Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by buescher 588 days ago
This hurts a little to read. Think about the use cases for recipes:

- Shopping

- Scaling up/Scaling down

- Finding ratios of key ingredients when you're looking at multiple recipes to figure out a dish or what's wrong with the last recipe you tried

- Mise en place, which is conventionally omitted except in very detailed recipes

- Planning cooktimes

- The actual cooking process

And as a home cook, I'm not personally experienced with commercial use cases, but there's even more there: costing servings, menu planning, mise across several dishes with common ingredients, etc. Having seen some commercial recipes, pros will frequently use very simple lists of ingredients and just a few notes on technique. Bakers will use baker's percentages.

The weird "cooking for people who insist on modeling the world in complicated categories" format doesn't support these very well, but it sure helps with "is grinding the whole spices a substep of combining the spice mixture?".

1 comments

another to add to the list is high-altitude modifications. using mark bittman’s guidelines ingredients and temperatures become a function of altitude. recently i’ve been using llms to make the modifications for me.
Or adapting to specific dietary requirements.

Simple formats and clear written language go a long way for human use cases.