by top scienticians.