I understand it's more convenient if you have a kitchen scale because you can put everything in the same container, but not all of us has a kitchen scale and converting multiple ingredients from weight to volume is damn near impossible.
That makes sense if you like numbers that are easy to multiply and divide, but it depends on region. Some people aren't familiar with metric, and the recipes they write probably don't use it. In all likelihood, recipes you find in imperial units were likely written by an american.
The volume vs. weight thing though, that transcends region or systems of measurement. It assumes everyone has a kitchen scale, when most non-professionals have volumetric measuring supplies which are typically way cheaper
Cheap kitchen scales are $10-20 and are accurate enough for cookies. I'm not suggesting that volumetric measurements should go away, but you will find that cooking or baking by weight is much more reproducible than by volume.
I came here to ask, "where is the 20 page long family history that makes you get a RSI from scrolling down to see the ingredients" but this will do too
Yeah, what if you want to do something like: "Seperate the yolks from the whites, beat the whites until they're fluffy and then add sugar and mix with the rest." And then a later step doing something with the yolks. I don't see how you would do that here without it turning into an unreadable mess.
You could just list egg yolks separately from egg whites in the first place. But yeah I get your point, for certain more complicated recipes it will break down. At the cost of some readability I guess you could list products of earlier ingredients on the side, but then it's no longer a list of what you need to start.
I think my ideal solution would just be regular recipes but have them actually list the measurements of things in the text. It's very annoying to have to go back to the list especially when it's on the other side of a page.
Or you could go the other direction and have a full graphical flow chart with some text in it, although I can't imagine that being particularly space efficient
It is totally possible. This is basically a dependency graph. Separating the yolks simply goes closer to the left, and it produces new ingredients (or data, if you want): yolks and whites. They move right to their own sequential processes.
I feel like this is less useful for a recipe you're making for the first time or make once in a while, but probably pretty handy as a quick reference for something you make regularly.
Maybe it depends on the recipe. I'm all for rethinking them and going for a cleaner design. I'm also looking forward to the day that we migrate away from hillbilly units, so I don't have to search "xxx recipe metric".
I once came across a cooking blog that used this sort of instructions over a decade ago; was apparently run by an engineer - haven’t found it again since, but the methodology stuck with me.
I love this. And to all the guys arguing whether this is a good way of designing a recipe, please remember you are on Lemmy, most people here are either it or engineers or at least very close to one of those professions so the amount of autism is significantly increased 😂
You Americans just can't get away from the corporate brainwashing no matter how hard you try.
"Hershey's cocoa powder", what the fuck? Not only is naming a specific brand for a recipe bad enough, naming the worst shit imaginable is so fucking weird.
My guess is that it has to do with the variations from brand to brand and clarifying that this particular recipe used that brand to get the expected taste. Assuming they didn't enshitify their version with cheaper ingredients.
Though I hate recipes that say something like "one can" or "one package". Even without shrinkflation, different brands sometimes use different sizes (if no brand is specified).
Though if it's a published recipe, I agree with the other comment saying that money probably exchanged hands, and that deal might even be the only reason that recipe is featured at all, because it was probably a "publish recipes that sell more of our shit" rather than "fit our shit into your recipes where possible". Guessing the whole thing might have started with "inventory of our cocoa powder is piling up, sales team gets a bonus if they can get it sold (and we'll lay off the people producing it for a bit)".
Sometimea it is important like when a recipe wants American jiff or skippy peanut butter etc, because it contains icing sugar besides just peanuts; which changes sugar ratios for cookies.
Typically that just means there was some kind of endorsement deal with the company that made the recipes. I doubt this is an exclusively American phenomenon.
I don't understand what this adds that the "traditional" recipe style is missing. I even see some things it's lacking. For example, the last 4 ingredients should be mixed together independently before folding in to the base.
I don't dislike this format, but I just don't see why it's so revolutionary.
If the last 4 ingredients need mixing together first, then you simply have a mix column with just those ingredient rows under the mix column from above to show that those get mixed independently in parallel. This recipe implies that is unnecessary for this food though.
For example, the last 4 ingredients should be mixed together independently before folding in to the base.
Isn't that indicated by the combination of rows?
I like this chart. It even allows for multithreaded multi-person baking, because the combination of rows indicates where processes are merged (and need to be done).
Edit: I may be dumb. A mix step is missing below the mix block of the other ingredients, but it could easily be included.
Right, I was about to say that the big near-square in the middle bottom could easily be used to indicate this as a separate process. I really like this format!
