Where's the box for the story about how mother used to make this years ago and how the author made it for a such and such party and guests were asking for the recipe and ...
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Here's an open source library for generating these from markdown https://mossblaser.github.io/recipe_grid/tutorial.html
Annoying that they did not even mention the original site: https://www.cookingforengineers.com/
Which does seem down right now, so archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260729050049/https://www.cookingforengineers.com/
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But where am I going to put the six paragraph AI generated anecdote about my grandmother?
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COOKING FOR ENGINEERS!!!
I learned how to cook from this site like 20 years ago! I still use that format on my home recipe cards sometimes, but now I've just gotten so used to it all recipes look like this on my head. Great format, taters guna tate.
The real site also includes a paragraph description, this is just a quick reference card that's assuming you have already cooked the recipe a few times, not great for learning it the first time.
I don't know, what's a recipe without a popup video and six banners and a "jump to recipe" button that doesn't work, as well as 99 pictures of spaghetti?
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I made an app where the the recipe is saved as a JSON file with ingredients separate from the steps. In the steps instead of saying "mix sugar and butter" if says "mix {sugar} and {butter}" and the app adds quantity there directly. I can scale the recipe and still have the quantities inside the body ("mix sugar (100g) and butter (55g)").
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Works for some recipes, but not all.
Also, more detailed instructions are needed. Mix for how long, till what consistency? Baking times and temps usually also say something like "... or until just brown", or "...until crispy with dark edges." Because, unlike machines with switches that do exactly the same thing each time, cooking has many variables that simple instructions don't account for.
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I believe this design breaks down once you prepare an ingredient that then gets split for use in two or more later steps.
But now I'm thinking which kind of diagram could be used as well. Some adaption of an UML activity diagram maybe?
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If you are tired of reading of grandma's hardships in the great depression here is a trick:
Add "cooked.wiki/" (without the "") to the beginning of any recipe URL, and it will strip away everything but a column with the ingredients and a column with the recipe.
You have to make an account to store recipes, but that's totally optional.
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My dyslexic brain hates this. Words and lists are better.
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Kind of reminds me of the output of qdirstat.
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You should probably mix together the dry ingredients before folding them in. So the big blank square in the bottom middle should be "mix" but I guess that ruins the cascading aesthetic and makes it more cluttered, which would've also showed the weakness of this design
Also why would you fold in the dry ingredients, maybe this is just some "lorem ipsum" recipe but unless there's a foam you're trying to keep inflated you don't really need to fold stuff in.
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The hallmark of recipe design imo was modernist cuisine and the following books on pizza and bread. A lot of the recipes were obnoxious and it’s written by a notorious ex Microsoft cto that turned into a patent troll to finance his cooking nerd bullshit (morally justifiable to pirate all of the obnoxiously expensive books) but props for their recipe format
Very clear, in order of addition, scaling percentages, and in the actual book clear instructions follow which is extremely helpful in the bread one especially
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Instructions unclear, went all in before folding, now I'm baked
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I first saw this notation technique on a recipe card pinned to a stove from the 1850s at a preserved historical village display. I have no reason to doubt that it was the original card, or descended from it.
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