Opensource.cooking: A simple, bloat-free cooking site
opensource.cooking
opensource.cooking
Edit: The Spaghetti Carbonara recipe actually has multiple mistakes. it says the cook time is 0 minutes, it tells you to add the beaten eggs but never tells you to beat them, the recipe includes butter as an ingredient but the recipe tells you to heat the oil, and never says to grate the cheese. If this was a wiki or something I could try to fix those issues, but as it currently is I don't see any way to even flag it. It's also tagged as Banana and Greasy.
I find it easier to manage a bunch of markdown files than anything else.
Also rewriting them lets me list ingredients as groups as far as what goes together in a bowl or whatever ...the laundry list of ingredients so many sites list drives me crazy.
Outside of America's Test Kitchen... I've never found a blog's exposition on why they did what they did helpful. More often than not their description actually makes me question if they actually cooked the recipe often enough (or at all).
The aggressive SEO tactics, more than anything, are what drives me crazy.
I mainly use BBC Good Food. Being taxpayer funded and having unlimited google juice means they don’t need to play this game.
BBC Food was the publicly funded website, but I think that was shut down a few years ago.
I think the main problem with 'recipe websites' is that people don't want 'recipe websites'. They want 'cookbook websites', i.e. some editorial oversight over recipe quality, some standardization in units, style of directions, have a picture with each recipe, etc. What am I going to do with 100k crappy half-asses notes on everything someone somewhere ever threw together in a kitchen somewhere? I'd much rather have 2000 quality recipes that I know I can rely on.
Org counterpart (single file), but similar story. Static html export is handy also.
> Also rewriting them lets me list ingredients as groups as far as what goes together in a bowl or whatever
Lol. Ingredient grouping. Nice to hear it’s not just me.
https://xenodium.com/cheese-cake-recipe-no-crust https://xenodium.com/oatmeal-cookie-recipe https://xenodium.com/dal-makhani-black-lentils-recipe
One of them being that it's called "Spahetti Carbonara".
Separately, the recipe calls for whole eggs rather than egg yolks. This is a somewhat contentious issue, and many chefs have opinions one way or another. This recipe appears like it's The Definitive Spa(g)hetti Carbonara, but doesn't acknowledge that many consider it to be incorrect.
For me this is an issue with all recipe sites – my level of cooking ability, my ingredient preferences, how "authentic" I want to be, opinions I've formed on particular dishes – these are all very personal to me and unlikely to be fully represented in recipe sites.
I've started keeping my own recipe collection comprised of recipes I've made and enjoyed, I make no attempt to make them publishable, and I edit them as much as I feel necessary.
Whereas a site like this I reckon would aim for having definite versions of recipes, which is a) I think impossible for any dish and b) pretty much useless if you don’t happen to live in the exact region where it is from.
E.g. I have 3 different versions of the recipe for a Finnish blueberry pie. The original (well nothing original about it, just how my mother learned to make it), a Swiss version and a Colombian one. Because for the latter two I need different substitutes for the filling and slightly different measurements and baking time over all.
For me, recipe sites are just a starting point and inspiration for the personal collection. And I prefer having many different versions, some traditional, some sacrilegious available to compare and try rather than trying to get them into a single lowest common denominator version.
Even the base issue of at least ranking recipe blogs by quality isn't solved by other aggregators such as Google / Yummly which are more of a recipe dump.
If you or anyone else is interested I'm planning to release a version in the coming weeks - email is in profile.
Basics are "how to bind soup", "choosing and cooking pasta", or "frying onions". Common recipes are then "bound vegetable soup" or "maccharoni with tomatosause (and fried onions)". Specialities would be those recipes you try for christmas, or when the in-laws come over next month.
It's highly frustrating to find a recipe that says "bind the soup with starch" without going into how to do this (or even worse: what ingredients this needs!). But for someone more experienced, it is highly frustrating to have to read through five lines explaining how to fry the onions.
