• Snapz@lemmy.world
    1151·
    10 days ago

    This isn’t a recipe? Recipes have 40 paragraph long stories about how your grandmother fell in love in Rome .

      • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
        21·
        10 days ago

        Or giving units by weight.

        I understand it’s more convenient if you have a kitchen scale because you can put everything in the same container, but not all of us has a kitchen scale and converting multiple ingredients from weight to volume is damn near impossible.

          • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
            1·
            9 days ago

            That makes sense if you like numbers that are easy to multiply and divide, but it depends on region. Some people aren’t familiar with metric, and the recipes they write probably don’t use it. In all likelihood, recipes you find in imperial units were likely written by an american.

            The volume vs. weight thing though, that transcends region or systems of measurement. It assumes everyone has a kitchen scale, when most non-professionals have volumetric measuring supplies which are typically way cheaper

            • ramjambamalam@lemmy.caEnglish
              1·
              8 days ago

              Cheap kitchen scales are $10-20 and are accurate enough for cookies. I’m not suggesting that volumetric measurements should go away, but you will find that cooking or baking by weight is much more reproducible than by volume.

    • Avicenna@programming.dev
      3·
      10 days ago

      I came here to ask, “where is the 20 page long family history that makes you get a RSI from scrolling down to see the ingredients” but this will do too

  • Kenny2999@lemmy.world
    362·
    10 days ago

    I’m not sure an excel chart is that much better than just saying “melt x, mix y, fold z and then bake” and the list of ingredients xyz.

    • sepiroth154@feddit.nl
      17·
      10 days ago

      Yeah, what if you want to do something like “seperate the yolks from the whites, beat the whites until they’re fluffy and then add sugar and mix with the rest.” And then a later step doing something with the yolks. I don’t see how you would do that here without it turning into an unreadable mess.

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        10 days ago

        You could just list egg yolks separately from egg whites in the first place. But yeah I get your point, for certain more complicated recipes it will break down. At the cost of some readability I guess you could list products of earlier ingredients on the side, but then it’s no longer a list of what you need to start.

        I think my ideal solution would just be regular recipes but have them actually list the measurements of things in the text. It’s very annoying to have to go back to the list especially when it’s on the other side of a page.

        Or you could go the other direction and have a full graphical flow chart with some text in it, although I can’t imagine that being particularly space efficient

        • sepiroth154@feddit.nl
          2·
          10 days ago

          Yeah agreed, recipes could use something among the lines of “… And then add the sugar (250g)”

      • certified_expert@lemmy.world
        2·
        10 days ago

        It is totally possible. This is basically a dependency graph. Separating the yolks simply goes closer to the left, and it produces new ingredients (or data, if you want): yolks and whites. They move right to their own sequential processes.

    • dalekcaan@feddit.nl
      6·
      10 days ago

      I feel like this is less useful for a recipe you’re making for the first time or make once in a while, but probably pretty handy as a quick reference for something you make regularly.

    • Racoonwithbenefits@lemmy.zip
      83·
      10 days ago

      But this way you dont have to”instructions”

      You just list ingredients and whats done with them

      Its not for the just-moved-out teenager who is cooking for the first time

      • Rothe@piefed.socialEnglish
        31·
        10 days ago

        But lots of recipes needs instructions to clarify why or how you should use certain techniques or ingredients and the like.

        If it is not for everyone then it is not really an improvement.

    • schnapsman@feddit.orgEnglish
      2·
      10 days ago

      Maybe it depends on the recipe. I’m all for rethinking them and going for a cleaner design. I’m also looking forward to the day that we migrate away from hillbilly units, so I don’t have to search “xxx recipe metric”.

  • thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works
    29·
    10 days ago

    I once came across a cooking blog that used this sort of instructions over a decade ago; was apparently run by an engineer - haven’t found it again since, but the methodology stuck with me.

  • BradleyUffner@lemmy.worldEnglish
    222·
    10 days ago

    I don’t understand what this adds that the “traditional” recipe style is missing. I even see some things it’s lacking. For example, the last 4 ingredients should be mixed together independently before folding in to the base.

    I don’t dislike this format, but I just don’t see why it’s so revolutionary.

    • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
      10·
      10 days ago

      If the last 4 ingredients need mixing together first, then you simply have a mix column with just those ingredient rows under the mix column from above to show that those get mixed independently in parallel. This recipe implies that is unnecessary for this food though.

    • certified_expert@lemmy.world
      10·
      10 days ago

      It clearly shows the sequential and parallel threads of execution:

      • up/down: parallel.
      • left to right: sequential

      It clearly shows the sequence of produced intermediate results, split and merging points:

      • a row that splits into two rows is one step producing more than one result. Like spliting yolk and whites.
      • many rows becoming one: merging node. Like baking many ingredients.
    • Luccus@feddit.org
      5·
      10 days ago

      For example, the last 4 ingredients should be mixed together independently before folding in to the base.

