Cooking websites are broken

Popups, ads, and unnecessarily long explanations make consuming recipes online tedious.

The Internet is saturated with in-depth explanations on cooking ANYTHING you can imagine. Youtube videos, posts or podcasts are great content to keep you entertained and learn new things, but there is no solution to collect and share recipes online in a way that is minimal, concise and timeless.

That is why I'm putting together fork.club. Whenever I check for a recipe online, I hate myself for using those websites. People deserve a solution created with the sole purpose of amplifying preparations and helping people inspire others to cook more.

Recipes are supposed to be used in your kitchen, with your hands dirty. Therefore, they must be plain, straightforward and leave the pedagogy in another plane.

Good old days

Leaving aside the actual reasons why cooking books have changed dramatically over the last century, it is inspiring to look back and see how cooks shared recipes when in my humble opinion, incentives were more aligned with sharing actual knowledge.

Recipe books were just that, recipes in a book. You could open those books by any page, leave them open on your kitchen counter and follow the recipe with your hands dirty as you cook.

In more recent times, Nathan Myhrvold has been a huge inspiration. He does a fantastic job on his books by separating the stunning photographs and in-depth explanations from the recipes. In his publications (Modernist Cuisine at Home, for example), the literature and the recipes are divided into two different volumes.

When you are on your sofa and feel like learning the best way to cook fries at home, you grab the thick and colourful book where you'll be delighted with the most accurate description possible on the process, answering all the whys and hows.

But when you decide to cook those same fries, you grab the "Kitchen manual" instead. This book, spiral bound, covered in plastic, and black and white, only includes a concise explanation of what the procedure to follow is — no images, just ingredients, and brief instructions that will handhold you while cooking the recipe.

This is fork.club — We are the kitchen manual for your recipes online.

If you want to stay up to date with the development of the project, you can follow me on twitter