Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should • Hacker News Board

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#71

Post by jackweirdy » Wed, Nov 13, 2024, 12:20 PM UTC

adt2bt wrote: post #27

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…

Interesting. Also allows for some fun ‘expansion’ in recipes. A leaf node may be ‘chicken stock’ but you could link to a recipe that boils down to that one ‘chicken stock’ node if you want to DIY it.

In a previous job I worked for a site doing natural language parsing on recipes.

We noticed one of our partner websites had an unusual number of unique ingredients. It turned out every ingredient was a link to another recipe to make that ingredient, along the lines of your idea.

However for some reason (presumably SEO) they took this to the extreme and everything was a recipe. Including apples.

The recipe for “apple” is

1. Take 1 Apple

2. Eat and enjoy

But since Apple is a prerequisite for this recipe, infinite looping is a risk in the kitchen now

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#72

Post by memset » Wed, Nov 13, 2024, 12:21 PM UTC

I run https://www.plainoldrecipe.com

Had no idea about some of these other formats!

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#73

Post by woile » Wed, Nov 13, 2024, 1:12 PM UTC

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://www.reciperium.com/woile/garlic-tea-for-plants

[0]: https://github.com/reciperium/recipe-lang

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#74

Post by 23july2024 » Wed, Nov 13, 2024, 1:16 PM UTC

There actually is the BatchML stardardized recipe format, even if it's a different kind of recipes I'm talking about. ISA-88 recipes for describing pharma/chemical batch production processes.

https://github.com/MESAInternational/B2MML-BatchML

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#75

Post by Lutger » Wed, Nov 13, 2024, 1:37 PM UTC

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…

No way. The professionals I've seen use way, way simpler formats, often just simple lists of ingredients with very minimal instructions.

If anything, these formats capture way too much information. For example, you can't really measure cooking times reliably unless you do sous-vide, if you want to be precise, measure temperature.

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#76

Post by infecto » Wed, Nov 13, 2024, 1:40 PM UTC

JoshMandel wrote: post #5

I find "higher level" format issues to be of greater concern. These are issues like: is the recipe structured in a way that makes the prep/process flow clear, makes it obvious when a certain ingredient needs to be prepped but divided into multiple parts for use in different stages, or when different stages lead to products that are combined and subsequent poisons in the workflow? A recent example: I really like the H…

Was just about to say the same thing. I don't care as much about the structure but the presentation. Something I have also disliked is how recipes are standardized around ingredients and quantities at the top and steps below. I often have a recipe open on my phone and I find its a non-optimal instruction set.

Have been doing something exactly like yourself to split it into functionally two parts, there is the shopping list and for me the optimal steps of prep/cooking which includes the quantity for each item.

Re: Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should

#77

Post by infecto » Wed, Nov 13, 2024, 1:42 PM UTC

guhidalg wrote: post #32

exmadscientist wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presentation and structuring is really, really important. The best I've found so far is a multicolumn format: https://i.imgur.com/w0UrJt5.png Column 1 is the quantity. This doesn't really belong in the first column but it matches traditional ways of writing things and doesn't cause any actual trouble to do it that way, so whatever, we can do it that way. Column 2 is the ingredient. And column 3 is the cooking instruc…

Take a look at my website, https://letscooktime.com/ and let me know what you think of the way I render recipes. There is an internal representation like this: 1. A recipe is composed of multiple components 1. A component is composed of ingredient requirements and steps 1. An ingredient requirement is a tuple of an ingredient and a quantity I found good success using this model for recipes, specially complex baking r…

For myself, the one thing missing the quantity of items inside of the recipe itself. I am often using my phone to read a recipe while cooking and its annoying to have to scroll back and forth to see how much of something I need to add. I have all the ingredients out and ready, just tell me in the steps how much of a seasoning I need to be adding.