Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and

Mark, and I'm Mark Scarborough, and together with Bruce, we've written

dozens of cookbooks, sold near unto 1.

5 million copies of those books, and we have developed over 10, 000, oh,

God, 10, 000 Tens of thousands of original recipes and written them over

20 some odd years in the food business.

I can't believe I started in this business when I was only eight years old 25 years.

So there you go.

Uh, this is our food.

You don't look good for your age.

Thanks.

Thanks awfully.

And you mean I don't look good for a 32 year old or however old I am?

Wait, eight and 25.

I can't do math.

33 year old.

Really?

Um, okay.

Anyway, uh, on this episode of our podcast, as is traditional, we're

going to have a one minute cooking tip.

We're going to tell you the truth about online recipes and

how you can make them work.

And this is a subject that's very near and dear to my heart because I am garnering a

lot of of recipes off of Instagram Reels and TikTok lately and cooking a lot of

vegan recipes from especially from UK chefs off TikTok and Instagram Reels.

So we want to talk to you about kind of what to look for in internet

recipes and we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tips.

It's all about when you're cooking for friends or family.

Everybody wants to help.

Everybody drives me crazy.

If you're like me, it drives you crazy.

You hate cooking with people.

Bruce doesn't even really like me to cook with him.

I know.

No, no.

I'll go away when you cook.

And I do.

He doesn't really like anybody in the kitchen with him.

But sometimes people insist.

So here's what I do.

I leave really small tasks that I can give someone who insists.

Even if it's as simple as can you take this bottle of

olive oil back to my pantry?

Can you put the raisins back in the pantry?

Otherwise, people force themselves into your cook space.

And well, that doesn't always go so well.

Yeah, as Bruce has, uh, rather campily said, would you add a

brush stroke to Renoir's painting?

Why are you asking to take the brush from my hand?

We had a dinner party once and friends were over.

And the, this woman of this couple was, Desperate to help me.

She was standing in the kitchen with me and I made rack of lamb and I

was cutting the racks into slices and she's like, let me help you.

Let me help.

And I'm like, no.

So she decided it would be very helpful to throw her hands.

onto my cutting board to hold it steady as I'm slicing the rack of lambs into

bones with my 12 inch chef's knife.

And guess what happened to her finger?

I cut it so badly that we thought we were going to have to go to the

emergency room and have it sewn back on.

Luckily, we didn't.

Okay, well, you got to the bone, but you did make I cut down to the bone.

It was pretty bad.

No, but you did make a deep cut.

Who throws their hands on your cutting board?

Because They didn't have something else to do.

So give your guests something simple and dumb to do, and then they

won't do something dumb like put their hands on you cutting board.

That's true.

Um, I think it's really important to offer people something to do.

But I can tell you that just on a personal level, the one thing I don't want help on

any circumstances is clearing the table.

It is just this thing that I have that I'm generally the one who

cooks, of course, as the chef, most of what we serve to other people.

But I clear the table.

And sometimes we do multi coursed plated meals.

So there's a lot of clearing and resetting.

And, you know, I have Lots of silverware out, and I'm pulling away dirty

silverware and plates and all that.

And people seem to always want to jump up and help me put in the kitchen.

And I'm always like, don't, because I have a whole system of where I

want the dirty plates to go, where I want the dirty silverware to go.

I want it in, you know, I fill a bowl of water in the sink, and I want to

put the dirty silverware in there.

And I want to put the plates over here, and I want to rinse them.

But it's a whole thing.

Yeah, everyone has their own method.

I got a whole dance going on.

And it does not help me.

It's just a pet peeve, and I'm sorry to be so obsessive about this.

It doesn't help me either to help me and carry stuff into the kitchen,

nor does it help me to pass plates down a table and stack them up.

Because now I have to wash both sides of the plates before I put them to the

side, before they go in the dishwasher.

And it just, it makes my whole system screw up.

And I know I'm being ridiculously type A.

You're not, actually.

But it's just me.

We have some very good friends who have some very awesome ideas.

Very expensive China and they don't stack and they make it very clear when

they clear the plates away They bring two plates at a time into the kitchen

and I've been to their house at dinner parties where other guests have Insisted

on helping even though they were told no and these gorgeous dishes got stacked

and the look on our friends face Really really fine French porcelain hand painted

and and you wouldn't dare stack them And we have just to say we have plates from

a Hollywood designer that my great aunt bought years and years ago in my family

they referred to as the damn green dishes but we have the damn green dishes and they

are these weirdly painted gold deep green plates with this kind of weird psychedelic

gold painting across and I don't want anybody messing with those because

they chip, because they're fragile, and because I don't want the gold to chip off.

