Here at The Salty Cook, we believe in keeping it real. The modern internet is a wasteland. The food-blog space is a special kind of hell. So many contemporary food blogs are monetization platforms first and recipe platforms second. You tap a picture of a cake on Pinterest and next thing you know you’re on a food blog where you have to close three pop-up windows, scroll past six auto-expand soliciations for an email list, and deal with an auto-play video ad before you can even get to the thirty pages of ‘content’ to get to the recipe. On top of everything else, a lot of food sites are now using generative AI to barf out recipes and images of food. It’s a terrible user experience, it’s exploitative, and I hate it.

On the other side of the coin we have highly-polished video content on platforms like Instagram, where some perfectly-manicured cook in a spotless professional kitchen uses shiny kitchen tools to make perfectly photogenic meals served on bespoke dishware in perfect lighting. This kind of content is more appealing but it’s unrealistic, and it sets up unrealistic expectations for the home cook.

While there is value in the escapism and fantasy of polished, cropped, cultivated content, I believe that consuming too much of it warps your perception of reality. Most of us have some dirty dishes in the sink, and that’s okay.

This website is not a fantasy about home cooking. It’s not a revenue-first spam website. It’s a website about actual home cooking. I am a regular person living an average life. I have zero culinary training and have built my skills in the kitchen by cooking meals for my family from scratch every single day. My goal with this website is to help people learn to cook good food at home. As such:

• No AI Slop. We do not use generative AI for our recipes, our images, or any content on this website. Everything you see here is human-friendly.
• Our recipes are free. There are no pop-ups and no prompts to join a mailing list.
• We do not make you scroll through 1,500 words of gibberish to get to a recipe. Recipes are recipes, blog posts are blog posts. Let’s not conflate the two.
• Our recipes are optimized for mobile devices. That way you can use your phone or tablet to view the recipe as you cook without having to pinch and zoom and scroll. Our recipes are also formatted to be printer-friendly.
• We cook real food. We try to avoid packaged foods and convenience foods. We make as many things from scratch as we practically can.
• We believe in flavorful food. Many food bloggers seem averse to seasoning. We aren’t.
• We eat our own recipes. We’ve tested every recipe on this website.

This is the simple and radical formula we use at The Salty Cook. I hope you find some value here. Now, go cook!