The internet is full of garbage recipes that either just don't work, inauthentic, and uncreative, all at the same time.
As far as murdering trees go -- let's not forget that libraries and e-books exist.
The best cooking tutorials are barely translated Youtube videos. Or even better, recipes going through Google Translate.
(Or get a multi-lingual friend... :) )
Cook's Illustrated also does some 100% legit international recipes, they are smart enough to A/B test against the country of origin and try to match up the flavor profile with ingredients that are available in America, which can be more work than just directly translating to "closest cultivar of a plant".
I've also enjoyed the organic explosion of low carb cooking that has happened online. I have been witness to the community growing from its very beginnings less than a decade ago when it was just some people trying to make weight loss taste good, to professional level chefs jumping in with their recipes. It is now possible to source low-carb recipes online that can go toe to toe with any other genre of food (e.g. https://alldayidreamaboutfood.com/chocolate-hazelnut-sandwic...).
Of course there is also an explosion of low-carb blog spam. Ugh. I do sometimes miss when everyone in the community was there because they loved just trying new things out and sharing their experiences. The same SEO problems exist...
Yeah I love those. The "random grandma with a gopro" tutorials always work, modulo language barrier. The video editing is crap and you sometimes have to keep fast forwarding while stuff is cooking but the recipes are good.
I have been to what I thought was deep in the Internet recipe mines and never saw this.
It's good to slow down and enjoy those fairly simple things.
Honestly, I miss absolutely nothing from the internet when it comes to cooking. But I also wanted to be a chef. So I studied how to properly cook long ago and I cook almost every day... so I'll admit in already an outlier. Still, the way the internet treats cooking is retarded. It doesn't surprise me that people don't like to cook if they grew up with the internet as a learning resource. All these people overcomplicate easy recipes and substitute anything because it makes them feel like pretty snowflakes.
Does that still work? Most people's grandmas today where very much alive and cooking in both the 70s, 80s and even 90s and thus as steeped as anybody in all the international influences and 'foreign' ingredients that those decades brought.
the way the internet treats cooking is retarded.
And here you and I disagree. I like the way that 'modern' cooking is willing to revisit well established and 'sacred' truths about food and put them to the test. Perhaps a housewife in the 1920s isn't the authoritative source on the best way to prepare a dish, and even if she is there is no way to know without someone actually testing that hypothesis. Sites like Serious Eats and all the sites they begat bring both rigor and the joy of experimentation back into cooking. I mean why not substitute one thing for another just to see what happens or apply the 'wrong' technique to a standard dish? Many a dish that is considered a 'classic' today no doubt got their start that way.
This is way older than a decade. I knew people getting into it and sharing recipes on Usenet. The current boom is new, but online low carb communities are ancient in internet terms.
It wasn't very palatable back then, but people sure did try.
There was already an active Usenet community for lowcarb diets in the late 1990s (alt.support.diet.low-carb).
Yeah library, to check if you want to buy it or just write down a handful of recipes.
In my experience, these sites tend to be less spammy too, but there's certainly variation there too.
There seems to be two distinct 'genres' of cookbooks. One written by people who have studied cooking, and one written by people that have studied marketing.