So it's a thing.

Yeah.

So back to the initial part of this tip is have other tiny little

things you can give people to do.

Rather than carry the dishes back to the kitchen, let them blow out candles

or turn off your electric candles.

Or I say, uh, can you help me blow out candles?

Or if we're in the middle of dinner, I say, oh, could you pour some

more water around the table for me?

That would help me a lot.

It makes them feel like they're doing something.

Yeah, and then it's great.

Okay, so now enough being nastily prohibitive.

And our six minute cooking tip.

Uh, guy, now, and we sound like we're such divas.

Anyway, well, we are.

Um, if the, if the glass slipper fits, just go ahead and wear it, darling.

So, um, before we get to the next bit of the podcast.

Let me say that it would be great if you could rate this podcast, if you could

subscribe to it to get it every week.

And if you can write a review, even great podcast or lots of fun, that

would be terrific in whatever language and whatever platform you're on.

I know Spotify doesn't allow you to write a review.

Some, you know, Some platforms do, some don't.

In any event, we would appreciate that to continue the work of Cooking

with Bruce and Mark because we're just doing this on our own and we're not

supported, we're not asking for any money.

It's the whole thing.

So that is a way that you can help us out.

Okay, up next, the big central segment of this podcast, the truth.

about online recipes.

Most of us look for recipes online rather than read you for a cookbook.

And as a cookbook author, you know, even I do it.

It's what happens.

So this segment is about how to put us out of business and how to

make our mortgage go into default.

Sometimes it's great.

And the recipes are real, especially from a trusted source.

I mean, I like Serious Eats.

I go there a lot.

But there are thousands of food blogs that are still up with

recipes that we have to look at more carefully before we go shopping and

waste our time and money making.

Yeah, I mean, as I said at the opening of the podcast, I am cooking

a lot of vegan food lately, and I'm following a lot of vegan chefs.

I think this started when we had Phil Corey on our podcast, and he

is the head pastry chef at Harrods, and he's got a new vegan blog.

He's got a baking book out.

It's not something new now, but he's got a vegan baking book out.

And I kind of, from there forward, I started cooking more vegan

and I really love doing it.

And I love watching the Instagram reels or the TikTok.

It's usually the same thing, because they post it everywhere.

Of these chefs.

And I love the stuff they make.

It's crazy.

I've never considered how to make a cheese sauce without cheese and cream.

And I'm learning all kinds of things from them, which is great.

But, I will tell you.

that I have had quite a few failures and I have had quite a few things

where I have followed the recipe exactly and it absolutely falls apart.

So let's go back to the old school days when bloggers were around and there's

a lot of these blogs that still exist.

Of course, millions of them that still exist and some of them are

not being refreshed and some of them are still being refreshed.

Some food bloggers are still in business out there.

And, uh, you know as well as I do.

One of the things that people complain about is that food bloggers don't

present recipes until you drag yourself through 10, 000 words of content.

But there's a reason for that.

Authors tell you their life story before getting into the

actual recipe and here's why.

Blame the algorithm.

Blame search engine optimization.

Let's say two food bloggers, both post a guacamole recipe

at the same time on Monday.

And one is just, here's my recipe and here's a picture of it.

And the other is prefaced with a long, winding story about this blogger's memory

of picking avocados in the old country with the grandmother and That's the one

that the algorithm is going to pick to give a higher yield and will come up

first when you search for guacamole.

And that's because the algorithm is seeing more keywords.

It's seeing cilantro, it's seeing avocado, it's seeing all

these words that are popping up.

It's seeing grandmother.

And so the algorithm is seeing, I know I'm so weird, it's seeing

like it's AI, but it is AI seeing.

The algorithm is seeing these things and it's noting keywords.

And especially if the blogger is able to repeat the word like cilantro or

avocado multiple times over the course of the page, then it is going to

really jump as a keyword on the page.

But note, on most of those blog pages, there is going to be a block you can

click at the top that says jump to recipe.

Sometimes they program that you have to click it a few times before

it does it slightly is the thing.

You gotta click multiple times, but it will then scroll through

all that garbage you don't care about to get down to the recipe.

So now you're down at that recipe.

But you have to look at other things about it.

Does the recipe have stars and comments?

Well, yeah, and make sure you don't just pay attention to stars.

Uh, because, and listen, this is no shade on bloggers.

We're all trying to figure out how to do what we do.

But a lot of bloggers will open up their heads.

multiple email accounts and they will multiply like their own stories.

This has become really problematic and tick tock videos in which tick tock

essentially lets you open up many, many, many accounts under your name.

And so then you just sign into all of your accounts and you like your

own videos and even comment on your own videos off your other accounts.

