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Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine

stovetop.app

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Re: Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine

#111

Post by LordAtlas »

dharmab wrote: post #48
artursapek wrote: post #32

I have wanted to build something like this, but the real pain point to solve is recipe blogs are a pain to navigate. They’re covered in ads, popups, and the first 50% of the page is some story that nobody wants to read. What we need is wikipedia for cooking.

It's an expensive paid subscription, but the America's Test Kitchen website is basically a professionally maintained cooking information index. The standards of information are much higher than a wiki (they do scientific method testing of every tool, technique and recipe). Unfortunately there is one thing that annoys me, which is that there are full page ads for their other products, even if you are already a subscri…

As an Indian, I've found some of their Indian food recipes on Youtube to be downright terrible.

Re: Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine

#112

Post by amflare »

m12k wrote: post #31

Great idea! But please read https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...

> Considering only positive and negative ratings (i.e. not a 5-star scale)

Is there anywhere that details the changes necessary to use for other rating scales (such as the 5-star/10-star system)?

Re: Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine

#113

Post by hinkley »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #105
john-tells-all wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! Cookbooks have editors, and the recipes are tested so they can be made with common ingredients. They want cooks to be successful! Oddly I've found cookbook recipes to ALWAYS be better than online recipes. Book recipes tend to be shorter, clearer, and more successful. Online recipes are okay but sometimes don't come out the way I'd expect, they're more fiddly. It's great to have options!

The barrier to publishing online is lower, so recipes are always hit or miss. Really depends on the author.

The ecosystem of publishing also has people who have to exhibit their value to the process or get eliminated. Online publishing removes both technical and social friction for putting half-baked ideas out there. We haven't invented a good way to have one but not the other yet.

Re: Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine

#114

Post by dazc »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #73
VRay wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, what a disappointing thread.. the BBC site is great except it’s all weird British ingredients and units (how do I convert grams of British flour into cups of American flour without a scale?) The OP’s site is a really nice search engine, but it dumps you into the recipes’ unreadable SEO trash pit websites instead of parsing out the data PlainOldRecipe isn’t working to strip recipes down for me

> how do I convert grams of British flour into cups of American flour without a scale? A web search will turn up dozens of helpful sites that will do the conversion for you. Or the US could try joining the rest of the world.

To be fair, the UK went metric many decades ago yet we still use MPH on the roads; and most people would struggle to tell you how tall they are or how much they weigh using only metric measurements.

Re: Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine

#115

Post by joshstrange »

I'll take this opportunity to mention one of my favorite apps: Paprika [0].

It's a recipe app that can import from just about every recipe site/blog/etc and if it can't auto-import it then you can use the really easy tools to grab all the pertinent information. Once imported you can edit/scale/rate/tag/categorize/etc the recipe. Furthermore it has meal planning tools and a grocery list built in. I love the grocery list feature because you can easily click "Add to Grocery List" (of which you can have multiple if you want) and then just uncheck all the things you already have. It has a "Pantry" feature but I've never used it, I assume it will auto-uncheck items you already have when you go to add them to the grocery list but I'm not sure about that.

It's great to import a recipe and then tweak it after making it and see what works/doesn't so you don't have to find the recipe again later and/or remember the changes you made to it.

It's cross platform (Mac/iOS/Windows/Android) and running it on an older tablet in my kitchen is an awesome experience (timers built in, switch between multiple recipes easily, cross out ingredients after adding them, etc).

I have no connection to the company, I just love the app. If I had 1 request it would be a way to share recipes with friends through some "social"/"friend-ing" concept in the app (not using a social network). You can share a ".paprikarecipe" file that includes everything about the recipe but passing around a file isn't always easy and Discord just cuts off extensions longer than like 12 characters which makes it harder.

[0] https://www.paprikaapp.com/

Re: Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine

#116

Post by VRay »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #73
VRay wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, what a disappointing thread.. the BBC site is great except it’s all weird British ingredients and units (how do I convert grams of British flour into cups of American flour without a scale?) The OP’s site is a really nice search engine, but it dumps you into the recipes’ unreadable SEO trash pit websites instead of parsing out the data PlainOldRecipe isn’t working to strip recipes down for me

> how do I convert grams of British flour into cups of American flour without a scale? A web search will turn up dozens of helpful sites that will do the conversion for you. Or the US could try joining the rest of the world.

Haha, yeah. I wanted to turn my flour, milk, and baking powder into pancakes, but it’s surprisingly nightmarish to get the two floating point numbers I need in order to get the ratios right

“Why not simply…”

Re: Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine

#117

Post by hinkley »

blowski wrote: post #16

My normal challenge with recipes is that I have no idea how authoritative the reviews are. On some sites, there are a lot of recipes that make no sense whatsoever, and yet have 5 stars.

As I mentioned elsewhere, quality of a recipe can't be plotted on a line. It's at least a 2D space. The wrong mix of ingredients can be bad, but the instructions can also not be repeatable. And repeatability might even have dimensions of its own. Some ingredients age better than others, for instance, and some measuring systems are more consistent. Baking powder and spices are examples of the former, and brown sugar for the latter, or possibly both.

Re: Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine

#118

Post by hinkley »

blowski wrote: post #88
grogenaut wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused by what you mean by authoritative. Cooking isn't really like math, there's no canonical pineapple pizza recipe unless you go too vague like: dough, sauce, ham, pineapple, delicious. Or do you mean real reviews where the stars mean something? For recipes, stars often let me down as they seem to be more related to how the recipe worked and could be followed, not how good it tasted. And the flavors seem to…

I've seen five star recipes say things like "Hawaiian pizza - add pineapple, tuna fish, and lasagna". So, yeah, the star ratings are meaningless - but then there are too many recipes to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The target audience for this recipe is a Venn Diagram of "people who love lasagna but nobody else in their life does" and "people who can't eat ham for religious or dietary reasons" and "people who have no reverence whatsoever for pizza" (which also, according to some, is a superset of Hawaiian pizza eaters to begin with).

That's not a tiny number but it's not large either.

Re: Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine

#119

Post by forgotmypw17 »

milomildus wrote: post #2

Hi HN I wanted to be able to search recipes from sources I knew I could trust. I also wanted a way to sort recipes by rating and include and exclude ingredients I already had. Going forward, I aim to add more sources, better ingredient filtering (hierarchical) and more dimensions (cuisine, meal time, etc.) Let me know what you think! One thing I struggled with was whether to includes mode with pictures or not. I can’…

Thank you for sharing your project.

I like the minimal design.

Please take this as constructive criticism, because I like your project overall, and want to only encourage you:

Please consider testing your project in older browsers, and including no-JS configurations in your testing suite.

It is easy, as a developer with a beefy machine with the latest and greatest installed, to overlook these possibilities, and it severely limits the accessibility of your site by older devices, slower connections, security-conscious users, and other edge cases.

Re: Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine

#120

Post by mfashby »

VRay wrote: post #61
mfashby wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://plainoldrecipe.com/ does this!

Man, what a disappointing thread.. the BBC site is great except it’s all weird British ingredients and units (how do I convert grams of British flour into cups of American flour without a scale?) The OP’s site is a really nice search engine, but it dumps you into the recipes’ unreadable SEO trash pit websites instead of parsing out the data PlainOldRecipe isn’t working to strip recipes down for me

haha,

if somehow you could combine the search of OPs site, plus the garbage stripping convenience of plainoldrecipe, plug in some really good unit conversion system, & save my preferences while you're at it, you might have the ultimate recipe tool.

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