I guess it's just a revolutionary idea for those that didn't grow up in a time when we already did this. This is pretty much what all my recipes (inherited from my grandmother) look like today, just without the bracketing.
Exactly what I was hoping existed already. I think I'm going to try and convert some recipes to this format and see how it goes. I like that it has the ingredients in a simple list, makes shopping so much easier.
It works for very simple recipes where the work can be summed up in a word or two. Complex recipes need far more instructional information not just the order to put ingredients together.
This is pretty much useless unless the recipe is strictly additive. No room for "split a chunk of dough, we'll need it later". Or if you need to prepare two things in parallel before combining some but not all. Or indicating that a step can progress unattended.
Also an issue if you need to add an ingredient at more than one step. Suddenly you've got no good way of indicating the total amount you need for the recipe as well as the amounts for the individual steps. This is great for a specific kind of extremely simple recipe only.
Then you lose the format of the steps on the right. Try to picture what it would look like if it had you add half the vanilla where it currently is and another half at the "fold in" stage. There's not a good way to do it.
This design is built around a very simple kind of utilitarian cooking that's common for institutional kitchens. It's great for that! But there are a ton of recipes that would be complete trainwrecks if you tried to fit them to this kind of diagram.
I've never seen anyone else do that, but that's how I began hand-writing recipe cards around a decade ago. Not as neat a table, but groups with arrows that combine down to a final step (so I guess more pyramidal in most cases).
Mixing eggs in with fresh coffee and melted butter is a somewhat time sensitive action. If you don't get it mixed in in time, it can essentially cook, so it's best to do it deliberately.
Huh, well, I think it's awesome. The ingredients are listed first if you just consult the first column. In your defense, I would absolutely be interested in seeing this format applied to far more complex recipes. The blank boxes could easily be used to fill independent simultaneous preparation, though. One could simply fill the cells as one works from left to right. This is awesome!
Yeah, from a computer science perspective, cooking recipes are just algorithms. And I'm pretty sure, they need to be "turing-complete" in that, i.e. you can't really put a general boundary on their complexity.
A particular case that you can't portray with this scheme, is loops. It doesn't happen a lot, but
recipes
can
say
"Repeat from step 1".
You could obviously work around it to some degree by writing e.g "Prepare 10 dumplings" and maybe list the steps for that separately below.
But yeah, there's going to be other complexities like conditions, e.g. "if you're doing the vegan version, mix in the agave syrup now".
...But I guess, there's also no law that forces you to use that scheme for all recipes. You can totally write it out in prose when the boxes start getting hacky.
A workaround for loops is to simply label every box A1, A2, B1, etc. and have it say "repeat steps A1-5" or whatever. You can also just edit the framework of the box entirely or use separate tables for totally independent parts. Anyway, I just dig the visual stacking lol.
It refers to the setup required before cooking, and is often used in professional kitchens to refer to organizing and arranging the ingredients
That’s direct from Wikipedia and, yes, mis-en-place is taught in culinary schools.
You can certainly use it at home or even apply the principles outside of cooking.
However, I learned to cook in junior high home economics class and “mis-en-place” was not taught. I didn’t learn the term or its meaning until much later after adopting cooking as a hobby.
Unless a home cook has a strong interest in cooking as a hobby there’s lots of terms and techniques they wouldn’t likely know or apply. Think things like an aebleskiver or tamagotchi tamagoyaki pan.
I kind of suspect the people that don't agree with you don't cook often, at all, or are very amateur. It absolutely starts instructions at the top and LEAVES OUT those ingredients used for prep in the ingredient list. While this isn't a big deal for this recipe (extra flour and butter) this can be annoying when actually making something that requires different ingredients during prep.
Furthermore, I honestly don't see how you could use this format for anything beyond the most basic of baking recipes. I tried to think my way through writing a recipe for potatoes fondant in this format, and my mind started to melt thinking about to convey technique at each step. I also struggle to see how it's less complex to read than a traditional recipe format. Additionally, I fully agree that this recipe is going to result in misreading which ingredients go in each step, especially when you have to separately mix two separate sets of ingredients that are 10 or 11 columns out. It's just making a fairly simple list of steps way more complicated than necessary.
Maybe I'm missing something though. If someone has a more detailed explanation of how this style is supposed to work that would might be helpful. Otherwise it just seems sort of useless beyond cooking a box cake or a basic buttercream.
98 replies
This isn't a recipe? Recipes have 40 paragraph long stories about how your grandmother fell in love in Rome .
and inconsistently labeled units
Or everything is in cups.
