Have recipes become unnecessarily difficult to consume?

I’ve been thinking about how much friction there is between finding a recipe and actually cooking it.

You search for something you want to make, open a recipe, and before getting to the useful part you’re scrolling through introductions, stories, tips, substitutions, ads, popups, and everything else surrounding the actual recipe.

Eventually you find the ingredients and instructions, but even then you’re constantly going back and forth:

“Wait, how much was it?”
Scroll up.

“What was the next step?”
Scroll down.

“When was I supposed to add that?”
Scroll back up again.

And recipe videos aren’t necessarily better.

A 60-second TikTok or Reel might be entertaining when you’re discovering a dish, but it’s surprisingly annoying when you’re actually standing in the kitchen trying to follow it. Pause. Rewind. Play. Miss something. Rewind again.

Longer YouTube videos have the opposite problem: the information is there, but you have to find the exact moment you need.

Maybe our attention spans have just become terrible, but I don’t think most people want to consume content when they’re cooking. They just want the information they need, in the order they need it.

I came across this problem while building CutRecipe (https://cutrecipe.com/), which basically takes a recipe video or page and turns it into the boring-but-useful version: ingredients, quantities and step-by-step instructions.

But I’m curious if this is actually a broader problem or just something that annoys me.

When you’re cooking from something you found online, do you prefer following the original video/page, or do you usually try to extract the recipe first?