As with most education, cooking is layered: you build on top of existing knowledge, without repeating it each and every time. I presume this is partly a classification issue and organisation challenge. You don't want "how to bind soup without milk or eggs" to turn up when someone is searching "vegan tomato-soup". The web has hyperlinks, which would probably be a very good way to organize recipes.
And most importantly start your own recipe book.
You can buy The Essential New York Times Cookbook for $2.99 right now which has 1,000+ recipes from decades of The New York Times.
And even without special pricing you can get something like The Joy of Cooking or How to Cook Everything for $20. Just one of those books is, realistically, all you need for a lifetime of cooking and will give you far more recipes and far better instruction than the website in the OP.
So I cook. I have good equipment. I'm pretty darn good. I don't do "modern techniques" such as sous vide, tho David Chang might convince me yet. The partner manages the kitchen garden (tonight was the final batch of 2020 eggplants). But the real intellectual property for the various cuisines is to buy the good cookbooks, and READ them. I'm not kidding. Read through entire sections over time. The really good ones have a theme, often not explicit. And cook out of them! Make mistakes. Make glorious successes.
I will not elaborate here, but I find these these English Language authors essential:
"Chinese": Fuchsia Dunlop, for Hunan and Sichuan. I have 6 more for mostly other regional cuisines but none so uniformly excellent.
"Mexican": Diana Kennedy, Rick Bayless, and some Sante Fe, NM, US authors whose books are annoying because errors, though pretty awesome overall.
"Indian": Maya Kaimal, utterly essential. But I dip into Neelam Batra slightly less often. I have to because she is encyclopediac.
"Southern/Eastern Mediterranean": Claudia Roden (Oh you really should try out her felafel recipe, but be sure to dry out the surface of the beans after soaking. And um I made absolutely killer moussaka tonight mostly based on her recipe)
"Italian": Marcella Hazan. There are many others. Keep it simple and honest.
"French": Well I am sorry, I am going to go with the classics by Richard Olney and Julia, but I note that I only usually use "Mastering... V1" and "Simple French Cooking".
"American/Anglo": Oh this is too annoying for too many. I use the "The Joy of Cooking" as a starter. My version is copyright 1980, given to me as a going away to college gift that same year. In there is wisdom, that I have only appreciated as I have grown older and more experienced. "The Meat Book". You wonder how an Englishman could have cross cultural accuracy on Anglo sourced materials... and he does! Uhh, sure, Fuschia. Anyway, I love Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. For vegetarian dishes, my goto author is Deborah Madison. She is perfect. Right in the tradition that is implicit in the authors I reference above, but for vegetarians. And now, I want to emphasize two authors: Michael Rhulman & Brian Polcyn, who changed the way I think about food by introducing me to real charcuterie. But I had to read it through and make a bunch of things to understand it, and then, I began to understand how a lot of other cuisines work.
Do I have my own recipe book? I do! But it is not so essential to me as the above authors.
Does BBC Food count? It's ad-free if you are in the UK (possibly not if you're outside the UK). It has a wealth of recipes and food-related content:
Alas, not free -- but for my money, well worth it.
Also looking at step-by-step instructions allows me to quickly understand the recipe if i know most techniques involved. This way i sometimes just need a few seconds to absorb a new recipe or put it into mental cache while constructing my own based of multiple ones from the internet.
People go to recipe sites for the content, they read it, and then they leave. They don't click on adverts or engage in any monetizable way. People build recipe sites because getting a database of recipes is easy and they're trivial to build so you can throw a site with lots of pages (and lots of ads) up on the web fast. That doesn't mean they generate any revenue.
Their github with their fork of that repo.
Yes inspired by based.cooking, but wanted a simpler interface than git, so anyone could submit, will add users, editing and comments when i have a mo...
Sounds like a great guy to have a conversation with
My suggestion is to add a concise index. I didn't like browsing the paginated images.
