Recipes have a real problem on the internet. Everyone wants to share them, everyone wants to know them. But recipes are hard to monetize. They are not copyrightable!
A narrative, however, IS copyrightable.
And while most folks just are interested in a recipe, the surrounding text is important to food bloggers for multiple reasons:
- They need places to put advertisements which they use to fund their writing
- They think Google ranks recipes with stories higher
- They actually want to share interesting information. They are excited and want to share what they know, not just edit a recipe for you, a stranger!
It’s similar to how youtubers shoot ten minute videos where they mention the sponsor in the first 40 seconds, then talk about how they will give you some information but first… They are serfs, sharecroppers doing what the lords of the internet have dictated is needed to get a buck.
But I really just want to keep and use the recipes themselves. As damage appears, we figure ways to route around it. My new favorite example is http://cooked.wiki – it’s a way to collect recipes and edit them. I’m building a little cookbook of my fave recipes there under my cooked.wiki profile.
The killer feature of cooked is not just the user interface, it’s the recipe importer. Find any recipe you like online that you’d like to use.
For example – I made this Instant Pot Firecracker Chicken recipe. It’s great because you can prep everything ahead of time, freeze it and cook it on a night when you are busy and don’t have lots of time. It’s pretty good for that kind of freezer bag meal! Here’s a screenshot of the page, I’ll see you at the bottom of that.
So that’s a LOT. But I just go to the url bar and add http://cooked.wiki at the front of the url like so:
https://cooked.wiki/https://littlesunnykitchen.com/firecracker-chicken-recipe/
And that turns into something SUPER easy to read, super small that I can save in my personal recipe book.
It’s SO user focused. Any step you click on highlights the ingredients needed – it auto scales your portion sizes and you can create a shopping list from the recipes you are going to cook.
I can only assume that at some point this will get bought by a private equity firm and plundered. Until then, I’m using it and hoping they let me pay for the privilege.
But wait, there's more
This work by MattK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International