Cooking the Books: Optimizing Purchase and Use of Ingredients | Hacker News Reader

Cooking the Books: Optimizing Purchase and Use of Ingredients

jasmcole.com

62 pointsmhb17 comments

This is fantastic -

In the UK there has been a rise in 'cookery boxes' companies who send boxes of ingredients which you can use to cook a few different recipes.

However there is not many options in the market for a service where you can simply subscribe to the recipes (and generated shopping list) and then cook yourself. This could be based from an index of already available recipes online. Minimising the necessary ingredients (and therefore potential waste, and shop complexity), whilst maximising recipe variety is hard to do without a lot of planning. Combining this with the ability to favour and remove certain ingredients for example for preference, or intolerance would be really something indeed!

I've felt that way about Blue Apron. I'm perfectly capable of going to the grocery store but I liked having new recipes to try. If I could get just recipes (maybe optimized to limit crazy ingredients and waste), that would be something I might subscribe to.

You don't actually have to subscribe to Blue Apron to get the recipes—you can create an account, but not pay for anything, and (at least in the app) it will tell you what's coming up on their menus and give you access to a fairly wide archive. Sometimes there are nigh impossible to find ingredients (I've never seen verjus or the Korean rice cake things in a store), but often times there are pretty easy substitutions.

For me, the biggest advantage of Blue Apron is precisely the limited selection—my wife and I don't have the paralysis of choice in deciding which of all possible meals we would like to cook, but instead for each of a handful decide whether we want to cook it.

Try Meallime. (Not affiliated, but I've been using the free version for a long time.) It doesn't exactly optimize ingredients, but can put together a weekly meal plan for various dietary restrictions and groups ingredients together so you can do one shopping trip for your week.

https://www.mealime.com

There are meal recipe subscription services that do exactly that. I've been a subscriber to CookSmarts for a few years now, and love it!

https://www.cooksmarts.com/weekly-meal-plan-service/

I pay a low monthly fee for four recipes a week and have access to the archives if I don't like some of the recipes. I like to jokingly call it 'Netflix for meal recipes'. Each recipe has a vegetarian, paleo, and gluten free variant, and it creates a shopping list for your week. You can get a free trial if you want to see what it's like.

Recipes specify what you can prepare ahead of time (so you could do most of your prep for the week in one go), and contain embedded videos showing how to do some of the prep steps if you are inexperienced.

I will note that I simplify some of the meals. For example, some recipes contain salads and specify how to make a particular salad dressing from scratch, but I opt to use prepackaged salad dressing to save time. Other recipes specify expensive items, like capers, that I skip.

I also have lost weight eating these recipes in the portions specified, which has been quite nice.

(Note: I'm not affiliated in any way with CookSmarts; I'm just a super happy customer!)

The boxes are known as 'meal kits' in the sector.

At http://infinite-food.com/ we are developing vending machine like robotic service locations with fully automated hot meal preparation and packaging capabilities. Obviously efficient storage is a big concern so we have been doing exactly this sort of analysis to optimize our supply chain. Because every meal is custom made, dietary restrictions or preferences are easily handled.

PS. First external round late this year, hint hint :)

My business does this!

http://PaleoMealPlans.com

We're just paleo meals right now, but we're adding keto, low-carb high fat, and AIP iterations of the service as well.

One of my 2018 goals was "build a shopping list that helps me optimize recipe variety while minimizing shopping complexity." Looks like this cookbook is a good start, and this dataset is awesome. Are others doing/thinking this way?

The closest thing I have found are the Sainsbury's meal plans which are weekly [1]. However as far as I can tell there is no optimisation to limit waste and the number of ingredients.

[1] https://recipes.sainsburys.co.uk/meal-plans/weeknight-meal-p...

I'd love to see something that included the lifespan of food too, ideally in terms of when it tastes good, tastes passable, doesn't taste the best but is usable, and needs to be tossed.

Perhaps I'm not reading carefully enough but doesn't he start by showing that choosing in order of most popular is not optimal,

> At first sight this might look fine, but a closer look reveals that it is not a great ordering – it is impossible to make any recipes at all until you’ve purchased nearly 30 ingredients!

but then he uses this ordering as the ideal to optimize towards? I'm not seeing how to find a better ordering; like shouldn't there be a way to choose 8 ingredients that let's you cook 5 recipes etc.

I enjoyed the post nonetheless!

No, he's not trying to minimise the area between the test curve and the 'popularity' curve; rather, he's trying to maximise this area (which will be negative if the test curve is mostly below the 'popularity' curve).

The boyfriend and I found that the bulk section in our local Winco is a godsend. They sell herbs and spices by the bulk! We buy as much or as little as we want for a specific recipe. Really has cut down on bottles of this-and-that sitting unused in the spice cupboard long past expiry date.

Next up slow cooked black beans for tortilla wraps!

For people like myself, who absolutely hate cooking and constantly eat outside. I have totally moved to meal replacement powders, which have decent amount of protein and all the nutrients that body requires. I mix the powder with almond milk and I'm done.

But potentially, long term, you will suffer from this approach. Simply because there is no compelling evidence that this approach can work long term. The complexity of real food might not be matched by powder compounds.

I am only trying to warn you. We simply don't know the long term effects yet.

I make meal replacement shakes a couple of times a week. Almost all of the recipes for the "nutritionally complete" shakes include a multivitamin, which feels like a hack at best and a nutritional failure at worst. I don't know if the premixed meal shakes are the same way but I suspect they're as complete as Frosted Sugar Bomb kid's cereal with sprayed on vitamins and minerals.

There are many meal replacement shakes like organic raw meal, which barely have any sugar and pretty low on calories. I mainly have it for breakfast.

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