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.
Generally I just wing it, have been cooking so long I can develop my own recipes for most things. But sometimes I do have to look for tips, and will read recipes for inspiration.
Food:
Bon Appetit
Recipe Tin Eats
Boy who Bakes
Perfect Loaf
Food and Wine
NYT Cooking
Cocktails:
Punch
Imbibe
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.
YouTube has been most reliable for me. If you see someone showing their process/results and multiple people do it the same way, that’s a pretty good indication that it’s worth trying out.
Marginalia is good for this. It can be hard to find recipes with very specific requirements, but I’ve bumped into so many cool personal websites with recipe collections just by searching for “[name of one ingredient I want to use] recipe”.
Some websites found that way:
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 :)
I always check recipetineats.com first
Also I have started building a federated recipe site (well… Very early stages), so hopefully, one day, there.
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.
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)I honestly don’t use recipes. I cook the food until it’s done and put whatever seasonings I enjoy in it.
Ummm… What?
Bad Manners / Thig Kitchen, they had a website which now seems to be gone, but there are also cookbooks, both paper and ebooks. It’s vegan but they’re some of the best recipes I tried, vegan or not.
Public service reminder: Your local Library carries cookbooks. When AI has destroyed cooking, get a Library card.
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
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.
Never had loveandlemons.com let us down.
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.
I’m aware. I’m also an experienced cook that would not add just anything to my food, or use improper cooking times and temps. I own a copy of the Betty Crocker cookbook that is my baseline for baking and meat temps.






