I was reading through this and caught myself thinking "man, if you want people to read your recipe then just write it", and for that plain text or some minimal markup still works wonders...
That's great for writing recipes for someone to read as recipes, but it's not very useful if you're trying to create a collection of structured data from recipes.
This is one of the golden applications of LLMs. You can see the variety of structured formats proposed in comments, the different use cases, and honestly it seems like a bad idea to privilege any single format. Instead, you as a data consumer can use LLMs to parse common language recipes into the structured format most appropriate to your needs. DAG or linear? JSON or XML? You decide!
If your primary use case is displaying individual recipes that makes good sense. Less-so if you need reliable calculations at a larger scale. For example, if I was making planning software for a catering company, they’d want to know how many cases of onions they need this week for the 9 events with different menus. I don’t trust LLMs for that level of accounting yet. Hopefully soon!