Show HN: Guided Recipe Creation
recipelabs.com
recipelabs.com
But, I'm not sure how useful it is in this packaging.
The service that makes a shopping list for me for a given dish seems valuable. But the service that tries to lay out quantities seems sketchy. All you're providing is an ingredient list, not the technique; to get technique, you have to click through to one of a zillion recipes, and none of the ingredient lists in those recipes corresponds exactly to the ingredient list in your app.
Also, you need to do a better job with proteins. You can't make duck confit with "N pounds of duck"; you need duck legs (also fat, which didn't come up in the list at all). Similarly, chicken paprikash is made with thighs, not "N pounds of chicken". The solution to this is probably just to break animals up into retail cuts in your database.
There's a genuinely valuable "recipe lab" product to be built using a database of flavor profiles (like The Flavor Bible), a database of ratios (like from Ratio), and a database of core techniques ("roast", "braise", "fry", "aromatize", etc).
One thing that'd be neat to do would be to scrape flavor pairings from your database of recipes, do build a bottom-up "Flavor Bible" instead of trying to figure out a way to get the rights to the Flavor Bible itself.
I realize this won't ever work perfectly for every type of dish. But the dishes I have tried using the given ratios have all come out much better then my previous unaided versions of the same dish.
The ingredient database I am working with definitely needs an overhaul. The original focus of this db was matching ingredients broadly, and that is now becoming a major problem.
I think the ingredient database you are looking for is http://www.ingredientpairings.com/. This brings forward more of the broad matching ingredient problems though. When I redo the ingredient database this should be more useful.
The bigger problem I have with every service like this is that the recipes are untrustworthy. For instance, I'll generally avoid recipes from Epicurious. The curation problem here seems hard.
The recipes they have from Gourmet seem to me to be the best large collection of online recipes: diverse, well-written, tested, proofread, and forthright in their descriptions of each dish. They often have helpful user reviews as well. Some recipes tend to be more time consuming or require rare ingredients or equipment. But generally I'm relieved if (assuming I've already exhausted my proper cookbooks) Google gives me an Epicurious/Gourmet recipe as opposed to another site. The Bon Appetit, Shape, and other recipes on Epicurious aren't as uniformly good.
What are other sites that you do prefer? I'd be happy to discover something better.
The rest of the Internet is rife with people who think mayonnaise goes in Caesar Salad.
I just flipped through Ferran Adria's "The Family Meal", which is a record of every house meal served at El Bulli, each of which is scaled to 2, 6, 20, and 40 people. Sure enough, almost none of them scale every ingredient linearly (Caesar salad and hamburgers did, because you just make more dressing or more patties for more people).
In particular: oil, butter, lemon juice, onions, and intensely flavored seasoning ingredients (herbs in particular) often scaled by 2x when the servings scaled by 3x. In some places, an ingredient scaled by more than 3x to make 3x as many servings. Salt went in both directions.
You probably already know this, but the ingredients lists are not copyrightable according to [http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html]. It seems from reading that site that the list of steps that gets loaded when you import a recipe may be subject to copyright, depending on how closely those steps resemble the original recipe's instructions, and whether the original instructions were copyrightable.
I'll agree that common flavor pairings, frequently associated spices, and best techniques for a given ingredient are the more interesting data. It'd be great to ask the database what spices are frequently used in Thai food, for example. Combine it with a list of local suppliers of hard-to-find or imported ingredients and you have a winner.
The basic database you're looking for already exists (and, if you cook regularly, at a very reasonable price). You should just buy the book. Yes, it does beg to be a web app, but you need the expertise behind the book more than you need the convenient interface. I'm wary of convenient- but- bad- answers to important questions.
Sounds like the Cooks.com approach that was one of the first sites I blocked when Google instituted their site blocking functionality.
(Sorry to be so snarky about it).
Notepad neither suggested the alternatives nor updated the amounts required.
A better test (I make a lot of duck confit): do you know how to make duck confit now? Did you learn from this app? What are roughly the steps you learned?
A good test for an app that is designed to teach you how to make a dish is: do you know how to make it now? But that's a bad test for this app, which helps you build recipes that you already know something about.
But for what it is, I love it. A recipe is two parts - the ingredients (in what proportions), and how to use them. This completely separates the "how" from the "what" and that's great. Sometimes, I know how to make something, but I need suggestions on what the proportions should be. I like that I can add my own ingredients and find out proportions, or that new ingredients are suggested below. In fact, coupled with the recipes on the side, I can find out how to make it, and immediately vary to my taste. A normal recipe doesn't do that, and unless I've made something many times, I might not have the proportions down pat.
Complaining that this product isn't a different product doesn't make sense to me. If you are completely uncreative when cooking and require exact recipes then don't use this. Or if you already know how to cook something, then why do you care, for example, that "duck" is listed instead of "fat" and "duck legs"? For anyone in between, I think you can use this to easily and successfully adjust a recipe you already sort of know. And that's cool.
Why would I want to create a recipe with the tool in the first place? If I'm just submitting an existing recipe of mine to an online database, then the ingredient/quantity predictions aren't that helpful. If I'm trying to create a new recipe, then why would I want to submit it? I've never cooked it before - it might be terrible!
Even a short blurb on the recipe tool page explaining what I should use it for and why it's useful would be helpful. As it stands, this dumb user doesn't get it.
BTW, I love the design of the main page and the "create a recipe page". Very clean and easy to use. However, while viewing a recipe, I found it a little odd that the ingredients were listed in the right column. I found myself looking at the picture and reading the instructions before ever seeing the ingredients.
However general baking is more difficult than cooking, since the ratios are so much more important. But it also means the app would have so much more value added in this context.
I don't know how I'd use this though. If I want to make pancakes and type that in it gives me six of the seven ingredients required for basic American pancakes.
What would be useful is if I can input the ingredients I have and the app will tell me what I can make -- and create a shopping list for items I don't have (including coupons).
If you can incentives image upload along the recipes, you could build a nice database with image and calories as a label. Then you are one step towards building algorithm where you shoot a photo of your food and get approximate calories. This gives you millions of dollars of healthcare venture capital from obesity prevention programs for household environments.
P.S. Plum Vodka is called Slivovitz.
Because it is really important for my health to track my vitamin K intake, five years ago I built a recipe web site (cookingspace.com) that gives a breakdown of nutrients in recipes that I use. Simple to do, except figuring out the USDA nutrition database.
EDIT: just realized that I actually typed in "lasanga", hence the weird ingredients.
Design is really nice, I'll just make hover menu font little bigger and changed the color of "ask a question" btn.
Minor niggles: - on the "newest recipes" list: they all say things like "Created on 24 minutes ago". Drop the "on" (presumably this is there for older recipes that might get a date against them?). - after clicking on "coupons" some of the top menu links are no longer correct
I often find myself wondering what to cook of an evening so a good recipe site is definitely of interest. Looks like it's aggregating quite a lot of other content though so I guess the challenge is for it to be better at recipe searches than Google.
At the same time, I haven't seen anything remotely similar to this tool on foodily. Foodily is a recipe search site. The labs part here is completely different from what I've seen.
As other's have said, probably better not to focus too much on quantities and more on necessary/optional ingredients and how to source them.
Btw, you spelled "cholesterol" wrong in the nutrition information section.
Also.. perhaps cups is not the best way to measure onions ;)
Nice work though, design looks slick
Also, btw. Corn syrup? Not a common household ingredient (nice rip off the packaging list, I guess?) 3/8ths cup of sugar on TOP of the corn syrup? Dude, you're crazy!