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Comment by batch12 | Hacker News Reader

Those are what my recipes look like. I keep them in a binder and edit them as I cook them again and again. The chocolate cookie recipe looks like it was written by a crazy person with dated notes going back 4 or so years. I have an idea for a cooking/recipe sharing website, but I never find the time to make it..

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Tangent on representing recipes - Always loved the "Cooking for Engineers" guy's recipe notation (scroll down to just above the comments), they're so clever and concise:

https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/168/Pecan-Coffee-...

That is an absolutely brilliant way to visualize recipes.

Wow! Fantastic!

I'm building something to automate this. Copy paste recipe text/url -> get flowgraph.

Edit: thought the link was about this: https://fluidvisual.com/flowchartrecipes/

Edit 2: "Chapter 2 Resource theories: Monoidal preorders and enrichment", in particular page 2

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-s097-applied-category-theory-...

Edit 3: one problem the representation used on www.cookingforengineers.com has is that it can only represent recipes whose structure is that of a tree: every step can have multiple direct ancestors but leads to only one descendant. Not all steps of all recipes have this "convergence" property. See the lemon meringue pie example in the link above, where yolk and whites are processed separately (filling and meringnue respectively) before being merged in the last step (covering the pie with meringue)

I'd like to see what you make! I see the value in the flow chart, especially the pie you linked.

Regarding the CfE multiple descendants problem, it's not really a problem.

    +-----+----------+-------+---...
    + Egg | separate | White | etc..
    +     |          |-------+---...
    +     |          | Yolk  | etc..
    +-----+----------+-------+---...

or you'd just start with "1 egg yolk" and "1 egg white" for your recipe. Or you'd say "See meringue below" or... some other answer that you like.

Whatever, we're humans, we roll with it.

If the recipe somehow gets too complicated, you make two separate tables, like they did for the recipe above.

My flowgraphs are not worth showing yet. Laying out graphs properly without human intervention is ... very hard, and this is a fascinating field with a lot of ongoing research.

I can however point you to some designs I generated using dall-e (non-sensical and with a perplexing flow, but the illustration are a good start towards something gorgeous): https://imgur.com/a/1NN8DaU

There are also other ways to use LLMs to explore culinary arts, for instance these "equations" pertaining to caramel:

    1. Creaminess (creamy texture in caramel)
    Creaminess ↑ ⇔ Cream ↑ + Butter ↑ + Milk ↑
    Creaminess ↓ ⇔ Sugar ↑ (hard caramel) + Water ↑ (syrup texture)
    
    2. Hardness (firmness or brittleness of the caramel)
    Hardness ↑ ⇔ Cooking temperature ↑ + Sugar ↑
    Hardness ↓ ⇔ Butter ↑ + Cream ↑ + Shorter cooking time ↓
    
    3. Chewiness (soft, stretchy caramel)
    Chewiness ↑ ⇔ Butter ↑ + Cream ↑ + Glucose syrup ↑
    Chewiness ↓ ⇔ Cooking temperature ↑ + Sugar ↑
    
    4. Stickiness (caramel that adheres to teeth or surfaces)
    Stickiness ↑ ⇔ Sugar ↑ + Longer cooking time ↑
    Stickiness ↓ ⇔ Butter ↑ + Cream ↑ + Shorter cooking time ↓
    
    5. Color (darker caramel)
    Color ↑ (darker) ⇔ Cooking temperature ↑ + Longer cooking time ↑
    Color ↓ (lighter) ⇔ Lower temperature ↓ + Shorter cooking time ↓
    
    6. Sweetness (perceived sugar taste)
    Sweetness ↑ ⇔ Sugar ↑ + Cooking time (slightly shorter) ↓
    Sweetness ↓ ⇔ Butter ↑ + Salt ↑ + Longer cooking time ↑ (more bitterness)
    
    7. Bitterness (burnt or deeper flavor)
    Bitterness ↑ ⇔ Cooking temperature ↑ + Longer cooking time ↑
    Bitterness ↓ ⇔ Lower temperature ↓ + Shorter cooking time ↓

It's difficult to get this kind of info without having a lot of experience in a specific culinary space. I've never cooked caramel seriously so I can't tell if this is right (looks like though), but I have started to master ice cream production this summer, and the set of equations ChatGPT generated was on point, so I guess I can trust those too.

Oh my god I love the way they visualize the recipe steps. That's how I write them down (grouping ingredients and steps), but its a table merging rows instead!

I like having my recipes in digital format, but the lack of notes, annotations, and editing history is a big weakness in most of them. I would love one that offered a git-like interface for recipes: it could track the "diff" of a recipe as you tweak it, and you could "commit" each variation along with notes about the outcome.

Why not just put your recipies in a text editor and then use git?

A generational git repo of family knowledge is a fun idea to think about.

>Hey grandpa, can you show me the family brisket recipe?

>Sure grandson. But first, let me tell you what git is.

Throw pandoc into the workflow, and have a new edition printed every year or three at your local print shop.

In the editor, make sure to M-x org-mode. Lots of dated annotations, and a lot of results, in my many recipe files.

Honestly, not a bad idea. I'd just have to deal with figuring out a good, standardized text-based format. I already use a git-backed Obsidian markdown knowledge base for most of my notes, so it would make a lot of sense to incorporate recipes too.

I think my current recipes app stores entries in the Recipe JSON Schema format[1]. This format is also useful since many websites will offer recipes in that schema. If I could make a conversion layer that transformed between a markdown version and the JSON recipe schema, that would probably be all I need.

* [1] https://schema.org/Recipe

> I'd just have to deal with figuring out a good, standardized text-based format

Why? Recipes are for humans to read, and we're good at accomodating a wide variety of formats as long as they are reasonably sane.

I've looked at a few and I haven't loved any of them. They all have some kind of shortcoming that makes them not usable.

For example, the schema.org schema puts quantities, units, and ingredients in a single field. Fail, IMO.

Other issues include things like not being able to group ingredients or procedures.

I don't have my notes on what I thought of each of the ones I've reviewed handy, but here are some I've looked at:

- https://cooklang.org/

- http://www.formatdata.com/recipeml/

- https://recipemd.org/index.html

EDIT - for clarity, added examples of standards

I'm not much of a cooker, but I helped my spouse organize her recipes into a little site. The backend is just a SMB file share with one text file per recipe. And there's a perl script that looks for changes, generates the HTML, and pushes it out to the web, so it's easy to reference on the go, maybe while at the grocery store or something. The perl script needs to do a bit of magic around character set detection, because windows likes to do dumb things, but otherwise, it's pretty straight forward, other than kqueue is a bit arduious for watching a whole directory tree (I think Linux has a better api for that, but it's doable in kqueue).

No diff tracking, but you can put notes in as you like, it's just text. You could use git as others suggested too. It's just text, git is good for changes in text files.

That's what the idea was. Something you could diff and fork (heh) other recipes using git.

I started transcribing them. I’ve been using typst, could probably change back to latex or context or something if needed. I have a git repo, organized in to several sections. I found a template and hacked it to my liking, including a section for comments and remarks and then organized the sections in to chapters.

Took an hour or so to kind of get the framework in to place. We do family meals regularly (eat with your kids, it’s a good thing) and I record the ones they like, add notes as we change them. It’s sort of a secret project, I plan on giving it to my kids as a wedding gift or something. Only about 30 in it so far but I add one or two a month, I try to capture some pictures to go with it.

Can you share your chocolate cookie recipe?

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