Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

rknight.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 140 posts

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#51

Post by DavidPeiffer »

Since people are posting their respective recipe formats, I'll throw in one created by a friend from college. I haven't tried any recipes in this format, but the color coding of processing/ingredient blocks to the vertical time axis and clear listing of how ingredients get processed together are appealing.

I've had multiple recipes on common recipe sites in which, mid-cooking I've realized were missing steps, didn't mention reserving a portion for later, or some elements were not impacted by the serving size multiplier. A diagram of some sort could help me reduce my error rate.

http://torfinseth.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Bu...

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#52

Post by askvictor »

numlocked wrote: post #9

Many 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 was having this discussion with a workmate. Where this approach really shines is when you need arrange a number of recipe (for example, for a dinner party). Being able to put together different recipe modules into a meal, then know when to do each section would be fun. Though totally over thinking it.

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#54

Post by Terr_ »

mattdesl wrote: post #12

With latest LLMs I feel there is less and less need to be structured about authoring recipes. I now jot down rough notes in Obsidian when I make a meal I like, and let AI re-format it if I want to share the full recipe with somebody. This also lets me control the output: if I’m sending the recipe to somebody who is new to cooking, I might ask for a more detailed output than if they were only interested in my flavour…

> With latest LLMs I feel there is less and less need to be structured about authoring recipes.

Assuming the LLM doesn't unpredictably add something poisonous. :p

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42123455

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#55

Post by dmje »

I'm entirely in the "make it easy" camp. I'd rather spend more time gathering, cooking and eating recipes than developing an over-complex schema which I have to think about all the time. I found this [0] which converts markdown and just keep my recipes in Obsidian with a simple ChronoSync to periodically upload stuff to the family recipe website. I did dabble with a scraper that turns web recipes into this same markdown format which is quite fun but really just simple as possible is the way for me!

[0] https://github.com/jeffThompson/Recipes

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#56

Post by Terr_ »

chefandy wrote: post #6
Finnucane wrote: post #2

A nice demonstration of how JSON is a stupid way to manage complex text documents. It is not clear why that would be better than an xml-type arrangement like cut your apple into slices Or even just plain text.

As someone that's written a whole lot of code parsing both complex XML and JSON, I'd go with a more restrictive JSON format over a more idiomatically correct and elegant (from the data perspective) XML format any day. Complex XML sucks for storing structured data unless it's as restrictive as a JSON document, and then... The simple use case for XML is always easy, but then it always ends up looking like this: prepare…

My gut feeling is that there's something going on here with dueling priorities between (A) the best editing experience with a plain text editor vs. (B) the clearest storage format. This leads to things like "too much inlining" or "too much duplication".

In contrast, imagine relaxing the everything-in-notepad requirement, imagine a renderer that can easily display cross-referenced materials in a readable way. Or a step beyond that, an editor which also gives you "jump to definition" etc.

That change permits a much more internally-consistent XML file, such as one where "materials" and "steps" are separate sections, and any step can references a material that is being used as input or output, with something like .

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#59

Post by beAbU »

stevage wrote: post #47
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…

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".

Some dishes require more overlap, which will be tricky to write in this format.

E.g. taking the pan juices and turning that into a sauce. It's a separate process/dish, yet wholly dependant on the other process completing a critical step.

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#60

Post by account42 »

stevage wrote: post #47
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…

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".

You also often have ingredients or intermediate products that are used in more than one step so a tree is not ideal. You could duplicate those ingredients/intermediates but that would not be helpful.

And for more complex meals, time planning becomes more important so that everything is ready to serve together.

Post reply on HN