[1propionyl]

The replies to this post are, unfortunately, very indicative of the negative side of the "(pseudo-)engineering mindset", which is rather close to the model-constructing mindset inherited from economics (reductionism, hiding any variety incurred by real world complexity, etc).

I don't see very many people here who seem to really have done a lot of cooking, consider it a serious hobby or profession, etc.

None of these proposals pass the smell test as being able to capture anything beyond the most basic of recipes.

[guhidalg]

I'd love your opinion on my cooking site https://letscooktime.com/

Though I'm a software engineer, my main user is my mother-in-law who was a nurse all her life and now likes to bake. Check out for example, this multi-component recipe for Brazilian empadas: https://letscooktime.com/Recipes/Details?id=bc786a2f-50ec-4f...

[Lutger]

No way. The professionals I've seen use way, way simpler formats, often just simple lists of ingredients with very minimal instructions.

If anything, these formats capture way too much information. For example, you can't really measure cooking times reliably unless you do sous-vide, if you want to be precise, measure temperature.

[1propionyl]

I actually agree with this. There's a ton that's between the lines in professional recipes and often much that you can't really put on paper you just have to learn at the foot of the master or try enough times you rediscover the same insights.

My critique should be amended to emphasize that it's about naively constructing a model that picks and chooses elements to include based on availability, convenience, etc rather than one built by studying actual chefs and cooks and learning how they think about recipes.

I can say for myself at least that for many classes of dish I barely pay any attention to the specific details in the recipe. I've made thousands of braises, I just need to know the key elements and the rest just sort of fills in (perhaps there's a comparison to musical proficiency here). I'm less concerned with "brown the meat for X minutes on each side" than "brown to mahogany". I don't find it useful when a recipe says how long to reduce a sauce, but when it says what kind of reduction in volume I should be looking for, that can be helpful. In practice I just have an image of the final product and can taste to tell if I've cooked out the acidity and water sufficiently for how I want the dish to taste.

To put a finer point on it, knowing which elements of a recipe are standard procedure and which are distinct and important to the character of the dish is an acquired skill and not something any system that describes recipes as strict assembly instructions can quantify or even qualify.

[Lutger]

Totally, we are on the same page.

First of all, you can't really model exactly what chefs do algorithmically. Or you can, maybe, but you shouldn't do that in a recipe. Unless you are building an autonomous robot-chef arm. I've seen these in China, they only cook very simple dishes.

What developers tend to forget, the recipe is a tool, and it helps chefs put together a dish. A mere combination of ingredients and maybe cooking techniques is usually sufficient for that. It is NOT an algorithm.

That's why I liked the 3 column layout linked somewhere else in this topic better than the cooking for engineers forget: it has less information which makes the things that matter stand out more.

[fsckboy]

you're complaining so this is a good place for my complaint. coming at this from another angle, I think "the unix way" is to write your recipe so it looks like a recipe written for a human; but be careful to be rigidly precise in following a uniform format and then command line tools/scripts can parse the recipe to create an ingredients list, double the recipe, etc.

to your point, add structure/features/"coding standards" as you need for automatic processing, but otherwise you have a perfectly written recipe to whatever standards you hold.

rather than unix, what I see up and down this page is Dave Cutler slicing and dicing of data to the point of incomprehensibility. You know how you guys all loved markdown so much that you've embraced it and are now adding so many features that make it as unreadable as html? don't do that again and again, learn not to do it.

(btw I have cooked extensively and at somewhat high levels of precision (tricky sauces, souffles etc)

[naet]

My wife worked in a higher end catering kitchen and the "recipes" she brought home were crazy to me. They have little instruction other than ingredient ratios and sometimes an extremely rough outline of the technique. I guess a lot of experience is needed to fill out the gaps. As a home cook I would not have been able to follow them without more info.