• CannonFodder@lemmy.worldEnglish
    117·
    11 天前

    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 …

    • BeigeAgenda@lemmy.caEnglish
      34·
      11 天前

      I want to read the authors complete backstory and several holiday pictures and sales pitches on why I should buy their artisanal ingredients, scrolling until I nearly give up.

      • Widdershins@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        11 天前

        I feel like the recipe loses authenticity since there is no backstory about how their great uncle came up with the recipe after falling out of a guard tower during WWII.

        • VitoRobles@lemmy.todayEnglish
          4·
          11 天前

          That sounds cool and all, but can you vibe code a script that injects more heart tugging stories and additional AI images before I get to the recipe? It should feel like Im wading through slop to find what I’m looking for.

  • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
    62·
    11 天前

    But where am I going to put the six paragraph AI generated anecdote about my grandmother?

      • VitoRobles@lemmy.todayEnglish
        15·
        11 天前

        You know, I don’t hate this.

        Let’s simplify websites significantly. Everything SEO/AI slop appears below the fold in white text.

        • Taldan@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          11 天前

          The point of the AI slop / random pointless exposition is to maximize the number of ads a user has to scroll past to see the actual recipe. What incentive would a website have to put that at the bottom?

          • Croquette@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            11 天前

            It started as a SEO thing where websites with longer texts got a better indexing on Google, thus more ad revenue.

          • GlendatheGayWitch@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            10 天前

            Or its because it was a family recipe passed down and making the recipe reminds you of all the special times you spent with family and want to share the origins of that family tradition, rather than just sharing your grandma’s secret recipe.

  • NekuSoul@lemmy.nekusoul.deEnglish
    61·
    11 天前

    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?

    • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
      21·
      11 天前

      Or if any of the steps requires a more complicated instruction that can’t be expressed in a few words. It wouldn’t break the structure of the diagram, but it wouldn’t be as beautiful.

      It is a fun idea though, maybe there is another format that works.

      • lagoon8622@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        21·
        11 天前

        This diagram is classic “engineer developing a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist in a domain they don’t understand”

        • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
          25·
          11 天前

          The diagram does have benefits. For example it shows which steps can be performed in parallel if multiple people are cooking.

          • 0ops@piefed.zipEnglish
            9·
            11 天前

            And concise! No more frantic scrolling on my phone with batter-covered fingers

            • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
              3·
              11 天前

              Similarly, it also easily identifies which part of the recipe each ingredient goes to. You can do this by splitting up the ingredients list as well, but that doesn’t really go against it being a good idea.

              • lagoon8622@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                2·
                9 天前

                I’m a software “engineer” and also passionate about cooking. Both are arts. You can’t reduce it to an algorithm

                • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  1·
                  9 天前

                  Same; but imo while “real cooking” is an art, following instructions (a recipe) is basically an algorithm. At least, expressing it as one doesn’t change the opportunities for artistic expression.

    • gamerdonkey@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      3·
      11 天前

      I ran into this exact issue when I was making these diagrams for my own recipes: https://git.tilde.town/gamerdonkey/recipes_for_engineers#known-issues . My workaround was just to have instructions to set some aside and use it later.

      I find this layout works best for in-the-moment reference while cooking, and the 2-dimensional nature of it is what really makes it useful. So I think of splitting an ingredient as like lifting some of it out into an imaginary third dimension before inserting it later at another step.

    • VAK@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      10 天前

      I suppose you could show a split. Doesn’t cascade anymore but flow still works.

  • Pencilnoob@lemmy.worldEnglish
    38·
    11 天前

    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.

  • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    30·
    11 天前

    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?

  • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.netEnglish
    28·
    11 天前

    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)”).

  • RecursiveParadox@piefed.socialEnglish
    22·
    10 天前

    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.

        • gramie@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          9 天前

          F-droid is an alternative to the Google App Store, but upcoming changes by Google will prevent all third party stores from working on standard Android phones.

    • LandBasedDaveyJones@lemmy.todayEnglish
      4·
      10 天前

      Someone mentioned an app for this, there’s also one called Paprika 3 that does something similar. This one you don’t need an account to store recipes though. It can also translate weight to imperial measurements, and solve ingredient quantities for portions like 1/2, etc.

      Also generally you can hit the in-page “print” button and the print version is often a one-sheet that cuts out the “my family xyz” bs. To be fair, some of those have real tips or hints or substitutions they don’t include in the recipe proper, but a lot of the time it’s just fluff as you can’t copyright recipes without significant extra steps and exposition.

  • djmikeale@feddit.dkEnglish
    18·
    11 天前

    This seems like it wouldn’t scale well for more complex recipes, and for the given example I’d prefer a list of steps instead, e.g.

    1. butter and flour an 8x8-in pan
    2. preheat oven to 350 fahrenheit
    3. melt unsalted butter (4 oz)
    4. mix with sugar (1 cup), vanilla extract (1/4 tsp), and 1 shot fresh brewed espresso or very strong coffee
    5. mix with eggs (2)
    6. fold in ap flour (1/2 cup), cocoa powder (1/3 cup), baking soda (1/4 tsp) and table salt (1/4 tsp)
    7. add to pan and bake for 30-40 min
    • MoffKalast@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      11 天前

      Could always make a few of these for any required subassemblies and then one that puts them together.

      But yeah it’s hard to beat a succinct list.

    • ericwdhs@discuss.onlineEnglish
      2·
      11 天前

      I think it depends on how much of a verbal versus visual thinker you are. I’m very much the latter, and I’ve been using the Cooking for Engineers template for years. One nice thing about it is still having an ingredient list for shopping or mise en place and steps together without repeating a bunch of text.

      Also, bigger recipes will usually have parts that are done concurrently, and the boxes with those steps will stack vertically. The example is one sequence all involving the butter, so that’s already really the worst case scenario for this format.

  • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    17·
    11 天前

    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

  • Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    17·
    11 天前

    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.

    • bort@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      3·
      11 天前

      So the big blank square in the bottom middle should be “mix”

      is see that as an improvement. that square was empty and unbalanced space before

      showed the weakness of this design

      i guess when you generate such a design per script, then you can replace some of the straight lines with flowing/wavy lines and get a nice design again. (i am thinking like a sankey diagram maybe? but there are probably other more compact variants possible)

  • PNW_Doug@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    11 天前

    It’s a neat diagram, but I’m unsure what they mean by “ignore it.” This is exactly how good recipes have been designed for many many decades, minus the nifty visual cheat sheet and with better instructions. [i.e. Do you beat the eggs? How thoroughly? How do you know when it’s done baking?]

    I absolutely get that this might help those who are more visually based learners, but the structure of recipes already follows this pattern. This turns the written instructions into a simplified chart, and I hope more thorough written instructions are simply being elided here.

    I do like it though. It would certainly make a nice visual shorthand to glance over at during prep.

    • solarspark@lemmy.mlEnglish
      8·
      11 天前

      I think the diagram is especially useful for those who have done a recipe numerous times.

      This seems like a great visual summary and useful for those who can refer to it and use experience to fill in the details.

      Nothing substitutes a raw cooking instruction in plain language.