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Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

parsnip.ai

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Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#231

Post by powersnail »

EligibleSpatula wrote: post #118
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…

Apologies if the wok explanation came across as insensitive or racist. The wording used was 'a wok is unwieldy and uncommon in a lot of home kitchens'. As one of the two Asian writers who this got past, we believed that this statement was true enough for North American beginners looking to learn how to make scrambled eggs. I have changed the copy there and endeavour to make sure that we are more culturally sensitive…

It's not racist. It's just untrue. While the wok is indeed uncommon in NA, as compared with skillets, there's nothing unwieldy about it, in terms of scrambling an egg. You can scramble eggs in a wok in exactly the way as you would a skillet.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#232

Post by jmckib »

timgarner0 wrote: post #34
cossatot wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter...

Can't believe I didn't know this exists, just installed the Chrome version, thanks! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...

I tried it and it didn't even work on seriouseats, a very well known recipe site with (IMO) way too much text before the recipes.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#233

Post by quasarj »

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…

lol, I read your comment and was like "pfft look at this smug UK-er thinking his best-eggs-in-the-world mean the app sucks" and then the first question I got was ridiculous and suggested I should always buy the cheapest eggs haha. You were absolutely right.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#234

Post by ac29 »

mizzao wrote: post #173
ac29 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The picture of quizzes on their blog post was odd too. The idea of washing ground beef to make a hamburger is very weird. Sounds like the result of an algorithm that decided that washing {ingredient} was always the first step in any recipe.

I'm 99% percent that washing ground beef is a wrong answer -- what we teach NOT to do is just as important as teaching what to do. Same way how it's more important to know the ways a startup fails than to see what the successful ones did. But if it isn't, mea culpa and I'll get that fixed.

It wasnt a multiple choice question, it was a put the steps in order question.

link: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#235

Post by EddySchauHai »

gnicholas wrote: post #229
dmitriid wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most Western foods! I mentioned in another thread that recently I started learning Creole cooking which starts with a dark roux followed by stopping the cooking process with the holy trinity. This is very similar to espagnole mother sauce and a modified mirepoix (peppers instead of carrots). If you take a cooking course in almost any Western country it'll start with traditional French and Italian methods as a lot of cooking styles evolved from that. Certainly a lot of cooks in the 18th and 19th centuries trained in France (and Italy) taking their skills back home, not to speak of colonization by the French and Spanish.

It's a fun way to learn history actually, following the influences of cooking techniques and trade. And the French were very influential here. The Spanish influenced Mexican cuisine when they conquered the Aztecs, and Spanish aristocratic chefs trained in France, so you can see modifications of classical French cuisine in Mexican prep edited to local spice profiles and ingredients. Etc... Just look at pan dulce!

French cooking is the C of programming in many ways!

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#236

Post by EddySchauHai »

dandelany wrote: post #227
EddySchauHai wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becaus…

I do like Salt Fat Acid Heat too :)

But I really didn't think this thread would go this way, it was clear to me OP knew his way around a kitchen and was from Europe so knew enough about Italian cooking stereotypes to understand the intended humor.

Fwiw, you learn mother sauces after six weeks of knife skills at Auguste Escoffier in the US so you could definitely be right about 102 :)

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#237

Post by tempe1h1 »

what I don't like about this (in general) is that it's part of the overruling ideology that will turn the internet from a place where you can look up how to make any recipe for free into a place where you have pay somebody a monthly fee to look up how much sugar per cup of flour goes in some dish (to put an example)

of course, this is not exclusive to this project in particular, but it's a crummy trend that just keeps getting worse. and this project is part of this wave.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#239

Post by mandarax8 »

Ekaros wrote: post #169
ac29 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The picture of quizzes on their blog post was odd too. The idea of washing ground beef to make a hamburger is very weird. Sounds like the result of an algorithm that decided that washing {ingredient} was always the first step in any recipe.

Washing ground meat? Just no.. There are few cases when it might make sense like when the skin has impurities like feathers or hair, but generally it is not recommended. I would throw instructions right out if they even suggest something going against modern basic foot safety.

It is a thing though, look up 'keema matar' for example. But it has nothing to do with cleaning the meat afaik, just a texture thing. Definitely not for making hamburgers though.

Re: Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

#240

Post by klipt »

arcticbull wrote: post #215
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.

"Mother sauces" is not gatekeeping lol, its an industry term. It's no more gatekeeping than "data structure." I don't understand at all, honestly - I see a term I don't know, I grab the googs and figure it out. My first reaction isn't to accuse the person who knows something I don't of gatekeeping.

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