It's either that or I have to make little piles of dry ingredients on my table and it makes a huge mess.
Or giving units by weight.
I understand it's more convenient if you have a kitchen scale because you can put everything in the same container, but not all of us has a kitchen scale and converting multiple ingredients from weight to volume is damn near impossible.
Why cups, tbsp, and tsp though. Use ml and mg
That makes sense if you like numbers that are easy to multiply and divide, but it depends on region. Some people aren't familiar with metric, and the recipes they write probably don't use it. In all likelihood, recipes you find in imperial units were likely written by an american.
The volume vs. weight thing though, that transcends region or systems of measurement. It assumes everyone has a kitchen scale, when most non-professionals have volumetric measuring supplies which are typically way cheaper
Cheap kitchen scales are $10-20 and are accurate enough for cookies. I'm not suggesting that volumetric measurements should go away, but you will find that cooking or baking by weight is much more reproducible than by volume.
Ai will help you ;)
And if I’m using my phone every other line has 50 ads
[ * ]Ublock origin master race[ * ]
Every time my wife or I look up a recipe we start singing "when I was a young warthog..."
Ok I don’t know where this is from but I want to start singing it out of context just to keep the mystery going.
It's the circle of memes...
I'm a sensitive soul, though I seem thick-skinned,
And it hurt that my friends never stood downwind!
I came here to ask, "where is the 20 page long family history that makes you get a RSI from scrolling down to see the ingredients" but this will do too
i wish all recipes were presented this way. every single one of them.
Nah sorry doesn’t appeal to me at all.
Yea, this format sucks.
I'm not sure an excel chart is that much better than just saying "melt x, mix y, fold z and then bake" and the list of ingredients xyz.
Yeah, what if you want to do something like: "Seperate the yolks from the whites, beat the whites until they're fluffy and then add sugar and mix with the rest." And then a later step doing something with the yolks. I don't see how you would do that here without it turning into an unreadable mess.
I like it as the shorthand at the end. Special instructions could still be included before it as usual.
You could just list egg yolks separately from egg whites in the first place. But yeah I get your point, for certain more complicated recipes it will break down. At the cost of some readability I guess you could list products of earlier ingredients on the side, but then it's no longer a list of what you need to start.
I think my ideal solution would just be regular recipes but have them actually list the measurements of things in the text. It's very annoying to have to go back to the list especially when it's on the other side of a page.
Or you could go the other direction and have a full graphical flow chart with some text in it, although I can't imagine that being particularly space efficient
Yeah agreed, recipes could use something among the lines of "... And then add the sugar (250g)"
It is totally possible. This is basically a dependency graph. Separating the yolks simply goes closer to the left, and it produces new ingredients (or data, if you want): yolks and whites. They move right to their own sequential processes.
Or you could just list them separately to begin with. "3 egg whites" and "3 egg yolks" on separate rows.
I feel like this is less useful for a recipe you're making for the first time or make once in a while, but probably pretty handy as a quick reference for something you make regularly.
But this way you dont have to”instructions”
You just list ingredients and whats done with them
Its not for the just-moved-out teenager who is cooking for the first time
But lots of recipes needs instructions to clarify why or how you should use certain techniques or ingredients and the like.
If it is not for everyone then it is not really an improvement.
Maybe it depends on the recipe. I'm all for rethinking them and going for a cleaner design. I'm also looking forward to the day that we migrate away from hillbilly units, so I don't have to search "xxx recipe metric".
Much worse. And it won't work for most recipes.
I once came across a cooking blog that used this sort of instructions over a decade ago; was apparently run by an engineer - haven’t found it again since, but the methodology stuck with me.
I believe www.cookingforengineers.com , but it’s either down or doesn’t like my VPN, so I can’t verify.
Definitely not a VPN issue; I’m raw dogging the internet on my phone and also getting a Server 500 error.
Will bookmark to try and remember to revisit it at some point in the future. 😅
Seems to be back online. ¯\_(⊙ʖ⊙)/¯
You, and exactly as I remembered it - this is totally the same guy! 🤣
Last working
Yes I think the guy on that site invented the format. At least that's where I first saw it many many years ago .
I love this. And to all the guys arguing whether this is a good way of designing a recipe, please remember you are on Lemmy, most people here are either it or engineers or at least very close to one of those professions so the amount of autism is significantly increased 😂
But how are they supposed to fit irrelevant descriptions of their family's history with the dish in that format??