Unrelated to your site, what I find most difficult with my own collection is resisting the urge to add new recipes. I want to be able to pick any recipe from my box and know that I think it's absolutely delicious. Of course everyone has different goals, that's part of the charm of personal collections.
By the time you are good at that dish you will have invariably learned skills that transfer to related dishes, as well as how to taste and adjust. So you pick the next to learn. To make a product analogy, it’s vaguely like “Crossing the Chasm”.
Learning to cook this way is wonderful because you begin to see how dishes come together and start to imagine your own recipes! Whereas if you cook a new dish every time, you get spread a little thin and lots of cooking remains frustratingly “magical.”
Recipe|Turkey Stuffing
I|4 C==French bread hand torn into small pieces (about 1/4 inch pieces)
I|3/4 C==Butter
I|3/4 C==Onion (minced)
I|1 C==Celery
I|1 Tbsp==Salt (less if bird is butterball or self basting)
I|pinch==Pepper
I|2 Tbsp==Sage, thyme, and marjoram mixture
D|Melt butter in large skillet over low heat
D|Add onion and celery & spices, stirring often until it all smells great.
D|Pour 1/3 of the hot mixture over all the bread, then toss, then 1/3 more, toss, then last 1/3 and toss.
I always debate fleshing it out. 99% of the time spent with something like this is curating the recipes themselves, which I'm far from an expert in, and I don't want it to become a big time waster.
- https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/based.cooking/ (which the submitted site may be derived from?)
The killer feature is that you can be on a recipe in the browser and do "Share", pick Paprika, and it'll grab, almost without fail, the recipe from within the pages and pages of prose that most recipes have these days.
I also use the sharing so my wife has access to the same recipe set, though she doesn't use it as much as I do. I use the Photos feature, and also take notes about how it comes out if I want to make changes.
* a list of things I've cooked, with notes if I like
* a list of things I'd like to cook
* an easy way to build a grocery list from a set of recipes
I've recently taken a stab at something like this, too – the result is a Pandoc-and-Bash-script-based static site generator for my personal recipe collection. Recipes are written in a format based on Markdown (with ingredients listed separately for each step, which comes in real handy while cooking), and the end result is a lightweight, responsive, searchable website. I've received very positive feedback when I shared it as a "Show HN" a week and a half ago.
It's available as open source here: https://github.com/doersino/nyum
There's also a demo: https://doersino.github.io/nyum/_site/index.html
Finally, here's what the Markdown source for an example recipe looks like: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/doersino/nyum/main/_recipe...
I also usually get good results with recipes from Serious Eats[1], I also find that the in depth articles go into reasons behind the recipes, really help with knowing the "why", not only the "how".
Along similar lines, with similar goals, my wife and her dad have been building this as a pandemic project: https://www.recipereform.com/ -- I (who am admittedly biased) think it's pretty great. She inherited this style of recipe organization from her grandmother, and I love the formatting it of it, how clean the recipes end up looking and how fast / ad-free the site is.
I've been trying to get her hooked on HN for years. I showed her this thread and maybe this will convince her to make it open-source. Any feedback would be appreciated and helpful!
One suggestion: Add iconography to indicate cooking apparatus. The gestalt of your nested layout gave me a quick sense of the prep and cooking phases, but it would be nice to see if I need to preheat the oven or pull out the backyard grill.
I love that CookingForEngineers site. The original name I had suggested to her was Recipes for Engineers, since that was the vibe the table/nested flow layout gave me, it's cool to see someone else doing a similar thing.
Involved in encouraging this behavior from the inside of Google? Sorry bub, that's gonna be three consecutive life sentences.
But personal stories are, And descriptive text is too. Probably why they’re added.
I’ll agree about the ads. Thus we signed up for platejoy (YC 2017?)
Platejoy just gives recipes. You buy your own groceries(or at least that’s how we use it)
It’s mainly about meal planning.
