[tharkun__]

    What I'm questioning is how does including an ingredient list also eliminate the need to include the ingredients inline? I don't even know how you'd make a recipe that doesn't say the ingredient names inline.

That isn't what I said though. Like my sibling mentions, of course you mention the ingredient. But you don't list the ingredient at the front as "2 cups of butter, melted" etc. and then in the text you say it again "Mix the two cups of melted butter with the 4 cups of sifted wheat flower...". You use short references and that's it.

    This is true for pretty much any markup language. If that's an issue for some reason then you can just use plaintext.

The point of cooklang seems to want to be to read well as plaintext though. Like markdown promises. But cooklang does not seem to succeed in that. I find the embedded ingredient with quantity markup destroys my reading flow and doesn't allow me to use the plaintext to actually use the recipe. I have to use the compiler. In markdown I find the plaintext is all I usually need/use and I never compile it to a nice looking document, except if I am trying to publish it for someone else.

    This case covers a huge number of the recipes I use, including simple ones like bread recipes.

YMMV. I don't have many such recipes and the few that do work very well in plain English.

    I'd also argue that this makes the "default case" easier, as you only need to focus on writing the actual steps involved. 

It seems like you're saying that writing a recipe is done more often than reading it. I would question that very much unless you're someone that is like a professional recipe maker.

    An argument could be made that it makes reading the markup annoying, but I need to reiterate that markup is primarily for writing. 

See above on markdown. I primarily read my `README.md` et. al. in `vi`, not through generated HTML in a browser. YMMV as always.