I re-write recipies to call things by different names when they change.
I got sick of losing track of the current state of something when a recipe is all "take the eggs, scamble the eggs, add the eggs to the mixture, let the mixture sit, cook the mixture, cut the mixture.
My recipies are; scramble the eggs to make scrambled eggs, add the scrambled eggs to the mixture to make eggy mixture, let the eggy mixture sit to make sat mixture, cook the sat mixture to make cooked mixture, cut the cooked mixture to serve.
So, do you think it would be a good idea to have a "Copy & Edit" functionality where somebody could copy a recipe (even one of their own) and make changes based on it?
I never thought about this, and I think it might be a brilliant idea.
I think you presented this too early. There's barely any content on it. You need to seed it with recipes first so us users can actually fully appreciate what the product is.
There's "Featured makelists" named "Test" and "Untitled Makelist." This site isn't ready for an audience yet.
I can only second this. The placeholder in the search bar is “ex: tacos, breakfast, …” so I searched for tacos - zero results. Having a bit more content would likely leave a better first impression.
So, we were trying to display the recipe creation software but I realized now that we should upload some of the couple hundred recipes we have. I have just been mainly sharing this with engineering friends to get input on the software, not the recipes.
But, I'm going to begin uploading them all over the next few days. I am also getting involved with people who have more recipes to upload some of their own.
Got it. We're doing this and I'll upload more about our progress once we have a decent docket of recipes and makelists, and sort through several other details of the website.
Sorry for being grumpy, but over time it becomes rather frustrating to see projects like that. The problem I encounter with recipes is that sometimes it's hard to find properly written (and preferably overall nice) ones: not just that units of measurements tend to be odd, but they often use volumes where you'd expect weights (particularly for baking), or don't mention important parameters (like vinegar solution for pickling, where it's commonly recommended to follow recipes exactly, precisely to get the acidity right), or would sometimes include odd/unexpected steps/proportions without an explanation. Yet the "solutions" I keep seeing are just some overengineered languages/formats/databases/websites, and I'm unsure what they are even supposed to achieve (except maybe for some monetization for its authors, or being a fun or educational project, which is good, but still not useful for potential users). This one just lists regular startup buzzwords, and the website seems to be quite broken in FF even after allowing JS. If we had one properly written Wikimedia Cookbook recipe instead of each one of those custom cooking/recipe projects, I guess there would be a rather comprehensive cookbook by now.
Frankly I think the real problem is that most home cooks or even pro recipe writers are actually pretty clueless about these things. They don't have any formal education and they just fluked into something that works for them but they don't know why. So you end up with a majority of recipes online being overly specific in places that don't matter and really unspecific in those that do. Then you follow these recipes and some work and some don't and you develop your own intuition, which is very specific to your own setup and your ingredients.
I have been watching Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, the UK one, which is not very dramatic like the US one, and instead actually really focussed on the restaurant and the kitchen. One thing that amazes me is the clear, laser focussed simplicity of the dishes that he suggests. He and the other chefs (at least those ones who have been to catering school) simply have an education that allows them to cook a basic pasta dish that will blow away any intricate home cooking recipe. Not only are home cooking recipes generally worse in outcome, they are actually more complicated, more difficult, and more expensive to make. Uneducated cooks don't seem to trust the basic flavours and textures of what they are cooking.
This, so much. In my opinion cooking is equal parts mindful practice, science, and art.
Probably my favorite cooking book is one that doesn't have more than maybe 5-10 recipes in about 900+ pages : Harold McGee's On Food And Cooking
Seeing yet another site claim to make it more enjoyable / "build communities" by ... presenting more recipes ... it just feels like mis-clicking on one of those Facebook feed "news" articles from some clickbait outlet.
If you've ever actually seen '47g eggs' it's surely almost certainly because it's been scaled down from a much larger (i.e. commercial) recipe where that would make more sense.
You can buy (in the UK anyway) cartons of egg whites/yolks (separately) - which I think makes a tonne of sense for non-egg-whole cooking, and would love for it to be more common (i.e. cheaper, came out considerably more expensive when I did some 'napkin math' on it a while ago; separating eggs isn't hard/annoying enough to warrant it, I concluded) - but even then you'd surely measure it by volume, not mass.
Eggs by mass is surely whole, shell included; so yeah it's pretty much inherently approximate - as close as you can easily get to 47 (or more likely 470 or 4700) grams with whole eggs.
I have Modernist Cuisine at Home cookbook. Which is probably at the far end of how recipes are done. And their recipes generally make lot of sense. Everything has scaling percentages from certain base ingredient. And recipes are divided to sections with steps inside with ingredients for each listed in section.
Nice approach when you at times don't want to make full recipe. And makes instructions much clearer.
Modernist cuisine has their own recipes. The problem is converting already existing recipes to the new format.
Let's assume that we make MC standard - you can get Hesston and Alton Brown on board. The bakers too. The egullet guys and gallals. But how many of the already existing food chefs, blogs will be willing to convert especially the one that have a bit more romantic connection to cooking.
Anything aimed at professionals---or even serious amateurs---will be written as bakers' percentages, which lists the ingredients as a percentage of the flour weight.
Scales are great though. You just keep adding stuff to the same bowl: it's faster and there are way fewer utensils to clean.
It's not for flour or yeast. Everything else that is not compactable you can get away with volume. But flour is different beast. Best to look at dough consistency if you know how it should look.
IMO, What we need is a website that is a combination of something like Cooklang[0] and a git forge - This way you can "fork" ;) recipes to modify and maintain attributions and have a machine readable format to convert weights, calculate dynamic portions etc.