> Hi everyone! Today I am going to show you my recipe for 1-Dish Taco Bake. The recipe you see here is actually the recipe from my 4-week-old daughter, and it is a pretty simple one. When you get to the part where you have your dish in the oven, make sure it is not too hot. That's because the most important thing is to bake the dish as light as possible.
Now you just need to make the stories 25x as long and pepper it with ads!
E.g.: This classic béchamel-based mac and cheese is loaded to the hilt with cheese. Not only do we pack as much cheese as we can into the sauce itself, but we then mix the cooked pasta and cheese sauce with additional grated cheese, for tiny pockets of stretchy, melty bits throughout. One of the benefits of this method is that you can get enhanced browning in the oven, especially on the bottom and sides of the baking dish, thanks to the flour and butter in the sauce. (it goes on)
https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2016/11/classic-bechamel...
But, it's not like you're trying to create a restaurant that may need good reproducibility of outcomes. Most home based cooks just want to feed themselves and their families and have some variability, and for the food to taste reasonably well.
Buying ingredients also gets less frustrating, because you don't need a precise list, just a general idea of what you want to make that day.
There are even books that help you discover taste affinities for ingredients.
If I don't have the technique or the pans, I don't need the recipe to come up in a search.
The data catches my eye because there seems to be quite a lot of bad data. Recipes with cooking time of 0, when it's clear that's not true. Typos like "Spahetti Carbonara". "Ham Sandwich" tagged as "Fruit".
If we're supposed to ignore all that and just evaluate the CMS bit, it looks fine. But it doesn't seem very specific to cooking. Just tag organized text.
Most recipe websites these days are horrible (poor layout, annoying popups/popovers, crazy amounts of content that have little or nothing to do with the recipe....). The minimalism of this website is refreshing. I only wish the website itself was also open source. It would be pretty cool to be able to collaborate on and enhance the site (and a SCM hosting platform like GitHub or GitLab would provide a built-in way for maintainers to evaluate new recipe submissions, etc.)
started uploading some personal recipes to https://benjaminclauss.github.io/minimalchef/ with Hugo (PR's welcome) but this definitely will not scale
I would definitely use a Strava for Cooking.
I'm am down!
As I mentioned before[1], I'm skeptical of this premise. Recipes are hard to get right, hence the use of cross testers and standardized language in professional test kitchens.
The meal-planner/shopping list feature is well worth the subscription: Add your meals for the week, then make a shopping list. The shopping list collects like items, joins their volumes/counts (if it can), and makes one big shopping list organized by category.
It makes shopping so much nicer.
I installed Delicious Recipes on it, a solid Wordpress plugin.
I only have a couple recipes on it, but you get the idea: gramybee.com
OP - if you have a JSON export of the data, I’d love to include it in the index.
- Only one recipe.
- Vetted to be high quality.
- Gets straight to the point.
The internet is amazing but for a lot of domains books are way better.
I'm not dissing, just making sure your ducks are in a row. It's a fun idea!
https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html
Beyond the recipes themselves, the collection may be copyrighted.
The photos accompanying the recipes are also copyrighted.
"A recipe is a statement of the ingredients and procedure required for making a dish of food. A mere listing of ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions, is uncopyrightable. As a result, the Office cannot register recipes consisting of a set of ingredients and a process for preparing a dish." https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf
Removed the dodgy test recipes for all you pedants...
Example: -> https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/242040/egg-salad-with-chop...
This site, started in 1999, attempted OP's goals:
... it was probably one of my fave sites for years that was actively curated, but it took a LOT of time to keep healthy.
I appreciate the effort, but this isn't as easy as it looks.
While I applaud the efforts (truly!), I hope the community can get behind one.
Where I sit, I don't want to sit and type out my wife's recipes on a site that'll be gone in a year. So I'll wait.
This is actually _really, really interesting_ and could spur some really great discussion, so I was ready to check out the HN comments only to find... griping about recipe sites. Ctrl+F 'Open Source' to find this comment. Man, HN sucks.
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html#:~:text=...