      Isn’t that indicated by the combination of rows?

      I like this chart. It even allows for multithreaded multi-person baking, because the combination of rows indicates where processes are merged (and need to be done).

      Edit: I may be dumb. A mix step is missing below the mix block of the other ingredients, but it could easily be included.

      • Prathas@lemmy.zip
        1·
        10 days ago

        Right, I was about to say that the big near-square in the middle bottom could easily be used to indicate this as a separate process. I really like this format!

    • Sharkticon@lemmy.zip
      4·
      10 days ago

      Because it fits on a little card. Which everyone used to keep recipes on for a long time. Little boxes full of recipe cards.

      • BradleyUffner@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        10 days ago

        I guess it’s just a revolutionary idea for those that didn’t grow up in a time when we already did this. This is pretty much what all my recipes (inherited from my grandmother) look like today, just without the bracketing.

        • Sharkticon@lemmy.zip
          2·
          10 days ago

          Its not as universal as you are suggesting here. I’ve seen it before but there are certainly no cards like this in the boxes I’ve inherited.

  • Juviz@lemmy.zipEnglish
    15·
    10 days ago

    I love this. And to all the guys arguing whether this is a good way of designing a recipe, please remember you are on Lemmy, most people here are either it or engineers or at least very close to one of those professions so the amount of autism is significantly increased 😂

    • chickenf622@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      8 days ago

      Exactly what I was hoping existed already. I think I’m going to try and convert some recipes to this format and see how it goes. I like that it has the ingredients in a simple list, makes shopping so much easier.

  • M137@lemmy.today
    155·
    9 days ago

    You Americans just can’t get away from the corporate brainwashing no matter how hard you try.
    “Hershey’s cocoa powder”, what the fuck? Not only is naming a specific brand for a recipe bad enough, naming the worst shit imaginable is so fucking weird.

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
      3·
      8 days ago

      Sometimea it is important like when a recipe wants American jiff or skippy peanut butter etc, because it contains icing sugar besides just peanuts; which changes sugar ratios for cookies.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
      3·
      8 days ago

      My guess is that it has to do with the variations from brand to brand and clarifying that this particular recipe used that brand to get the expected taste. Assuming they didn’t enshitify their version with cheaper ingredients.

      Though I hate recipes that say something like “one can” or “one package”. Even without shrinkflation, different brands sometimes use different sizes (if no brand is specified).

      Though if it’s a published recipe, I agree with the other comment saying that money probably exchanged hands, and that deal might even be the only reason that recipe is featured at all, because it was probably a “publish recipes that sell more of our shit” rather than “fit our shit into your recipes where possible”. Guessing the whole thing might have started with “inventory of our cocoa powder is piling up, sales team gets a bonus if they can get it sold (and we’ll lay off the people producing it for a bit)”.

    • LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world
      1·
      9 days ago

      Typically that just means there was some kind of endorsement deal with the company that made the recipes. I doubt this is an exclusively American phenomenon.

  • farmgineer@nord.pubEnglish
    7·
    10 days ago

    I’ve never seen anyone else do that, but that’s how I began hand-writing recipe cards around a decade ago. Not as neat a table, but groups with arrows that combine down to a final step (so I guess more pyramidal in most cases).

  • Bubbaonthebeach@lemmy.caEnglish
    71·
    9 days ago

    It works for very simple recipes where the work can be summed up in a word or two. Complex recipes need far more instructional information not just the order to put ingredients together.

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
      3·
      8 days ago

      This chart works well as both the requirements and process reference.

      The fine details can be asterisk line items afterward.

      Then the family story goes at the bottom, with perforations so you can tear it off and toss it out

      • ThirdConsul@lemmy.zip
        1·
        8 days ago

        Then the family story goes at the bottom, with perforations so you can tear it off and toss it out

        Stop you gorgeous creature, I don’t want to fall in love with you, I don’t even know you.

  • Lojcs@piefed.socialEnglish
    6·
    10 days ago

    This is pretty much useless unless the recipe is strictly additive. No room for “split a chunk of dough, we’ll need it later”. Or if you need to prepare two things in parallel before combining some but not all. Or indicating that a step can progress unattended.

    • monotremata@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      9 days ago

      Also an issue if you need to add an ingredient at more than one step. Suddenly you’ve got no good way of indicating the total amount you need for the recipe as well as the amounts for the individual steps. This is great for a specific kind of extremely simple recipe only.

        • monotremata@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          8 days ago

          Then you lose the format of the steps on the right. Try to picture what it would look like if it had you add half the vanilla where it currently is and another half at the “fold in” stage. There’s not a good way to do it.

          This design is built around a very simple kind of utilitarian cooking that’s common for institutional kitchens. It’s great for that! But there are a ton of recipes that would be complete trainwrecks if you tried to fit them to this kind of diagram.