Adjustable recipe | Hacker News Reader

Adjustable recipe

jeanieandluluskitchen.com

46 pointsincanus7757 comments

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The affordance I've always wanted is to have the instructions contain the amounts.

So instead of:

- Long list of items

- Complicated multi-step instructions moving back and forth

It's more like:

- Long list of items

- Add 1/2 cup oats, 1 teaspoon cinnamon to bowl

It would make recipes so much easier to read.

I think a large part of it is that the standard form of recipes is designed for commercial kitchens, not for home cooking. In a commercial kitchen, you'll have one recipe that has been finely tuned, with the ingredients pre-selected, and the goal is to follow that recipe. The long list of items is useful for prep work, because that lets you know how to set up the station for making that particular dish. But for home cooking, your ingredients are already chosen, and the goal is to make a dish out of them.

This is also why the prep time is so unrealistic. It assumes that you already have your onions finely minced, your garlic peeled, your oven heated, and your portions measured. The only time when that's a useful measurement is if somebody already did all the prep work early that morning, and you need to know how many cooks to have covering the dinner shift. If you're cooking at home, then the relevant time is how long it will take including the prep work and measuring.

I built a tool called https://cookmatic.co that solves this exact problem (among others)! You can hover (or click on mobile) the ingredients in the recipe body and it will tell you the amount from the ingredients list.

ex: https://cookmatic.co/recipes/easy-frittata

I tried turning a sugar cookies recipe I found somewhere into a graphical representation to see if it would be easier to follow in the kitchen compare to the usual format. It worked fairly well.

Here it is [1], although Imgur is having some issues right now [2] so the link may not work at the moment.

Follow the numbered arrows in order. Rounded rectangles are ingredients involving ingredients, diamonds are actions, and circles are containers.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/cIYtJTf

[2] ranging from pages not loading, to pages with '{"errors":[{"id":"","code":"500","status":"Internal Server Error","detail":"Internal Server Error"}]} ' embedded in them.

This is amazing, I love it.

Seriously, every time I make a long recipe I wonder how that became the standard. It's not like everyone is on a cooking show where they lay out all the ingredients in the right quantities before they start cooking.

I think it became the standard because that's the way to cook. No surprises. You don't want to get halfway through mixing up fruitcake dough and discover you need dried fruit.

Except that uses far more measuring dishes and counter space. Instead, put the final bowl on a scale, add each ingredient one at a time, and zero the scale in-between. I might pull the ingredients out ahead of time, but unless you're in a commercial kitchen, there's no real point in pre-measuring everything.

Like this? https://www.makebetterfood.com/

This webpage is great not because it's adjustable but because of how simple it is. Unfortunately, this is only the print preview page - the actual clearweb website has the usual cheesy blogging fluff, and doesn't show the recipe until the very end.

https://jeanieandluluskitchen.com/lemon-lavender-donuts/

If only you could adjust it to show standard units so that 96% of the world didn't have to Google 15 times to get the ingredient amounts........

Unfortunately, while it sounds good in theory, it falls apart in practice for multiple reasons.

Mainly that anything involving cooking involves an interaction of heating rate, thickness, volume vs. surface area, moisture evaporation rate, browning rate, etc. Their interaction is entirely non-linear.

On top of that, there's the fact that measurements are often chosen to relate to a whole number of large eggs, to standard baking pan sizes, what can be cooked in a single frying pan without overcrowding, etc.

Obviously some recipes scale better than others. But you're generally best off sticking to the recipe, scaling by an integer multiple, and using that many separate pans/trays/batches. And you don't really need a website to double numbers for you...

Arguably the other switch required is that between US and UK Imperial units, and SI. In particular, I've always found cups rather hard to use, especially if a volumetric measurement of something like butter is required.

At least you can melt butter. I have seen recipes that measure bananas in cups. How can I measure a cup of banana?

Also, how many measuring cups should I keep in my kitchen? You cannot measure oil with a cup and then measure flour with the oily cup. Going from flour to sugar? No, measure sugar first and flour second to avoid contaminating the sugar. I need to spend spend too much mental energy trying to measure everything with a cup without having to wash and dry it 10 times in between.

