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Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

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Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#221

Post by OJFord »

I'm not sure whether to apologise for this being off-topic/too tangential or not, but it seems too good an opportunity to pass up:

Yesterday I was on the verge of Ask-HN-ing if there was anything like Duolingo for mathematics?

I studied it as much as anyone (well..) in EE/CS, but don't use much professionally (less than many, I'm sure). I'm not necessarily looking to advance further than I've studied before (I'd like to, but for me Duolingo wouldn't be a good format for it) - but there's so much I've forgotten and wish I still had an intuition for or could draw on as the reason or an analogy for something.

Can anyone recommend a 'Duolingo for mathematics'?

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#222

Post by ddoolin »

whateveracct wrote: post #160
danpalmer wrote: post #84

I've done a few quizzes on the app now, and I don't get it. The questions feel very contrived, like someone had a quota to fill so just put whatever looked plausible together. They are also _very_ culturally specific. Questions about eggs barely made sense to me being from the UK, with incorrect pack sizes, animal welfare terms, and completely missed our great standards body that makes it easy to know which eggs have…

Cooking has become a very weird thing - people both overrate its difficulty and complexity to the point of phobia..and also consume content of people cooking without ever doing it themselves. So many cooking tik tok etcs are so obviously not good food to make compared to normal stuff. Scrambled eggs are a good thing to learn for a beginner, and maybe the app does try to teach you the real "hard" part of them: Heat co…

This is almost poetic, thank you. As someone who has a very weird and perhaps phobic relationship with cooking, you made it seem more approachable with a few words.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#223

Post by jfim »

asoneth wrote: post #171
EddySchauHai wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to see a cooking teaching app that allows users to work through a recipe in varying levels of detail. For example, consider a Lasagna. A lower level recipe may use ricotta for a quick and easy version, a higher level might explain step by step how to make a bechamel, and the "hardest" level may just say "make a bechamel". Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying. Because of yo…

Not only do I not know how to make a bechamel, this is the first time I've heard this word or the expression "mother sauces". (Maybe because I'm only a quarter Italian?) If we're going to gatekeep cooking behind a lot of prior knowledge perhaps it would be even more efficient to reduce the lasagna recipe to a single sentence: "Make a lasagna."

Mother sauces are a French thing. They're béchamel, velouté, espagnole, tomate, and mayonnaise.

Some stuff can be made shorter by just saying things like "deglaze the pan" instead of "pour some flavorful liquid such as stock, broth, or wine in this hot pan that you think would compliment the taste of whatever you're cooking and make sure to scrape the brown bits while at it." It's the same thing as programming, one might say to a professional programmer to "sum these items" while a beginning programmer would get "write a for loop with an accumulator variable, and for each iteration of the loop add the item to your accumulator."

They're both the same thing, it's just that one is more succinct.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#224

Post by TheDarkestSoul »

mizzao wrote: post #168
Mikeb85 wrote: post #163

I wish you good luck but I don't get it either. The thing that makes Duolingo great is that right away you learn words in a new language. It hooks you. Within 1 lesson you know several words or a phrase with a few variations. This is more just random trivia about food that no one cares about. I started with the cheeseburger recipe (apparently an advanced lesson or something). Right away it's asking me a bunch of ques…

The goal we're building toward is that you can pick any recipe on the Internet and learn it in this way. But first we have to start with a small group (beginners) and make sure it's actually fun and interesting for them. I explain how this works at https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope The unintuitive observation for beginners is that their pain doesn't seem to be cooking the food and making the recipe. It's "I d…

I don't mean to come off rude but your app comes off like it's aimed at people who are almost literally afraid and bewildered by the sight of a pan or stove or avocado like the apes in 2001 coming across the monolith. With people I know who don't cook it's usually due to wanting to avoid the hassle they think exists because of misconceptions about the difficulty or time it takes. I'm not sure there are that many people who are avoiding it because they're intimidated to the point that they need to be calmed down by playing a matching game with different spices

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#225

Post by TheDarkestSoul »

colpabar wrote: post #44
mattknightlewis wrote: post #27

What I really need is a browser extension that recognizes I'm on a recipe website and automatically scrolls past the recipe writer's whole autobiography to the section with the ingredients and instructions.

people make comments like this often and it makes me wonder if you actually really need it, because you can very easily find several extensions that do just that. As an experiment, I copied your comment into google verbatim, and found exactly what you are looking for.

I don't understand. But then what do I have to complain about on the internet?

