Content Standards
What every guide must contain before it can be published, the language we avoid, and where we stand on machine-written recipes.
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These are the standards every page here is written to. They exist so that guides stay consistent even as the library grows.
What a recipe guide must contain
- A full ingredient list with quantities, including which substitutions work and which do not.
- The reason behind each significant step, not just the instruction.
- Sensory checks alongside timings, so the reader can judge by sight, smell or sound rather than by clock alone.
- A troubleshooting section naming specific failures and their causes.
- Storage guidance, where relevant.
- A named author who cooked the dish, and a last-updated date.
Language we avoid
We do not call a version "authentic" or "the traditional way" without naming whose tradition it is. We avoid "detox", "superfood", "guilt-free" and similar marketing language entirely. We do not describe food as clean or dirty, or dishes as cheats. And we try hard not to write the thousand words of filler that so many recipe pages carry before reaching the method; if a guide is long here, it is long because it is explaining something.
Structure and readability
Headings describe what is under them so that someone scanning for the fermentation section can find it. Ingredient lists come before methods. Steps are numbered where order matters and bulleted where it does not. Measurements are given in the units the dish is actually cooked in, with metric equivalents where precision matters.
Accessibility
Every image carries descriptive alt text that conveys what is actually shown. Headings follow a correct hierarchy without skipping levels. Colour is never the only way information is conveyed. Text contrast meets WCAG AA. The site works with the keyboard alone and without JavaScript, other than the mobile menu toggle.
On machine-generated text
We do not publish recipes written by a language model. A recipe is a claim that something works, and that claim can only be made by someone who cooked it. Tools may be used for spell-checking or for tidying a sentence, but the method, the testing and the judgement are human, and a named person signs off on every page.
Images
Photographs on recipe pages show the dish as it actually came out of our kitchen. Where an illustrative image is used for a category or a hero rather than to document a test batch, it is chosen to represent the subject honestly and is never presented as a photograph of a specific tested result.