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by ahnick 588 days ago
Reminds me of the cookingforengineers.com format to some degree.

Here's an example. You'll need to scroll down to see the actual recipe format. https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/194/Cream-of-Mush...

2 comments

After reading another comment here about a recipe being an “upside down tree” I now understand what at least this format is trying to accomplish.

It has some really nice properties, but trades off a key feature of the gantt format: your hands can only be doing one thing at a time. With the gantt format it’s very clear what you are supposed to be doing at any time and it preserves the order of operations. It doesn’t express how things are combined, however, which the tree format accomplishes.

My motivation for the gantt format was to prevent getting “meanwhiled” by a recipe. You are chugging along, and think you are in good shape, and come across that dastardly word in a recipe: Meanwhile. Turns out you should have beaten the eggs to a stiff whip 15 minutes ago.

> but trades off a key feature of the gantt format: your hands can only be doing one thing at a time. With the gantt format it’s very clear what you are supposed to be doing at any time and it preserves the order of operations.

In the cookingforengineers.com (COE) format, the order is to do each step in the first column and then move right to the next column and do those steps, etc.

Hmm interesting. But I have to confess I have no idea, intuitively, how to read that format. I’m sure it works once you understand it, but if you need an instruction manual for the format then maybe you’ve lost the plot a bit.
It reads left to right, top to bottom. Ingredients are on the left and then each step boxes around the items involved in that step.

Using the mushroom soup recipe as an example:

(1) Melt the butter.

(2) Wash and dice the onions, celery, and leeks.

(3) Sweat the melted butter from step (1) and the diced onions, celery, and leeks from step (2) together for 6 minutes.