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Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language

cooklang.org

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Re: Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language

#71

Post by giraffe_lady »

tasuki wrote: post #59
silisili wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, I meant water+flour+starter denominator. Didn't figure salt would matter enough. My math brain wants everything as a percentage of a whole, but I see how it's simpler the way it is. Especially since the starter also has some relatively unknown amount of water and flour inside itself.

The starter has a mostly similar percentage of water. And there isn't that much of it anyway to make a significant difference. I'm not that experienced with baking, so take the above with a grain of salt!

Once you're going for consistent loaves eg selling them to people who expect them to be the same every day, you do have to factor in hydration of the starter. Usually you keep it the same as the dough for simplicity but there are reasons why it might make sense for them to be different.

Re: Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language

#72

Post by giraffe_lady »

mailund wrote: post #61
silisili wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife makes sourdough, and this frustrated the hell out of me when she started. I asked her what hydration meant, and she said how much water was in it. So of course I told her to do water/water+flour. Nope, apparently it's just water/flour...which doesn't make sense to me, as it allows 'hydration' to go over 100%.

While I agree it is unintuitive, it is super practical when calculating the recipe. Making a 80% hydration pizza dough? Just measure how much flour you added and multiply by 0.8!

Kitchen scales start to have this feature built in at around the $60 point too. Dramatically simplifies bread baking, pickling, and a couple other pure ratio projects.

Re: Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language

#73

Post by giraffe_lady »

armanboyaci wrote: post #23

Reminded me this blog post about the complexity cost of trying to cover all the edge cases, using the example of recipe writing! https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/edge-case-poiso...

My career was cooking for a long time before I ended up coding for a living and that's the only post I can think of by a programmer who really gets it.

It's pretty funny watching every conversation about food or cooking on HN turn into confident assertions of how it should be done. Meanwhile every attempt to do it smashes right into these problems and, while maybe gratifying for engineers, are virtually worthless to cooks. You can tell by the fact that no cooks use these systems.

Re: Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language

#74

Post by mcdonje »

guhidalg wrote: post #29
mcdonje wrote: post #10

Putting ingredients inline is interesting. I think I actually see the sense in it. As a reader, I want the ingredients list at the top, but as a writer, I'll think about ingredients as I write the instructions. So, doing it this way potentially saves on jumping back and forth between the instructions and the list, which almost feels like boilerplate. However, if you want to make shopping list annotations, then you're…

Hello! My website CookTime handles recipes with sections (I call them components). Check out this macaron recipe: https://letscooktime.com/Recipes/Details?id=8a67c391-ddcc-4d... The benefits are that you get distinct ingredient lists for each component but they get aggregated when you create a grocery list. Check out the discussion from last year here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31201528

Thanks. I can't figure out how to look at the markdown. I made an account figuring that'd let me edit (so I can view), but the protections apparently have another level.

So, are the components different files? That'd definitely help if there's a component that applies to several recipes, like a sauce or crust. However, it could make things more complicated than some would like if they're working on a smaller project, like a reference notebook or a family cookbook.

Power vs simplicity is often a balancing act.

Re: Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language

#75

Post by patmorgan23 »

yodon wrote: post #22
duped wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just pour it right out of the container I store it in and don't have trouble with clumping. Life is easier and cleaner without packing flour.

> Weight vs volume measurements This is as un-winnable a debate as vi vs emacs. The world is full of both kinds of people. Any attempt on the part of the format to dictate one or the other approach will simply reduce the use of the format. As firmly convinced as you are of the rightness of your position, there is at least an equal number of equally committed champions of the other position, regardless of which positi…

Baking is chemistry, chemists measure primarily by weight.

Weight is superior.

Re: Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language

#76

Post by alkonaut »

mcdonje wrote: post #10

Putting ingredients inline is interesting. I think I actually see the sense in it. As a reader, I want the ingredients list at the top, but as a writer, I'll think about ingredients as I write the instructions. So, doing it this way potentially saves on jumping back and forth between the instructions and the list, which almost feels like boilerplate. However, if you want to make shopping list annotations, then you're…

If you have them inline, you may or may not want them separately as well. The benefit of the separate listing is that it's the total amount required. Inline, you might have 1 egg being added first, and one egg being added last.