So.

It is a problem.

So what you want to look for is not necessarily the perfectly said

comment like, this recipe is beautiful and reminds me of my grandmother.

You want to look for the more real comment like, Oh, I made this and it tasted good.

Or I made this and my hubby didn't like it.

Or you want to look for those comments.

But pay attention to comments that have complaints.

Some of them are fairly genuine and it's important.

Like, you know, I made this recipe a little too salty.

So if you make it, try it.

you know, cutting down the salt or someone said it didn't have enough acid.

So I added more lemon juice.

Those are helpful comments, but sometimes people will say, I love this recipe was

perfect, but I substituted cauliflower for the chicken and I substituted ground beef.

pork for the breadcrumbs.

And I substituted baking soda for the flour because they're

both white and powdery.

And okay, so you didn't really make this recipe, did you?

So you have to pay attention to both people who complain it didn't work because

they made the changes and people who loved it because they made the change.

Yeah.

And be really careful on reels and on tech talk these days about uber slick videos.

There are, um, production companies now that are fabricating influencers.

Uh, they work very hard to fabricate them.

Um, if you watch any Instagram or TikTok food stuff, I'm sure you've seen the two

British boys who go all over the United States and talk all about how great U.

S.

food is and bar, Austin barbecue joints and all that kind of stuff.

But if you really look at what's going on there, there are sound.

people.

There are multiple camera people.

There are directors and sometimes they even hand food to the boom

operator and all that kind of stuff.

But if you just think about it, you have to sit back and say, Wait a

minute, this is a produced TV show.

And so their reaction, maybe it's honest and maybe it's

not, but it It is less real.

There's this guy that I see a lot that is hyper produced and he does a lot

of vegan baking which of course you know is going to show up in my feed.

And he is always shirtless.

He's always wearing jeans and shirtless.

He has an absolutely drop dead gorgeous body.

But when I watch what he does, I think to myself, wait a minute, you can't get

cinnamon rolls to rise in 20 minutes.

You can if you're shirtless.

Yeah, that's exactly it.

Because you're hot and you're putting out heat so they rise faster.

That must be it.

They rise for you because you're hot.

That's, that's clearly it.

And he is.

So be really, I'm not saying cynical, just be careful.

Watch people who are more real in what they do and it feels more real.

Bruce and I are doing a lot of, and not to toot our own horn, but we're

doing a lot of TikTok videos right now.

And we leave a lot of the mistakes.

Oh, we have one that went up the other day and I actually posted it.

put something in my mouth and it fell on the counter out of my mouth.

Eat much?

And we left it in there because we thought that at least it showed that

we weren't overproducing the stuff.

That it was actually a recipe that we had developed and worked on together.

And I just encourage you to be very careful about what you make or pull off.

I have to be very careful about what I do.

For example, I did a recipe a while back that had a vegan cream sauce

in it, and it had, uh, uh, silken soft tofu and nutritional yeast,

or as the kids now call it, noosh.

Noosh.

That's the name of our dog, Noosh.

It is.

Our dog is Nosh.

We call him Noosh.

So it has nutritional yeast, or noosh, and it had silken tofu.

And, you know, you blend this up to make a faux cream sauce,

and it is kind of amazing.

I smoked it.

Paprika and garlic powder and it does make an amazing cream sauce.

Okay, vegan cream sauce but the proportions were all wrong and be

this person advocated my Pouring it into the chickpea stew and then

letting it simmer for 30 minutes that tofu is gonna break I know this.

That tofu is going to break and it's going to be disgusting.

You're going to end up with a curdled looking mess.

So, I know that recipe is not exactly right.

Just use your smarts when you pull these recipes off the internet.

And when you find a recipe, On one person's blog, before you jump to make

it, even if all the other cues are right, look around at other blogs.

See if that recipe is exactly the same on other people's sites.

Because sometimes people just copy recipes and it's just

like, you know, cookie cutter.

You'll find a hundred blogs with the same recipe that no one's tested.

So look for one that's unique and that'll help you out too.

When, just to say, this is totally anecdotal, and I'm sorry, this sounds

like, again, I'm tooting my horn.

But, when Bruce and I, years ago, came up with this cake in which we

grind a whole orange, you quarter it and take out the seeds, and you

grind it in a food processor with sugar, and then you just pick the

cake batter in the food processor, adding milk and adding flour, etc.

And I'm, I don't know that this is original to us, but I have

to tell you that when we posted that, I saw it everywhere.

It's suddenly within six months.

Everybody had posted it on their blogs, and I'm not saying that

they ripped us off in any way.

