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Comment by collegeburner | Hacker News Reader

My problem with recipes is not that i cant find them, its that everything has 32 million results and i dont know which ones are good and which ones are crap. The "reviews" on sites never seem to correlate with good vs bad recipes. If I've eaten something before its kinda better but hard to find new dishes to make if I dont also know the recipe is probably good. Anybody have advice on good recipe sources?

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Yes I know what you mean. I think there should be a site that realizes that there are many variants of well known dishes, and they should be categorized as that. Very rarely is there an original, true recipe that is the pristine source for the dish. So when I search bearnaise sauce, I should not get a recipe, I should get a general description, kind of like a Wikipedia page. And then below that, all the different recipes, that can be contributed like on a wiki. Each recipe should have a feedback mechanism so the best ones gets upvoted.

Most of the time - the recipes are pretty similar.

It's usually just a difference in spices, oils (or other fats), or emulsifiers. Or vegan / gluten free substitutes.

Nothing beats knowing your tastes and learning how to actually cook - then you can look at a recipe and know which things you'd rather substitute with something else and how and when, etc.

But are there any good websites for this?

I tried solving this with a search engine that accounted for reviews with some manual curation, but I realized there's actually an extremely limited set of 'good' recipe sites and kept returning the same 10 sites with a long tail of average sites.

You could improve upon this by establishing site authority for a topic (cuisine), but it still seemed pointless to me.

In the short term I'd appreciate some of those good recipe sites as I dont know what is better or worse. Would you mind sharing those 10 or so are good?

Bob Apetit is consistently good for any American or Italian basics. Biscuits, pies, tomato sauce, Omelettes, chili, just about any Italian pasta dishes, anything like that.

They’re also written well and are pretty easy to follow without long preambles or anything.

https://based.cooking is my current favorite.

If you have a NYTimes subscription, NYTimes Cooking is decent although the recipes tend to get a little over complicated and pretentious sometimes.

I hear (and have tasted) that the NYT recipes are both extensive and consistently good.

I have had pretty good luck with the product forums for the thermomix; the recipes are obviously written for that machine but it’s easy to repurpose them.

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