Sure. Recipe for 2 donuts:

0.39 cups all-purpose flour plus additional as needed for bench flour

0.22 teaspoons baking powder

0.11 teaspoon baking soda

0.11 teaspoon ground lavender

0.11 pinch salt

0.11 cup granulated sugar

0.06 stick butter softened to room temperature

0.11 whole lemon zested

0.03 cup fresh lemon juice

0.06 cup milk

0.22 whole eggs

0.17 cups powdered sugar

0.22 whole lemons juiced

Convert that to grams and we’re in business

> All recipe websites should be adjustable like this.

Yes & no - I find it frustrating that it's giving partial egg recipes. Donuts may scale linearly, but do all recipes?

I had this frustration with partial eggs. 100% of Swedish pancake recipe sites had this flaw. So I built my own: https://pannkakor.och.glass/

A lot of recipes also have volume measurements for melted butter instead of weight which is also frustrating. I built this banana bread recipe site for this: https://xn--bananbrd-t4a.och.glass This site also makes following the recipe much simpler and converted to metric :)

I think part of the problem is copyrights don't apply to plain recipes by themselves:

https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html#:~:text=....

"A mere listing of ingredients is not protected under copyright law. However, where a recipe or formula is accompanied by substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions, or when there is a collection of recipes as in a cookbook, there may be a basis for copyright protection"

Basically you have to add a bunch of literary expressions around it to make it copyrightable.

I've also read that people add all that stuff around them to help with SEO.

Wish more recipes listed non-fluids by weight.

Try UK receipe sites - that's the default.

I recommend the excellent https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes

Yeah. It’s especially frustrating when recipes list ingredients like flour by volume.

Depending on how one stores and scoops, there can be a 25% weight difference between what is on the recipe and what is on the bowl :/

Do non-American kitchens typically have scales? Anecdotally, most (nearly all, in my world) American kitchens don't, and other than the odd baking recipe, no American recipes do.

Sure and I definitely do not have anything that can easily measure cups, let alone 3 1/2 of them (you guys sure love fractions). It's always weird to me when I see stuff like flour measured by volume given that it can be more or less compacted.

For liquids it's often given by volume, but then due to the nice property that 1 liter of water weights 1 kilo we can easily measure things like water, milk and basically anything water-y by mass as well. The recipe calls for 25 centiliters of water? I can just measure 250g.

This was going to be my suggestion. Give an easy conversion so I can use weight for the dry ingredients.

You can also use: https://www.justtherecipe.app/

Thank you!

The amount of times I’ve left recipe sites because they’re filled with ads is too damn high.

I don’t even care if author adds a story but after every paragraph an ad is ridiculous.

Recently, I’ve been purchasing cook books just to not deal with the mess.

That site looks nice at first sight, but I found that it doesn't allow copy pasting text from the ingredients section and allows copying the instructions just one point at a time. I tried printing it as a PDF and got nothing either. I tried with different browsers, but it didn't help.

Try MySaffron App:

https://www.mysaffronapp.com/

For instance, here's the recipe I use for butter mochi muffins: https://www.mysaffronapp.com/a/shared/recipe/nyJcxWi8T/butte...

Great effort.

If I can make one suggestion that is admittedly very hard to implement, I'd think getting closer to the human way we'd describe certain units would be an improvement.

I think most people wouldn't say "Put in .11 sticks of butter", we'd say something like "Put in 1 tablespoon of butter". Or 6 ounces instead of .75 cups. Or 1 gallon instead of 16 cups. Etc.

I think most people would prefer to use proper units of measurement, like grams and liters.

This would be actually useful if the quantities of ingredients were listed by weight.

In volume units like 0.63 of a tablespoon it's unusable.

Agreed.

Adjusting for weight obviously depends on density, which is going to vary depending on ingredient.

That said, half a tablespoon is easily calculated. Rounding to the nearest 1/4 unit for the majority of ingredients would work fine as a middle ground.

I remember viewing restaurants back in the early late 1990's on my computer, a Sun workstation we had at the university. If you've never used Sun workstations, they were quite the cat's meow back then - coveted by us in academia and elsewhere. Recipes then were simpler, as the web was a lot slower. Dialup for some, but not for those of us lucky to use the Internet.

