What about the table format used by https://www.cookingforengineers.com/ ?
Though, tables in markdown are not so easy to read unless you put effort into formatting the data.
Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should
41–50 of 140 posts
Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should
#42Just 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…
This is just like the Cooking for Engineers recipe format. If you haven't seen it, click on any recipe and scroll down to the bottom.
Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should
#43Just 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…
What if the same ingredient is used twice in a recipe, for example for cooking and finishing?
Here is an example from Cooking for Engineers - Lemon Bars. If you scroll down to the recipe you can see it uses all-purpose flour twice and lists it two times on the left side of the table.
Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should
#44Here's my favorite format, which my sister and I made. It doesn't work well for all recipes, but it does for lots of them. Minimizes words, easier to visualize steps.
Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should
#45Just 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…
This is just like the Cooking for Engineers recipe format. If you haven't seen it, click on any recipe and scroll down to the bottom. https://www.cookingforengineers.com/
that's interesting! Same concept.
I initially got the idea from the book Cooking for Geeks https://www.cookingforgeeks.com/
I wonder if they got it from Cooking for Engineers
Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should
#46Many years ago I experimented with making recipes into Gantt charts. For more complex recipes this proved incredibly useful. I spent some time trying to automate turning some of the recipe formats into Gantts, but it was pretty cumbersome. I'll bet a good LLM would make this achievable now. For an example, here's a gantt chart for Beef Bourguignon: https://ibb.co/c3TVTnX Note that when I print it on a (physical) reci…
I use a version of this preparing for the holidays when I have multiple dishes all trying to finish at approximately the same time.
I use a vertical grid format, top to bottom, with rows bucketed into 10 minute increments. Columns are different cooking implements, so I can ensure I am not over allocating space in the oven/microwave/whatever nor my ability to manipulate the next dish.
Makes it trivial to assess where I am in preparing everything on game day. Also, it gives me a historical artifact for the meal. Which is unexpectedly neat to reference.
Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should
#47Just 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…
Some recipes end up with more than one dish, like when you prepare a thing and its accompanying sauce together.
I guess superficially you can join them together with a final node that is like "serve all the dishes".
Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should
#48Recipes are a pretty interesting case because they're right on the edge between text with a bit of markup, and data with a lot of text.
Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should
#49Just 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…
Well, it would be more like a directed acyclic graph, not a tree, because you can re-use nodes.
(And it's not even necessarily acyclic, because eg sourdough or master stock is perhaps best modelled as a cycle.)
In any case, looking at a recipe as a tree or a graph is a very limited view:
A great recipe isn't a list of steps to produce 'something'. A great recipe has a dish in mind with a specific taste (or a specific family of tastes with knobs you can turn), and the author has worked out what parts of the recipe you need to adapt in what ways to compensate or take advantage of current local conditions.
Eg some days it's warmer than others, so you need to adjust your fermentation times. Or some parts of the world have harder water than others. Or your available veggies might have different amounts of moisture etc.
Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should
#50Just 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…
Of course, when thinking of actual trees, it would resemble a right-side up tree.