So, I just saw a comment from another person and I think it could be pretty powerful. Are you agreeing that there should be some sort of "Copy & Edit" functionality for pre-existing recipes that you could then enhance/change?
I think that could bring about better enhancement procedures.
As for scaling portions/weights/etc. I know that we are working on something for this, but we wanted to start building a large recipe-based before building the tools for this. (We need more data for that)
Please fix the flashes of white/whatever content when navigating. This is one of the busiest pages I have ever seen when it comes to initial rendering - there’s even a text overlay that fades out on every route change (?). When swiping back on mobile Safari, the whole page sometimes turns white for a few seconds.
So much text on the landing page, but actual content is missing. As an engineer, I am interested in trying things out.
If "makelist" is the thing that separates this site from others, it is strange that I could not find a single makelist to see what that is. I still don't know what it is.
You're totally right on †his. I realized that we need to put on recipes and give a better view. Also, apologies for the slow responses. I'm not spam, I just was asleep.
I think we're going to start uploading our recipes and improve some of the link functionality, plus change our search based on tags, so that we can make it all better.
This is a new product and we made a stupid assumption to show the functionality without recipes uploaded yet. But we realize now that the recipes are the thing that makes the functionality make sense.
Oh well, we haven't uploaded recipes yet since we're just finishing up the work on the software, so that's why. We're just trying to fix up loose ends and things like the links... Once we get everything sorted, we have a couple hundred recipes we're going to put on the site.
When Engineers Think Cooking/Recipes Could Be More Enjoyable, we get a website with useless fade-ins/fade-outs that are choppy even on a MacBook Pro M1 Max with links that are not links, pages that jump around when you as much as click on something, and a cursor:hand overlay over 90% of the page.
The real problem that needs solving and that is worth addressing is finding good recipes that you enjoy. They have to hit your taste buds right and provide the perfect level of instructions for your cooking skills and confidence.
The best way to achieve this right now is to find one good cook and hand pick the material they have and that you enjoy. Going through other cooks they shoutout to is also worth.
Right now, I read undejeunerdesoleil.com (fr/it) weekly and copy what I like to Trello. I also infrequently read other blogs and do the same. Ingredients are checklists, instructions in the description, one column is used for shopping, one for what I can cook with what I bought and one for holding recipes. A little automation to reset checklists.
I have hundreds of recipes. It’s still hard or time consuming finding good recipes.
We built a system to create your own recipes online, manage others' recipes, form makelists, think playlists for recipes, with recipes from the site...
So, you guys think that for continuing, my team should:
- upload the recipes we have before showing more people (several hundred in our docket)
- fix the links situation to contain the actual hrefs
- change the loading screen
- be more distinct on makelists
- Content-heavy and searching better enhanced for recipe tags
Without reading the article: what I think many recipes are lacking is the fact that cooking is typically a complex process involving heat (and heat-transfer), humidity managment, etc.
If you put the same vegetable in a pot with an lid compared to one without a lid the outcome will be quite different.
Sorry to link to another project, but when I think of engineers and recipes, I can only think of "Cooking for Engineers". Here's an example of the kind of diagrams they use:
I would also recommend killing all the social media buttons on your site and replacing them with simple links. Your site loads a ton of garbage from facebook, instagram, pinterest, etsy.
The site also feels quite slow, has flickers of unstyled content before the page loads, and overall feels quite "busy" for a recipe site.
I thought I'd like that table, but in practice reading it is awful, it takes too long to actually match the subjects to the actions, which tells a lot about the state of "UI by engineers"
If one wants to list the ingredients once, at least make it vertical and add some arrows:
butter -> soften
|
sugar v
brown sugar ---> beat
vanilla extract |
v
eggs ---> beat in one egg at a time
etc
Arrows point to a mixing point, plus an additional action. Reading it is simple:
1. First take the butter and soften
2. Then take the sugar/vanilla and beat it
3. Then add eggs one at a time.
I never have to move my eyes to the top of the instructions again, like you would have to do with a table where distinguishing each steps leads your eyes to follow the lines until the list.
The only advantage of that table is that preparing two mixes at once is easier than this.
Okay, I think it's time to throw down about that cookie recipe [0].
Better version:
- Use 1 c. white sugar + 1/2 c. brown sugar, rather than 3/4 + 3/4
- Reduce flour to 2-1/4 cups. And make sure it's white, or else you'll need to tweak the recipe further.
- Don't actively soften the butter with a microwave, because you'll probably overshoot and end up with flat cookies. Better to just let it come up to room temperature.
- Optional: Refrigerate the dough before making the balls. It's easier to work with, and it helps you avoid flattened cookies.
- The baking time isn't necessarily 10 minutes. Start checking them at 9 minutes, and use your eyes and nose to judge doneness. (It takes practice to calibrate.)
[0] Smacktalk intended for humor purposes only. But I'm 100% confident in my recipe's superiority :)
Hah I'm sure yours is better, I'm just more interested in the format of the recipe itself (I just picked a random recipe on the site for an example).
I wonder if your recipe would fit well in that "timeline box" recipe card format, with all the caveats on how to prepare butter or optionally refrigerate the dough.
Oh this is nice too! It took a bit of time to visually parse it but I would guess this allows for a lot more flexibility in expressing the actions, and where they occur. I like the dedicated lanes for each cooking dish, reminds me of network diagrams :)
I got sick of losing track of the current state of something when a recipe is all "take the eggs, scamble the eggs, add the eggs to the mixture, let the mixture sit, cook the mixture, cut the mixture.
My recipies are; scramble the eggs to make scrambled eggs, add the scrambled eggs to the mixture to make eggy mixture, let the eggy mixture sit to make sat mixture, cook the sat mixture to make cooked mixture, cut the cooked mixture to serve.
And so on.