I’m noticing a lot of my favorite sites recently have begun to incorporate seeming AI generated receipts and so now I’m on the hunt for a more reliable human touch.
America’s Test Kitchen is pretty good, they go into the how and why of things in a way that’s really helpful if you don’t already know how to do things like “blanching” or “caramelizing” or “deglazing”. I’m a big ol dummy and it’s nice to have your hand held sometimes :)
It’s not the answer you’re probably looking for but, my cookbooks. I happen to have a bunch of old cookbooks I’ve inherited from family members and friends. It takes some research skills sometimes, but it works.
I also maintain a personal blog site which is my online cookbook. It’s not only my own recipes, but also a link dump. When I find a good, non-AI article I’ll share it there like a clipping with the usual tags for how I catalog things. It takes a bit of discipline, but for me its second nature by now. It also lets me take notes on how a recipe worked out, and what substitutions or adjustments I’d like to make next pass.
I always check recipetineats.com first
Also I have started building a federated recipe site (well… Very early stages), so hopefully, one day, there.
Public Domain Recipes
FOSS recipe list with very basic UIThat website seems really nice! I wish it had some more recipes though. I was trying to figure out how to make rye bread recently and every recipe felt wildly different, probably half of them were AI written. It gets so frustrating finding anything online these days.
Thank you, I had no idea this existed or how badly I needed it.
honestly… pinterest. it has led me to some cooking blogs i never would have known about otherwise. there’s one site i really like though and subscribe to via rss, Budget Bytes.
i also am subscribed to some magazines through my library on Libby: Cooks Illustrated, Food Network Magazine, Vegan Food & Living, Bon Appetit. Getting them digitally makes it easy to screenshot the ones I wanna try out.
also sometimes when browsing in the bookstore or library i’ll just flip through a cookbook and take pics of the recipes i want with my phone to put in my digital cookbook later.
Pinterest is also great to compare recipes. I like to take a few recipes and find things I like from each to customize things to my taste.
A word of caution about Pinterest: Pinterest Is Being Strangled by AI Slop
If it works for you, great but be vigilant. Especially when you’re putting what you find on there into your body.
Never had loveandlemons.com let us down.
I mainly get them from YouTube and their resppective websites. My favorites are:
Babish Culinary Universe (Everything)
Pailin’s Kitchen (Thai)
Sheldo’s Kitchen (Sotheast Asian)
Brian Lagerstrom (Baking and American)
Curries with Bumbi (Indian)
Hanbit Cho (Baking)Public service reminder: Your local Library carries cookbooks. When AI has destroyed cooking, get a Library card.
Google what I want. So far so good. I’ve had consistently good results with Allrecipes and BBC food.
Eatingwell has been my go-to lately. I see lots of things that look enticing from triedandtruerecipe on imgur, too.
Check out this riggies recipe. You won’t be disappointed.
No recipes - heavily Japanese influenced since he’s from Japan but a ton of great recipes from around the world
Damn delicious - love her spam fried rice but a lot of great Asian / pacific islander inspired dishes
Half baked harvest - a bit of everything but very garden to table inspired
Second for Half Baked Harvest. I love how cozy the site looks and the recipes are great
Budget bytes is a pretty good site. Especially if you are looking to save money.
My most used resource in the kitchen is a culinary school textbook. Plenty of recipes in there if I feel like challenging myself, also good if I forget how to do something simple like how long to poach an egg for or how to make bernaise sauce. Probably can get one used for hella cheap, it doesn’t really need to be the latest edition anyway.
Internet-wise, check out the Marginalia search engine.
It’s good if you already know what you want to cook, and are just looking for a recipe. Marginalia is focused on indexing old blogs and stuff written by humans, and has tools that allow you to filter out blogspam and recipes that exist only to push affiliate links.
I prefer to avoid popular cooks and cooking websites because they structure their recipes around engagement and polished images & video work, and it’s aggravating. 90% of the time all I’m looking for is 15 lines of information. I don’t want to click that bell, I don’t want 4K slow-mo shots of someone cracking eggs to chill lo-fi beats, I want a recipe.
Just made these today, first time making one of his recipes, would recommend.
More generally, we’ve got some blogs we’ve followed for enough years to trust. Koreanbapsang.com, rainbowplantlife, pickuplimes, chinesecookingdemystified.substack.com, and some others. But all of those we followed before ai slop became viable
It is definitely getting harder. I’ve been hitting YouTube looking for actual people.
Pasta Grammar
Tasting History
De mi Rancho a Tu Cocina
Pasta Grannies
Hatice OncelSome guy named Alton Brown recently started posting videos. He only had two up so far but he shows promise.
I don’t tend to cook what they are but I do get inspired between them and what I have on hand.
When I know exactly what in looking for I search and look at a few recipes and see if they pass the sniff test or not based on the photos and ingredients. Like are they mixing in a different bowl in two different pictures? Dl
Some guy named Alton Brown recently started posting videos. He only had two up so far but he shows promise.
/s, or are you one of today’s lucky 10,000?
Some more people on youtube:
Steve Vivaldi
Al’s kitchen
J Kenji Lopez Alt
Food Wishes
Fallow
Derek Sarno
Johnathan Zaragoza
Rick Bayless
Anti Chef
Chinese cooking demystified





