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by adt2bt
588 days ago
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I’ve recently been caught up on noodling on the combinatorics of cooking food. I wonder if a structured recipe format would be helpful to explore the ‘solution space’ of any given dish. For example, think of all the decisions required to specify a curry dish: How do you cut/mash your garlic and ginger and onions? (If you even add all of those ingredients) Do you use whole or ground spices? What about for each spice? Cardamom pods or ground cardamom? Do you toast each spice? How long do you cook your onions? And so on. Eventually you get to an absolutely gigantic amount of options that all generate a somewhat similar dish, but with key sensory differences. They may all be ‘chicken tikka masala’ but I’d argue you’d have a very different eating experience across that decision spectrum. I think this may also play (specifically for Indians) into the idea that moms is best. It’s probably because mom’s is universally unique and you crave that nostalgia. |
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Do any of the recipes you've seen online or elsewhere every bother to talk about what sort of kitchen is needed? Granted, 99% of the time it's just the standard western kitchen (stove/oven/fridge/mixer), but some recipes require less common appliances. A brick pizza oven, or maybe a sous vide machine.
The data might benefit from being in a different format than the file format itself... even that might need to be different than the presentation software. Do I want to be chained to the software, or does this need to be some open format like epub? How would I search through 500 recipes, or 500,000? Do I want to search through that many, do I want to keep that many or purge the not-so-great ones? Earlier in the thread, someone was complaining that they don't want the ingredient list and numbered list instructions at the top... so is this something like html plus optional stylesheets? God help me, xml and xslt?
Why are they giving me fixed ingredient quantities, rather than ratios and quantity-to-serving numbers?
Do recipes need to link up? If I'm making thousand island dressing or tartar sauce, should I be able to tap a hyperlink to a sweet pickle recipe? How would that even work if I had multiple sweet pickle recipes?