But the recipes were quite good then, that is true. Specifically I remember a wonderful tasty recipe for Fettuccine Alfredo on the Epicurious website. If you recall, Epicurious came online in November of 1996! Here is the Archive.org link -> https://web.archive.org/web/19961104042411/http://www.epicur...

I have to say, as an aside that isn't Archive.org amazing? What a fun thing it is to browse these old versions of websites. Isn't it fun to look up old sites? I sometimes visit my old personal website from the 2000's just for nostalgia. Ah those were the days weren't they? When you could just host a website anywhere and hand craft it? You can't beat HTML being written by hand.

Anyway, back to the Alfredo. Such a good dish. I still will at least once try it at every new restaurant. Sometimes I will order it again, other times never again. I can remember distinctly a small restaurant in Eugene Oregon where the proprietor would hand make the sauce as you watched. A handful of Parmesan, a chunk of butter, whisking over the gas stove. Oh that was the best. I still dream of it. He was a real character really. He had a young kid working in the kitchen once, and oh that poor kid - he got such dirty looks from the chef who clearly was a perfectionist. Perfectionist of course which meant his Alfredo was the best!

Anyway... Haha I started another paragraph with "Anyway". Funny how one can do such repetition when writing.

Anyway ;), here is a link to the...

Oh. Oh dear. It looks like Archive.org does not have my recipe saved! Well perhaps you will enjoy the simplicity of there original site on November 3, 1996 at https://web.archive.org/web/19961104042411/https://www.epicu...

Bon Appétit!

I think it would make a lot more sense if you could just do multiples of the base amount, rather than arbitrary breakdowns.

And use SI units of measurement instead of cups, teaspoons and other ambiguous terms.

I'm more impressed by the lack of the authors autobiography.

Only if there was also a toggle for metric system...

I'd be satisfied with recipe websites that don't pad out the recipes with 100 paragraphs of blogspam.

Finally, I can figure out how much of each ingredient is in 2000000000000 donuts

http://jollo.org/archive/doir/htmlfreetoo/

Fortunately 2000000000000 donuts still take only 2h to make. That's good news!

Definitely will if the oven is big enough. probably the OP can factor that in too :)

The power of parallelism.

Now I am wondering how many donuts the world produces every 2h...

I hate cooking sites that put a novel in front of the recipe. I get that you’re trying to tell a story about how you found it or some history to it. I landed on your site from Google because i know what I want to make and I’m ready to make it.

Be careful, friend.

There is an entire contingent of food bloggers and cooks who will make it their mission to cancel you on Twitter. Don't believe me? Look what happened Recipeasly[1][2][3]

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2021/03/02/recipeasly-fo...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/01/food-website-t...

[3]: https://twitter.com/search?q=Recipeasly

They've managed to get my recipe manager/meal planner's app taken down, but the website still runs great.

It's witchcraft, really. Tine wrote a hell of a parser!

https://www.copymethat.com/

People give twitter mobs too much power.

For companies, it's all about optics.

But you only landed on the site from Google because of the story.

You don't realize it, but the stories are all written because Google ranks a recipe higher if if has more content like that.

Don't blame the authors. Blame search engines.

Fortunately, it's incredibly easy to scroll down to the recipe itself.

I wonder why this is - is it as simple as SEO? (I can't see how unrelated keywords would help with your SEO really, if anything they might hinder it by triggering spam filters)

Another comment here suggests it could be around copyright. Does adding unrelated jargon to the page give you any meaningful extra protection of the mere ingredients list and instructions though? It strikes me adding a life story might protect the life story, but not the actual (seemingly unprotectable) recipe.

Or is there another reason? I'm intrigued as it seems to be a standard playbook, yet one which presumably costs money and time in writing unique content that's relevant enough to avoid users bouncing...

Google optimizes for time on site. You have to read through paragraphs of garbage = more time on site = ranks higher. Its all about showing the user the maximum amount of garbage they will tolerate without clicking back.

recipes can't be copyrighted, so the novel serves as content for the site to be unique (from Googlebot perspective) and target keywords so you find it in google in the first place.

I have heard this is done because of copyright issues with recipes alone. Dunno if it is true or not. Anyway, my app dev bucket list includes a git recipe hybrid so folks can fork (heh) your recipies.

I don't get it; where are all the ads?

who knew, only ~30C of flour for `1e+64` donuts

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