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 create, collect and share recipes in a way that is minimal, concise and timeless.
Most cooking websites are nothing more than clickbait-filled traps, designed to maximize interactions at any cost. They don't care about the content — only about keeping your attention as long as possible. Your eyeballs are the currency, and their priority is far from helping you cook.
Recipes should be practical tools, meant to live in your kitchen, used with your hands covered in flour or sauce. But these websites and apps? They're a UX disaster, slow, clunky, and riddled with frustrating quirks.
Why should I waste time reformatting my recipe to fit your platform? Even if I do, how long will your site or app last? Will it be maintained, or will my recipes and notes be held hostage? It’s exhausting.
Why not just use a notes app? After all, recipes are mostly just text. Some are detailed, others are little more than a list of ingredients and brief instructions. You might even throw in a link to a YouTube video or store a PDF somewhere.
Sure, you could use a notes app — but the result is chaotic, unstructured, and anything but timeless. It’s hard to organize, harder to share, and doesn’t adapt well. What happens when I want to tweak that recipe I found on Instagram the other day? Am I left with a note saying, “Use 100g of sugar” awkwardly sitting next to a random link? It’s just not practical.
It is inspiring to look back and see how cooks shared recipes when in my humble opinion, incentives were more aligned.
Cookbooks were straightforward: just recipes in a book. You can open them to any page, leave it on your kitchen counter, and follow the recipe while cooking.
In more recent times, Nathan Myhrvold has been a huge inspiration. He has done a fantastic job on his books by separating the stunning photographs and in-depth explanations from the recipes. In his publication (Modernist Cuisine at Home, for example), the literature and the recipes are divided into two different volumes.
When you’re on the sofa, curious about mastering the perfect homemade fries, you reach for the thick, vibrant cookbook — a treasure trove of knowledge that provides the most detailed and accurate descriptions of the process, answering every “why” and “how” along the way.
But when it’s time to actually cook those fries, you turn to the Kitchen Manual instead. This no-nonsense spiral-bound book, protected by a plastic cover, is all business. It’s black and white, stripped of distractions, offering only the essentials: ingredients and concise step-by-step instructions. No images, no fluff — just a clear guide to walk you through the recipe while your hands are busy.
This is fork.club — We are the kitchen manual for your recipes online.
Note to self: When in doubt, come back to this list. It should have the answer.
Author: Jorge Bastida
Published: December 1, 2024
RFD: #0001
If you'd like to discuss this RFD, share your thoughts, or simply chat about it, feel free to reach out to me - To stay up to date with the project's development, you can follow me on X