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Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

rknight.me

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Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#111

Post by danielovichdk »

Recipes should be handled like love and fights. Feelings. Understanding of the non-understandable. Emotional to the smell. Adventures to the mouth. Travelling with it. Close your eyes and let it flow from the tongue, dream of where you are with that taste.

Cooking is more like life than mixing things. There is a hidden magic to it. It's the closest thing to magic next to programming.

Exactly like programming. It can get to you and will swallow you whole if you let it.

Go eat now. Eat well. Sleep well. Love well. That is the essence of a good life.

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#113

Post by naet »

1propionyl wrote: post #28

The replies to this post are, unfortunately, very indicative of the negative side of the "(pseudo-)engineering mindset", which is rather close to the model-constructing mindset inherited from economics (reductionism, hiding any variety incurred by real world complexity, etc). I don't see very many people here who seem to really have done a lot of cooking, consider it a serious hobby or profession, etc. None of these…

My wife worked in a higher end catering kitchen and the "recipes" she brought home were crazy to me. They have little instruction other than ingredient ratios and sometimes an extremely rough outline of the technique. I guess a lot of experience is needed to fill out the gaps. As a home cook I would not have been able to follow them without more info.

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#114

Post by deltarholamda »

njtransit wrote: post #64

Perhaps it’s just me, but I’ve cooked recipes off of 50 year old, grease stained index cards written in barely legible cursive, whose ink has all but rubbed entirely away. And it was fine. Worrying about recipe format is like trying to improve reading as a technology. The state of the art is both really simple and really old. It’s hard to mess up (format-wise, recipe content can definitely suck) and it’s hard to impr…

I get the desire to computerize it. Think of all the automation that can be done! Automatic shopping lists! Unit conversions! Scale up or down! Not to mention having a good think about how to organize things appeals to the data-driven mind.

But I find cooking to be resistant to this sort of thing, at least if you have a family. Meal planning is more of a negotiation than a tallying of numbers. You tend to cluster around a few, well-honed recipes that are repeated often. And when you're cooking, having a piece of paper or an index card attached to the vent hood or whatever with a magnet is far more user friendly than having to wake up a tablet or a phone.

(Not to mention passing recipes down through the generations. It's not the same to bequeath the recipes to your grandchildren by saying "give me a ssh key and I'll rsync these MySQL tables to your VPS".)

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#116

Post by alganet »

somethingsome wrote: post #104

It seems written by someone that does not cook, it is missing a lot of informations! In particular, the cooking time is completely useless without the heat power and the kind of pan, and conversions between pans

semweb tech is extensible, you could write a specialized schema or ontology to express more detailed information if you want to.

Think search engines for example. This "cooking time" is often displayed as metadata when you search for recipes. You're just annotating a field for the search engine to display in the results.

Schema.org exists for that. Indexing larger granules of metadata. It is built on RDF so if you need something more specialized, you can use the standards to extend it.

This is actually a fun ontology to think about. You'll need to model pans, ovens and all sorts of cooking hardware. I don't see that knowledge often displayed in recipe websites, so microdata probably isn't the best for a specialized system like that. It would probably use the extended schema/ontology just internally, then publish simplified cooking times for indexing.

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#117

Post by woile »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #85
woile wrote: post #73

Nice, I have also created a language for recipe based on cook-lang (I didn't use cook-lang because I was not convinced by the syntax). The language is called recipe-lang[0] and it powers https://www.reciperium.com Check it out, I've open sourced as well a syntax highlight for vscode, a cli for the terminal, a tutorial and a playground, and the wasm modules. I use the language for more than food recipes, see: https://…

What do you not like about cooklang? I’m in the early stages of building an app around it.

The way ingredients and other things are described. I felt that explaining that a single word ingredient, requires @ only, but if you use multiple words, you have to use @ingredient with space{}, with the empty `{}` at the end can be too complicated to explain.

I felt that for someone who is not familiar with these things, it can be confusing. In recipe-lang the explanation is IMO simpler: wrap the ingredient with `{}`, there are no ambiguities. {salt} or {ingredient with space}, it's quite clear where the ingredient starts and end.

Once they learn that, everything else is a prefix of the curly braces, timer? t{}, link to another recipe? @{}, material? &{}. I'm considering for images something like i{} but I haven't had time to experiment with it.

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#118

Post by alganet »

turboponyy wrote: post #96
chuckl wrote: post #15

Just finished my own overthinking of recipe structures. I figure that a recipe is more or less an upside-down tree! Where you start with a list of all the nodes (ingredients) Have a n:1 relationship with the next series of nodes (steps) until you finish at a single node (the dish you're trying to make) So instead of having a separate chunk of "here's my ingredients" and "let me repeat the ingredients and one by one i…

Except the completion of the preparation of various nodes may have to be synchronized to that of other nodes - i.e. the steps can not be parallelized in the general case. Some nodes expire, experience changes in temperature or moisture distribution and so on. In that sense, there is additional context that your model doesn't account for that may preclude certain nodes from being combined.

How often do you see that knowledge expressed in the recipes themselves?

Microdata doesn't need to _fully_ describe something. It's not describing to a machine how to perform the recipe, it's just annotating the text with useful metadata. It's metadata, doesn't need to be full data.

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#119

Post by retzkek »

yoz-y wrote: post #99
d--b wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

overthinking some more: your idea is great but it removes the one feature that classic recipes have: sequencing. You can have the best of both world, though, if the branches in your tree had some kind of timing associated. Like when you make lasagnas, the bolognese takes 1 hour to cook, while the bechamel takes less than 10 minutes. You need to have a way to say: "while the bolognese is reducing, make the bechamel"

I’ve been cooking with recipes quite a bit lately (before it was just random stuff) and I must say that sequencing is always wrong. Unfortunately they all seem to assume that chopping, cleaning and moving stuff around is all done in 0 time. I wish the recipes would take this into account more. Because of this I actually would prefer the plain tree organisation more.

mise in place is the art of reducing all that other stuff to as close as zero time as possible during the cooking, and many recipes expect the cook to read through first and identify what can be prepared/placed in advance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#120

Post by WorldMaker »

alganet wrote: post #118
turboponyy wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the completion of the preparation of various nodes may have to be synchronized to that of other nodes - i.e. the steps can not be parallelized in the general case. Some nodes expire, experience changes in temperature or moisture distribution and so on. In that sense, there is additional context that your model doesn't account for that may preclude certain nodes from being combined.

How often do you see that knowledge expressed in the recipes themselves? Microdata doesn't need to _fully_ describe something. It's not describing to a machine how to perform the recipe, it's just annotating the text with useful metadata. It's metadata, doesn't need to be full data.

Doesn't mean that there aren't users that would desire a GANTT chart for a recipe (or set of them) if given the opportunity from enough data. Getting an entire meal out on time is one of the oldest schools of project management, after all.
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