Writing

How to get just the recipe (and skip the life story)

Thomas Bradley 2 min read

You searched for a recipe. You got a 1,800-word memoir about a grandmother’s kitchen, three video ads that follow you down the page, a newsletter popup, a cookie banner — and the actual recipe, somewhere past the fold, if you scroll long enough without losing your place.

It isn’t an accident. It’s the business model.

Why the recipe is buried

Two forces decide what a recipe page looks like, and neither of them is “help the person cooking”:

  • Ads pay by the impression. The longer you scroll and the more the page reloads, the more the site earns. A short page that gives you the recipe and lets you leave is, to an ad-funded site, a failure.
  • Length is rewarded by search. A bare list of ingredients tends not to rank, so sites pad it with story, history, and tips to look “thorough” to a search engine. The memoir is there for Google, not for you.

So the page is built around everything except the thing you came for. The recipe is the bait; the scrolling is the product.

The quick fixes (and where they fall short)

You can fight the page a little:

  1. “Jump to recipe.” Most sites now hide one near the top. It scrolls you past the story — but the ads and popups still load, and still interrupt.
  2. Reader mode. Your browser’s reader view strips some clutter, but it’s hit-and-miss on recipe sites, and it can’t help you cook.
  3. Print view. Sometimes cleaner, often not, and it’s a clumsy way to read on a phone propped against a mixing bowl.

All three still load the bloat. None of them double the recipe when friends turn up, or turn cups into grams when the measurements don’t match your kitchen.

Or just paste the URL

That’s the whole point of Drizzlelemons: paste any recipe URL and get back just the recipe — ingredients and method, no ads, no popups, no story. Then do the bit the original page never let you: scale the servings up or down, and convert the units between cups, grams, and millilitres, in place. It runs as a web app, a browser extension, and an installable PWA, so it’s there whether you’re at a laptop or cooking from your phone.

No ads, because you’re the person cooking — not the product being sold.

Open Drizzlelemons