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#226

Post by jfindley »

blindseer wrote: post #93
danpalmer wrote: post #84

I've done a few quizzes on the app now, and I don't get it. The questions feel very contrived, like someone had a quota to fill so just put whatever looked plausible together. They are also _very_ culturally specific. Questions about eggs barely made sense to me being from the UK, with incorrect pack sizes, animal welfare terms, and completely missed our great standards body that makes it easy to know which eggs have…

I tried the app too and experienced exactly the same thing. I’m surprised the app is getting as much positive reception on here as it is. Sure it is cute and “gamey”, but I don’t particularly think it’s even useful. I’d rather have the knowledge graph displayed to me in a way I can easily find information or navigate it. Why would I EVER want to use this to learn something new when I could just read the information a…

There's actually a huge amount to learn about cooking with eggs. I don't think this app is going to teach anyone much that's meaningful in its current state, but if you change your mind and want to really learn about the glorious complexity of cooking with eggs I'd recommend the book Ruhlman's Twenty as a great starting point.

That book does what this app says it does (but doesn't), and teaches you why things are done the way they are. It also occasionally has a recipe.

To the authors of the app, some suggestions. Firstly get rid of the quizzes. You don't need them. Get users to actually cook something, and then follow up with "this is what you should have got", and "if you ended up with X this is what you did wrong". Secondly this app is trying to teach all the wrong things (and getting many of them wrong too!). You should be doing things like teaching people what oil to use for what task, depending on smoke point, taste, nutrition etc rather than having opinions about how many people own a wok. Read the book I mention above - it'll give you a much better template for doing this well.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#227

Post by dandelany »

EddySchauHai wrote: post #195
tclancy wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mother sauces is absolutely gatekeeping. You can get pretty far, and even know how to turn a roux into a béchamel without ever knowing it’s a mother sauce or that there are others.

We're talking about a course on cooking here, how is it gatekeeping to talk about cooking 101 subjects?

It's not cooking 101, it's at least cooking 102 or 103. I know you didn't do it intentionally, but when newbies get into a new subject they are often turned off by comments like yours which boil down to "oh noo you can't do it that way, you simply must do insert term of art or else insert negative hyperbole" - it's precisely what's meant by "gatekeeping". If I told my girlfriend a million Italians were crying because she made lasagna wrong she'd probably slap me.

It also gets into the complaint about cultural specificity from the original comment. It might be Cooking 101 - for French cuisine. But to insist people learn to make the French mother sauces from scratch before eg. tacos or curry seems a bit too narrow-minded for "Cooking 101" generally speaking. I think "Salt Fat Acid Heat" has the right idea here.

edit PS: there is almost always a non-gatekeepy way to say the exact same thing. "In my experience, a homemade bechamel adds an incredible homemade taste to lasagna. I'd definitely recommend learning about the French 'mother sauces' sooner rather than later!"

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#228

Post by qu4z-2 »

motbus3 wrote: post #197
EddySchauHai wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to see a cooking teaching app that allows users to work through a recipe in varying levels of detail. For example, consider a Lasagna. A lower level recipe may use ricotta for a quick and easy version, a higher level might explain step by step how to make a bechamel, and the "hardest" level may just say "make a bechamel". Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying. Because of yo…

there is one to learn with real chefs. there is even a hardware that you put on top of your cooking station to record. you get back a full review of every step you did. from how to slice perfectly, to keeping your utensils neat. cookwithmoment.com i am sure they have a english page somewhere and you can order in euroupe. but for some reason it is showing up only in portuguese

For me it's showing up in Japanese... I'm interested, but there's no obvious way to get anything in English.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#229

Post by gnicholas »

dmitriid wrote: post #203
tclancy wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mother sauces is absolutely gatekeeping. You can get pretty far, and even know how to turn a roux into a béchamel without ever knowing it’s a mother sauce or that there are others.

It's not gatekeeping. I wish I had someone teach me the mother sauces (or the base sauces of the French cuisine) because: - most of them are ridiculously easy - most of them go with most food - most of them are required for most food - most of them are the basis of many other sauces - they are better than store-bought ones Any recipe apart from maybe putting sliced cheese on sliced bread will be more complex than bei…

> - most of them are required for most food

Most foods, or most traditional French cuisine? I've never even heard the term, despite cooking pretty decent food for decades.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#230

Post by whateveracct »

ddoolin wrote: post #222
whateveracct wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooking has become a very weird thing - people both overrate its difficulty and complexity to the point of phobia..and also consume content of people cooking without ever doing it themselves. So many cooking tik tok etcs are so obviously not good food to make compared to normal stuff. Scrambled eggs are a good thing to learn for a beginner, and maybe the app does try to teach you the real "hard" part of them: Heat co…

This is almost poetic, thank you. As someone who has a very weird and perhaps phobic relationship with cooking, you made it seem more approachable with a few words.

Thank you for the kind words, and I hope you do approach it! My wife and I recently started cooking together all the time and it's become one of our favorite hobbies. Spending a couple hours building a meal as a team after work is great fun.

If you want a recommendation, I highly recommend Laura Vitale's YouTube channel. She helped us get brave enough to do it. I use her recipes all the time (take your pick - it'll be good. The recent "one pan orzo chicken" is already a staple around here), and her videos really show her making the meal. So when you're making it yourself, you really feel like you've seen everything before :)

good luck on your cooking journey!

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