A recipe is a pre-configured series of modules and pipelines. Each recipe can be thought of as it's own special purpose static site generator. For example, the Blog recipe can be thought of as analogous to a tool like Jekyll. Recipes can still make use of configuration files to further tweak the generation process, but they aren't required.

Pipelines

The pipelines and other content from a recipe is loaded before your configuration file. This makes it possible to change the behavior of the recipe in your own configuration file. For example, you can prevent a particular pipeline in the recipe from running by clearing it (though you can't remove pipelines):

Pipelines["Pages"].Clear();

You can also substitute your own logic for a recipe-provided pipeline:

Pipelines["Pages"].Clear();
Pipelines["Pages"].Add(
    ReadFiles("**/*.md"),
    // ... more modules
);

There's also no reason why you can't add your own pipelines to a recipe to implement some additional custom behavior. Combining a recipe with your own pipelines and modules is a very powerful way to customize your generation without having to start from scratch. You can even use IPipelineCollection.InsertBefore() and IPipelineCollection.InsertAfter() overloads to control where in the generation process you want your custom pipelines to run relative to those from the recipe.