I don't know that for sure, but it was really weird that it just

appeared everywhere all of a sudden.

Unless the algorithm was showing you those, they may have already been

out there because then we posted one.

It's possible.

It's possible.

And again, I don't think we made that up, but I can, I can tell you that I

used to spend, I don't anymore because it's not worth my time, I used to

spend a lot of time searching the internet back in the day of splash pages

and the early days of the internet.

A lot of time tracing down our recipes and tracking them down and

asking people to take them down.

Oh, I remember that.

Yeah, remember that?

And I would spend like a whole day each week doing that.

Back when the internet was new and young and exciting.

And it wasn't just porn.

No, that's pretty much what it's always been.

It started as porn.

No, it's pretty much, it was that way when I was an academic with e mails.

So, no, it was pretty much always been that.

Your e mails were porn?

Well, people did send me e mails.

stuff around even in academic apartment and departments because of

course it was hidden on the server.

Anyway, let's get off that and let's say that, um, we have a

couple of bits of advice here.

Don't forget that libraries have all kinds of online services

where you can download books for free and we do this all the time.

We download cookbooks that we might want from our local library through its

portal and then if we like it, we buy it.

Almost every library can give you access to an online collection that's bigger

than they even have in their shelves.

And here's another tip that I'm going to give you that shouldn't

be coming from an author at all.

But if you go to an online bookseller, whether it's Amazon or Barnes Noble

or Books A Million, Many of these sites have an option to download

a sample of the book for free.

Yep.

If you download that, you might be lucky enough to grab a recipe in those

sample pages that you really like, and then you don't have to buy the book.

But the hope is, you'll like that enough, to then download the whole

book and give the author a royalty.

The Hope is an author, but it's true that you can often find things

there that are good on their own.

And again, your local library is a great way to find downloaded books.

If you have the wherewithal, you don't have to, but if you find a book

that you like, it's nice to buy it because you're supporting a small

business owner, a cookbook author.

You're supporting a small business owner, and that's nice.

But again, nobody's gonna dish you for not doing it.

And certainly Bruce and I download tons of books all the time.

Yes, we do.

Let's talk about what's making us happy in food this week.

Uh, for me, it's Bonchon Chicken.

I got to go there by myself this week.

I was out by the Farmington Mall in Farmington, Connecticut.

And I was sitting in the car in the parking lot and I was hungry and I had

an hour and a half before a meeting and I thought, hmm, I can get a Shake

Shack or I can go to Bonchon Chicken.

That would be a hard choice, but I would go to Bonchon Chicken.

And I got the eight.

piece and I got half with the spicy and man, they're spicy and spicy

and half with the Korean barbecue.

And it was, yeah, we love if you don't know, it's a chain

and you can find international.

They're all over the world.

Yeah.

And you can find it everywhere.

And they're.

They're fried chicken.

I particularly like the chicken legs.

Bruce likes the tenders.

Yeah, the strips.

I like the legs because I love all that leg, bony leg meat.

But, um, I, it's really good chicken and you should try it out sometime.

I love it.

Whatever I say always makes you laugh.

With advertisement for these people, I guess, or something like that.

Um, my, what made me happy in food this week is that we were invited

to friend's house and, um, this, uh, the husband of this couple is just a.

terrific cook and he made a veal morango roast and it was unbelievable.

He made it with a Brussels sprout dish with pasta on the side and

there was pasta on the side with roasted mushrooms and olives.

I just want to say, despite the fact that this was, of course, and then he made an

olive oil cake with raspberry glaze top.

And it was all incredibly delicious.

But.

Um, I just want to say that it's just so nice to be cooked for.

Mm hmm.

It's so nice for other people to cook for you.

And you know, of course, as cookbook writers, people are often afraid

to cook for us, which is absurd.

I'll eat your meatloaf anytime.

But people are afraid to cook for us, but And you shouldn't be and

I just want to remind you is that a call to be invited to dinner.

Sure I just want to remind you that having people over and feeding them is

a wonderful wonderful Wonderful thing and I think that you should include

more often in your life because the people who were there Maybe they don't

show it and maybe they don't even send you a thank you note or call

the next day Which they should they should or they don't get invited back.

No stop, but even if they don't do those things things.

You know that it is an incredibly luxurious experience to be

cooked for by someone else.

So please try that out in your life.

All right.

That's our podcast for this week.

Thanks for being along with us.

We appreciate your time.

We know the podcast landscape is gigantic and we appreciate the time

that you choose to spend with us.

And every week we tell you what's making us happy in food.

So tell us what's making you happy in food this week on our Facebook group.

Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

Uh, we will share really exciting ones and talk about them here

on Cooking with Bruce and Mark.