Five Startup Ideas

  Column 1: Ingredients involved in that step.
  Column 2: Instructions.
  Column 3: Reasoning, extra info. Things like why you're blanching and not boiling beans. Or potential substitutes. Or pain points to avoid.

Some recipe sites end up looking like an eHow/similar article with just the most basic of info. I cooked a couple of tandoori lamb racks on Feb 14 as one course. The recipe I used was brief and didn't mention whether the tandoori paste should be left on the meat when roasting it, or wiped off or what. I was torn between imparting maximum flavour and going for the best roasted appearance - ended up sacrificing some of the finished look to go somewhere in the middle.

(Very simple and easy recipe if anyone wants the URL.)

Imagine the ingredients and steps on one panel. Clicking on any ingredient or any step would pull in dynamic content onto the right "content panel". This requires that the recipes use standardized naming conventions + measurement units and we would handle this by making a guided recipe builder. The author of the recipe would be able to add in notes that would show up when you click on an ingredient/step.

Why is this any different than every recipe site out there? Right now, recipe sites, especially the most visited ones, mainly reproduce plain text and try to build some interactivity by finding words to trigger links against like "carrot". Even when you have more information, the sites are designed to open up new windows so you end up having 20 windows open by the time you finish the recipe. In a "twitter-like" layout, you will NEVER leave the recipe page. The ingredients and steps are always visible and all content loads into the content pane.

The types of content would include vetted UGC videos, photos/illustrations, or helpful tips like "shortcuts" or "substitutions". Of course, this is also where users comments would show up. This is where I really had the idea to try and do this.. I was on a recipe site and a popular recipe had over 200 comments.. MOST of the comments related to specific ingredients or steps but they were organized chronologically which is absolutely NOT logical at all. I asked myself why the comments weren't attached to specific ingredients/instructions and thus this idea.

I'm sure someone here will tell me it's been done, so please share any links if it has because I couldn't fine any that did it well enough to satisfy what I had in mind.

I know the guys over at http://www.Zinch.com are sort of addressing this problem. Its more of a social approach to finding a University.

I was rather impressed.