> Another one is if it’s a foreign dish and you can somehow find all of the ingredients in your local supermarket.
Fun one I noticed: if you search for Hungarian (as in, written in Hungarian) recipes for paprikash, you'll get one dish[1]; if you search for it in English, practically every result would best be classified as some other dish—maybe also good, but not really the same thing.
The key difference seemed to be that the writers of the English recipes were terrified of the amount of sour cream you need to make the real thing. It's a lot. I mean, I'm not Hungarian, but judging from what ~every Hungarian recipe I found said, the correct amount is at least 4x the sour cream per serving of what the English-language recipes suggested. Depending on the recipes one paired up from each language, some were more like 20x.
[1] "What's 'paprikash' in Hungarian, though?" that's what the Wikipedia "other languages" links are for! Find your recipe or ingredient or whatever there, then hit the dish's native language in the language bar. It doesn't even need to be in a script you can read. Works for just about any dish popular enough to have an English-language Wikipedia entry. More reliable (for this specific thing) than Google Translate.
Using the original source language can certainly help. But even then most of the blog recipes you find are going to have the same problem with being very simplified.
A problem with Google Translate specifically is that it’s often not great at translating ingredients. For instance it will translate daun salam as bay leaf, but there’s something like 6 different types of bay leaf, and they’re not at all similar. If a recipe calls for daun salam it probably wants you to use Indonesian bay leaf, but if you didn’t already know that distinction you’d end up with something weird. Another example would be bawang putih, which translates literally to white onion, but means garlic. Google translate has learnt this meaning sometime recently, but it used to give the literal incorrect translation.
Hungarian here. Yes, it needs a lot of sour cream. Having said that now living in the UK I rather use crème fraîche, which I find closer to what you can buy in Hungary.
Fun one I noticed: if you search for Hungarian (as in, written in Hungarian) recipes for paprikash, you'll get one dish[1]; if you search for it in English, practically every result would best be classified as some other dish—maybe also good, but not really the same thing.
The key difference seemed to be that the writers of the English recipes were terrified of the amount of sour cream you need to make the real thing. It's a lot. I mean, I'm not Hungarian, but judging from what ~every Hungarian recipe I found said, the correct amount is at least 4x the sour cream per serving of what the English-language recipes suggested. Depending on the recipes one paired up from each language, some were more like 20x.
[1] "What's 'paprikash' in Hungarian, though?" that's what the Wikipedia "other languages" links are for! Find your recipe or ingredient or whatever there, then hit the dish's native language in the language bar. It doesn't even need to be in a script you can read. Works for just about any dish popular enough to have an English-language Wikipedia entry. More reliable (for this specific thing) than Google Translate.