A friend gifted me a few hellofresh boxes once and I quite liked the recipes. But I don’t care about subscription services to get overpriced groceries delivered if the supermarket is a 5 minutes walk away.
Is there any collection on the recipes online? At least in Germany, recipes aren’t even copyrighted, so it wouldn’t even be illegal to distribute them here (AFAIK, IANAL).
Where in Germany? I have a huge stack of the recipes, in Heidelberg
Too far away ;)
If you don’t mind them auf Englisch, I’ve got a hoard of them and time with a duplex scanner.
I sure don’t mind them in english. Would be really neat if you’d share them. (:
I’ve done less useful things with a Monday morning before. PDFs, and I will try to suss a way to set the file names programatically.
A handful may come with ‘pre-printed accidents’ but all will be legible :)
As long as the scanner can handle the slightly thicker paper stock they use, we should be golden.
I’m still wondering if there’s a place where to communally share these recipes, other than importing them on some big recipe platform.
Python, Tesseract, OpenAI and my 3 remaining brain cells have now combined to form a working script that will rename the scan file names to whatever it reads in a certain section of the card.
Doing them by hand would be a nightmare 😅
Wow, someone needed a project. ;)
Thanks a lot, seriously! ^^
Good news, they went through the ADF without too much trouble. Images just need a little contrast adjustment.
The copier used also OCR’d the whole lot, so they’ll be searchable.
Has gone suprisingly well.
Tesseract failed in some places, making some of the sub-headings come out in what looks like Klingon. HF have varied their paper stock dimensions as well, which caused a few things to be clipped.
Acceptable output for manual corrections.
Preview:
Expect a DM soon-ish.
Welcome.
Didn’t realise just how many I had - a whole box file full and overflow from that.
I’ve had a nice morning so far sorting, de-duping and remembering the time I coated half the kitchen in sesame seeds…
Been meaning to do it for ages so cheers for the incentive!
Now I am wondering the same.
And looking down the rabbithole of Tesseract OCR haha.
They literally just publish them on their website. https://www.hellofresh.com/eat/top-recipes
Sam feel - Key & Peele - Planning a heist
Fun fact about recipes: they are not copyrightable.
So you can’t “pirate” them unless they put them behind a paywall, and even then you can download and reshare them.
I absolutely hate that Basics with Babish put his recipes behind a paywall.
Andrew Rea is a special kind of asshole (gotta love how he uses his own, probably legit, stories of struggles with mental health to sell fucking Better Help of all things).
But recipes and paywalls have always been a mess. Cookbooks were, and still are, a thing. And the time and cost it takes to develop a recipe is REALLY high. Brian Lagerstrom has talked about this on and off and half joked about how many lasagnas and cakes he and his partner have eaten to get a 15 minute youtube video up. And then someone else just steals that verbatim without any credit at all. So a lot of “recipe creators” are looking at methods to make sure they at least break even on their IP.
And Rea is very aware of this. Partially because he has a long history of using the exact same techniques that Kenji et al do without any accreditation (Alvin is REALLY good about saying where he got an idea though) and partially because he is pretty good friends with some of the most notorious recipe thiefs out there.
But yeah. If they had done a “going forward, all recipes are paywalled” I would not be too bothered. But he retroactively paywalled all his old recipes. Which sucks because many videos outright contained errors that weren’t in the text recipes because he screwed up the narration.
But also? The good news is that you can generally just google a few of the ingredients of a given recipe and get the “real” name of it and five different versions.
Many of his early recipes were actually direct copies of recipes from America Test Kitchen. Many word for word.
So it’s even extra shitty that he put his recipes behind a paywall because most of ATK’s recipes are available for free. (But buy their books! They are very good)
IMO, cookbooks are in a different category. While yes their recipes are copyright free, the organization by theme is worth their cost. When I was in college, I bought a Betty Crocker “5 ingredients 30 minutes” cookbook which is awesome for someone who is learning to cook. As I’ve developed skills I’ve gravitated toward cookbooks that teach the fundamentals and science of cooking that help explain what’s happening.
Babish did? Jesus. Well my opinion of him has gone down a bit.
Is it really any different than, say, a cookbook? I mean, Babish has to pay his bills and most of his content is still free videos which show you how to cook things including proportions and measurements for the ingredients.
Wow, didn’t know that, thanks!
Don’t bother. Most use pre mixed spices from them, wich are even harder to track down.
The pre mixed spices list their contents and it’s not that hard to come up with something similar by just using the individual ingredients.
I find the spices quite easy to substitute. It’s either obviops or I’ll just mix up stuff I like from my spike rack.
I kept a few recipes from a subscription I was gifted. Honestly, replacing the missing ingredients has been more fun than cooking the boxed meals.
I have tracked them down: https://joesdaily.com/food-drink/hellofresh-spice-blends-how-to-make-them/
The trick is to use a search engine. In my case, I used DuckDuckGo
If you tried reading that article, that these are “just” guesstimates of some of the spices they found online. I have a couple in my recepies that are not on this list.
The trick is to read. In my case, I used my eyes
what are you missing? i might have it somewhere
YouTube.
