Where do we draw the line on culinary uses questions?

Question

Long ago, we decided that recipe requests were considered off topic as they are not objective, do not promote "expert" answers, and are highly susceptible to "me too" answers. However, there is a class of question "How do I use [Ingredient]?" that isn't necessarily a recipe request. This falls under the culinary uses tag and the site position was outlined by Sam Holder.

The obvious issue is that these questions can be recipe requests in, sometimes rather thin, disguise: What can I do with a Chicken? What can I do with Onions?

We've seen quite a lot of these questions recently. Some of them are ok and some of them are clearly not. How do we as a community judge when these questions are on/off topic? I'm having a hard time coming up with any real metric to determine if the question is ok or not.

Some of the recent questions we've been seeing:

• What can I add to Frozen Peas for more flavor? (open)
• What are alternate uses for leftover buttermilk? (just closed)
• What are some savory banana applications? (closed)
• What to do with day-old cooked rice? (closed)

Some questions that were deemed on-topic (per Sam's original post):

• Things which normally would be considered waste. Questions about stale bread and apple peel are existing examples of this.
• Things which are not usually associated with cooking but are edible. Questions about hops and lavender are existing examples of this.
• Things which have a specific (or few) widely recognised uses which may have other uncommon uses. The question about cornstarch is an existing example of this.
• Things which are extremely rare. This is obviously the most subjective, but we could consider things which are not available in a supermarket as the yardstick. This is not perfect, and any other suggestions are welcome. A question about sumac is an existing example of this.

Answer 1

Digging a little more into the origins of this thread, it seems Allison quoted this from the guidelines:

• Things which have a specific (or few) widely recognised uses which may have other uncommon uses. The question about cornstarch is an existing example of this.

And later commented in this discussion:

Maybe the problem isn't enforcing these guidelines, but with the original guidelines?

I frankly cannot find fault with her argument. I was leery of that particular bullet point even back when it was first posted, but if it's enough to lead one of our current top members astray then there's clearly something wrong with it.

In my opinion, this guideline sucks. Not the guidelines in general - most are quite straightforward - just this particular one about "uncommon uses". By what criteria do we qualify "few", or "uncommon" for that matter? It seems to me that every conceivable question posted under the auspice of the "uncommon uses" guideline would essentially become a list of recipes.

There shouldn't be any gray area here. The whole point of the guidelines was to single out the "extreme" questions that were unique enough to justify their existence. Especially items which aren't normally considered food, but we might also make special exception at our discretion for items that we think most people have never heard of.

I propose a very simple test:

• Is this thing obviously food?

If it is, close it. If it's not, slap on the culinary-uses` tag and downvote answers that contain unqualified recipe requests and don't tell us anything interesting about the ingredient.

How upset would people be if I removed the "uncommon uses" bullet point from the guidelines?

Answer 2

In my opinion, I liked the boundaries outlined at Sam in the old question. They made sense. They made the site better. To me they were relatively clear. Would the question get five or six good answers or largely answers that might belong in Modernist Cuisine? Probably on-topic. Would it generate eight or ten recipes or dishes? Probably off-topic.

While I understand that Seasoned Advice is a place for getting google hits, that doesn't mean that we're a place for answering questions that can easily be answered by a google search. In fact questions that can be answered quickly on google were recently decided as good candidates for closing network wide. If we can google the answer quickly and find most of the answer's we'd list already posted in a clear and easy to find source, it might not be a good candidate for our site.

I use buttermilk regularly. I don't think it's particularly difficult to find uses for it. I couldn't make plenty of the Cooks Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen recipes I love without it. Want to make fried chicken? Soak it in buttermilk for extra flavor and tenderness. Drop biscuits? Wouldn't be the same without buttermilk. Ranch dressing? Much better if it's homemade with buttermilk. A quick google search can come up with the page that had 25 applications I found and more pages that have others.

I found the savory banana application question kind of interesting because I'd never thought of using bananas (at least not the yellow kind from Chiquita, etc.) in a savory application, despite having fried plantains plenty of times. At the same time as I saw the answer count increase I felt that it was turning into more and more of a place where random recipes would be posted as opposed to adding interesting information on chemistry and flavor pairing that would be definitive.

Since I usually cook one meal to last between two and four days I was thrown for a loop by the day old cooked rice question. Maybe this is heresy, but I usually just eat day old cooked rice as part of whatever I made it to go with. The answers were somewhat interesting, but not necessarily different than what I'd get from googling "rice recipe."

I don't want to say I'm calling out the authors of any of these questions. I can see how they'd each one be quite interesting, especially if you're not familiar with that given ingredient. I just don't think they're a fit.