You Americans just can't get away from the corporate brainwashing no matter how hard you try.
"Hershey's cocoa powder", what the fuck? Not only is naming a specific brand for a recipe bad enough, naming the worst shit imaginable is so fucking weird.
My guess is that it has to do with the variations from brand to brand and clarifying that this particular recipe used that brand to get the expected taste. Assuming they didn't enshitify their version with cheaper ingredients.
Though I hate recipes that say something like "one can" or "one package". Even without shrinkflation, different brands sometimes use different sizes (if no brand is specified).
Though if it's a published recipe, I agree with the other comment saying that money probably exchanged hands, and that deal might even be the only reason that recipe is featured at all, because it was probably a "publish recipes that sell more of our shit" rather than "fit our shit into your recipes where possible". Guessing the whole thing might have started with "inventory of our cocoa powder is piling up, sales team gets a bonus if they can get it sold (and we'll lay off the people producing it for a bit)".
Sometimea it is important like when a recipe wants American jiff or skippy peanut butter etc, because it contains icing sugar besides just peanuts; which changes sugar ratios for cookies.
Perhaps the recipe calls for vomit flavored chocolate that other brands cant match.
Nah, it's the delectible combination of wax and vegetable oil.
pity us.
We deserve no pity
Typically that just means there was some kind of endorsement deal with the company that made the recipes. I doubt this is an exclusively American phenomenon.
I don't understand what this adds that the "traditional" recipe style is missing. I even see some things it's lacking. For example, the last 4 ingredients should be mixed together independently before folding in to the base.
I don't dislike this format, but I just don't see why it's so revolutionary.
If the last 4 ingredients need mixing together first, then you simply have a mix column with just those ingredient rows under the mix column from above to show that those get mixed independently in parallel. This recipe implies that is unnecessary for this food though.
It clearly shows the sequential and parallel threads of execution:
It clearly shows the sequence of produced intermediate results, split and merging points:
Isn't that indicated by the combination of rows?
I like this chart. It even allows for
multithreadedmulti-person baking, because the combination of rows indicates where processes are merged (and need to be done).Edit: I may be dumb. A mix step is missing below the mix block of the other ingredients, but it could easily be included.
Right, I was about to say that the big near-square in the middle bottom could easily be used to indicate this as a separate process. I really like this format!
Because it fits on a little card. Which everyone used to keep recipes on for a long time. Little boxes full of recipe cards.
Luckily most recipes won't go super wide
I guess it's just a revolutionary idea for those that didn't grow up in a time when we already did this. This is pretty much what all my recipes (inherited from my grandmother) look like today, just without the bracketing.
Its not as universal as you are suggesting here. I've seen it before but there are certainly no cards like this in the boxes I've inherited.
Here's an open source library for generating these from markdown https://mossblaser.github.io/recipe_grid/tutorial.html
Exactly what I was hoping existed already. I think I'm going to try and convert some recipes to this format and see how it goes. I like that it has the ingredients in a simple list, makes shopping so much easier.
My wife said "But how will we learn their life story!?"
It works for very simple recipes where the work can be summed up in a word or two. Complex recipes need far more instructional information not just the order to put ingredients together.
This chart works well as both the requirements and process reference.
The fine details can be asterisk line items afterward.
Then the family story goes at the bottom, with perforations so you can tear it off and toss it out
Stop you gorgeous creature, I don't want to fall in love with you, I don't even know you.
This is pretty much useless unless the recipe is strictly additive. No room for "split a chunk of dough, we'll need it later". Or if you need to prepare two things in parallel before combining some but not all. Or indicating that a step can progress unattended.
https://mossblaser.github.io/recipe_grid/tutorial.html#splitting-recipe-components-up
someone figured out a way
Kinda breaks the elegance
Also an issue if you need to add an ingredient at more than one step. Suddenly you've got no good way of indicating the total amount you need for the recipe as well as the amounts for the individual steps. This is great for a specific kind of extremely simple recipe only.
I feel you could specify the amount in the step if it's not all of that particular ingredients.
Then you lose the format of the steps on the right. Try to picture what it would look like if it had you add half the vanilla where it currently is and another half at the "fold in" stage. There's not a good way to do it.
This design is built around a very simple kind of utilitarian cooking that's common for institutional kitchens. It's great for that! But there are a ton of recipes that would be complete trainwrecks if you tried to fit them to this kind of diagram.
But how do you fold in the cheese?