Sure, since it's markup you could sum them to two eggs in an auto generated ingredient list, but for a general text format recipe, I'd like to see the egg in 3 places. In the ingredient list it must show "2 eggs" and then on two different locations in the recipe it will say "add 1 egg".

Re: Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language

#77

Post by detourdog »

guhidalg wrote: post #29
mcdonje wrote: post #10

Putting ingredients inline is interesting. I think I actually see the sense in it. As a reader, I want the ingredients list at the top, but as a writer, I'll think about ingredients as I write the instructions. So, doing it this way potentially saves on jumping back and forth between the instructions and the list, which almost feels like boilerplate. However, if you want to make shopping list annotations, then you're…

Hello! My website CookTime handles recipes with sections (I call them components). Check out this macaron recipe: https://letscooktime.com/Recipes/Details?id=8a67c391-ddcc-4d... The benefits are that you get distinct ingredient lists for each component but they get aggregated when you create a grocery list. Check out the discussion from last year here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31201528

Since you seem to know this space. I'm interested in something people must be working on. I want something that is ingredient property oriented. Examples would be starch, antihistamine, and cultural usage.

The idea would be a recipe generator the uses taste profiles, food textures, but has no standard ingredients. If one only had taro root for flour all recipes would sub that in...

Re: Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language

#78

Post by KineticLensman »

duped wrote: post #4

> Slowly add @milk{4%cup} [- TODO change units to litres -], keep mixing No! Handle units! @milk{4%cup} should be trivially convertible to liters and configured by the user. For harder conversions (volume to mass) keeping a list of ingredients and their densities (configurable of course) would be extremely useful. On that subject, being able to specify a recipe in terms of ratios and then automatically convert it to…

> specify a recipe in terms of ratios and then automatically convert it to scale would be a super power that I can't beat by hand

Somebody mentioned here a couple of weeks ago that you can use a slide rule to do scale ratios in a recipe. I can't find that link now but here's a build-your-own recipe converter (circular) slide rule that I found:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/v7ilgv/cooked_up_a...

Re: Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language

#79

Post by otikik »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #25
duped wrote: post #4

> Slowly add @milk{4%cup} [- TODO change units to litres -], keep mixing No! Handle units! @milk{4%cup} should be trivially convertible to liters and configured by the user. For harder conversions (volume to mass) keeping a list of ingredients and their densities (configurable of course) would be extremely useful. On that subject, being able to specify a recipe in terms of ratios and then automatically convert it to…

Baking is very suited to ratios, cooking less so. Bakers commonly talk about percent hydration, which is how much water there is compared to the flour.

When I started baking, the precise measurement was the first thing that I threw out. When I did things “by eye” I got better results. I think it’s because the person writing the recipe doesn’t have the same water, flour, starter or salt as you. I take the measurements as “very general guidelines”, now.

Re: Cooklang – Recipe Markup Language

#80

Post by nitrofire69 »

slabity wrote: post #40
tharkun__ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What he's saying is that it's easier to have the ingredients in a list at the bottom/top instead of strewn around the text. Yes the tools can generate the list but you need the tools. Or read the entire text to parse out the list yourself. Sure some recipes require the same ingredient in different steps. Why optimize for an edge case and making the default case harder? It's solved "take half the butter..." and "with…

> What he's saying is that it's easier to have the ingredients in a list at the bottom/top instead of strewn around the text. I understand that part. What I'm questioning is how does including an ingredient list also eliminate the need to include the ingredients inline? I don't even know how you'd make a recipe that doesn't say the ingredient names inline. > Yes the tools can generate the list but you need the tools.…

I didn't see if there was a way to customize ingredients lists, but it a lot of recipes I make and use the ingredients list will be more descriptive of the specific type of ingredient, and in the actual recipe it will just use a general term so it's easier to read, for example the ingredients would read:

* 2¼ cups all-purpose flour, sifted

* 4 medium ripe bananas, mashed

...

and then in the actual recipe it would just say "in a large bowl whisk together the flour, sugar..." and "in a medium bowl, combine bananas, butter, eggs..."

It seems in this lang it seems like it would need to read: "in a large bowl whisk together the all-purpose flour (sifted), sugar..." and "in a medium bowl, combine medium ripe bananas (mashed), butter, eggs..."

It just makes the actual recipe part messier than it needs to be. But like I said, I only skimmed the spec, maybe there is a way to customize and be more descriptive in the ingredients list.

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