Hacker News Reader

overthinking some more: your idea is great but it removes the one feature that classic recipes have: sequencing.

You can have the best of both world, though, if the branches in your tree had some kind of timing associated.

Like when you make lasagnas, the bolognese takes 1 hour to cook, while the bechamel takes less than 10 minutes. You need to have a way to say: "while the bolognese is reducing, make the bechamel"

View on HN

I’ve been cooking with recipes quite a bit lately (before it was just random stuff) and I must say that sequencing is always wrong.

Unfortunately they all seem to assume that chopping, cleaning and moving stuff around is all done in 0 time. I wish the recipes would take this into account more.

Because of this I actually would prefer the plain tree organisation more.

mise in place is the art of reducing all that other stuff to as close as zero time as possible during the cooking, and many recipes expect the cook to read through first and identify what can be prepared/placed in advance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place

That is fine for professional recipes, when you cook for dozens of people. But for home cooking, if they say 25-35 minutes prep time 40-60 minutes cooking time, I’d expect them to count the cutting in there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com