This one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi%E2%80%93Shneiderman_diagram
Autism didn't exist 50 years ago! Autism 50 years ago:
Yeah, this is actually beautiful!
But what is the recipe for? There's no title.
I get it, some kinda cookie right? But still
https://www.cookingforengineers.com/
how do you actually read it though
You melt the butter, then add the next 3 ingredients and mix everything, etc...
Top down and left to right.
I've never seen anyone else do that, but that's how I began hand-writing recipe cards around a decade ago. Not as neat a table, but groups with arrows that combine down to a final step (so I guess more pyramidal in most cases).
Why is "mix" duplicated?
Mixing eggs in with fresh coffee and melted butter is a somewhat time sensitive action. If you don't get it mixed in in time, it can essentially cook, so it's best to do it deliberately.
My guess is to not overwork the eggs?
I want to know what this is a recipe for. I guess I'll just have to try it and find out...
Maybe based.cooking should try it out
NIH syndrome strikes again.
("Not Invented Here" for those unfamiliar.)
What does "not invented here" mean in this context?
Recycling an idea of another domine and claiming it is original?
How do I melt everything after the butter? Do eggs even melt? 🤔
You are seriously misinterpreting the chart, and I'm really not sure how you arrived at that interpretation to begin with....
Okay good. For a second, I thought I was going mad. To the previous poster, you only melt the butter. Reading goes left to right, top to bottom.
This is terrible - forces me to scan across and then forget what I'm looking at.
It's contrary to mis-en-place: ingredients listed first, then instructions.
My technical brain does like the visual, this just doesnt work in reality, especially as recipe complexity increases.
Huh, well, I think it's awesome. The ingredients are listed first if you just consult the first column. In your defense, I would absolutely be interested in seeing this format applied to far more complex recipes. The blank boxes could easily be used to fill independent simultaneous preparation, though. One could simply fill the cells as one works from left to right. This is awesome!
Yeah, from a computer science perspective, cooking recipes are just algorithms. And I'm pretty sure, they need to be "turing-complete" in that, i.e. you can't really put a general boundary on their complexity.
A particular case that you can't portray with this scheme, is loops. It doesn't happen a lot, but
You could obviously work around it to some degree by writing e.g "Prepare 10 dumplings" and maybe list the steps for that separately below.
But yeah, there's going to be other complexities like conditions, e.g. "if you're doing the vegan version, mix in the agave syrup now".
...But I guess, there's also no law that forces you to use that scheme for all recipes. You can totally write it out in prose when the boxes start getting hacky.
A workaround for loops is to simply label every box A1, A2, B1, etc. and have it say "repeat steps A1-5" or whatever. You can also just edit the framework of the box entirely or use separate tables for totally independent parts. Anyway, I just dig the visual stacking lol.
Mis-en-place format makes sense if you’re a professional or have adopted professional methods.
However, a lot of home cooks/bakers don’t prep everything first and instead grab as they go or “chunk” the recipe steps like in the image.
Preparing all the ingredients before starting is something you learn in school?
That’s direct from Wikipedia and, yes, mis-en-place is taught in culinary schools.
You can certainly use it at home or even apply the principles outside of cooking.
However, I learned to cook in junior high home economics class and “mis-en-place” was not taught. I didn’t learn the term or its meaning until much later after adopting cooking as a hobby.
Unless a home cook has a strong interest in cooking as a hobby there’s lots of terms and techniques they wouldn’t likely know or apply. Think things like an aebleskiver or
tamagotchitamagoyaki pan.Edit: autocorrect
I kind of suspect the people that don't agree with you don't cook often, at all, or are very amateur. It absolutely starts instructions at the top and LEAVES OUT those ingredients used for prep in the ingredient list. While this isn't a big deal for this recipe (extra flour and butter) this can be annoying when actually making something that requires different ingredients during prep.
Furthermore, I honestly don't see how you could use this format for anything beyond the most basic of baking recipes. I tried to think my way through writing a recipe for potatoes fondant in this format, and my mind started to melt thinking about to convey technique at each step. I also struggle to see how it's less complex to read than a traditional recipe format. Additionally, I fully agree that this recipe is going to result in misreading which ingredients go in each step, especially when you have to separately mix two separate sets of ingredients that are 10 or 11 columns out. It's just making a fairly simple list of steps way more complicated than necessary.
Maybe I'm missing something though. If someone has a more detailed explanation of how this style is supposed to work that would might be helpful. Otherwise it just seems sort of useless beyond cooking a box cake or a basic buttercream.