Oh wow, thank you for sharing this! That tabulated view is almost exactly what I've been looking for when baking. I had an idea along the same lines, but a slightly more visual approach where portions are represented by illustration that quickly give you a sense of the size of the portion as well.
You may be interested in this analysis on various recipe formats, along with the proposed "RxOL" notation for explicitly expressing recipes as such a tree based structure[0].
Personally I find RxOL hard to read & edit though, so I have been thinking about whether it would be doable able to infer such tree structures from CookLang's more readable recipe format[1][2].
Ingredients and times are already marked, so surely verbs & follow up mentions of ingredients can be extracted from the text without further annotation? Haven't tried doing it yet though.
A trip down memory lane. Thanks for the pleasant reminder that it's still around, and pretty much unchanged. A hidden gem.
Some of the comments on the site from ~2005 are so quaint ("Great site. Am linking to you!", etc.). Makes me feel like I'm in a quaint old-world town: proud of its anachronisms that morph into charm and wisdom with the passage of time.
Please excuse my ignorance, can you explain how I'm supposed to read those? Top-to bottom first? I studied the pizza one and onion rings and while I could create the items from the format, I feel as though I don't fully understand it.
Wow that's really interesting, thanks for sharing. I find it wildly unintuitive but it's nice to be pushed into a different way of thinking about recipes!
If I search for "doughnuts", it's rather unlikely that I'm interested in "Chapssal doughnuts" (top spot), "Pumpkin Doughnuts" (second spot) or even "Gluten-Free Baked Chocolate Doughnuts Recipe" (third spot).
The list should be ordered (somehow, no idea how) by classic or common interpretation of the query first and pushing exotics, varieties and fusion stuff down to the very bottom.
Another one is "sourdough" - "Caesar Salad with Sourdough Croutons" is the top suggestion, followed by "Hard-Boiled Eggs and Parmesan on Toasted Sourdough" and "Radicchio Salad with Sourdough Dressing". Not exactly relevant.
Ha! Thanks for this. I knew that this must be a solved problem but wasn't searching for the right thing. I'll take a look at implementing a better default sort order.
I'll take this opportunity to mention one of my favorite apps: Paprika [0].
It's a recipe app that can import from just about every recipe site/blog/etc and if it can't auto-import it then you can use the really easy tools to grab all the pertinent information. Once imported you can edit/scale/rate/tag/categorize/etc the recipe. Furthermore it has meal planning tools and a grocery list built in. I love the grocery list feature because you can easily click "Add to Grocery List" (of which you can have multiple if you want) and then just uncheck all the things you already have. It has a "Pantry" feature but I've never used it, I assume it will auto-uncheck items you already have when you go to add them to the grocery list but I'm not sure about that.
It's great to import a recipe and then tweak it after making it and see what works/doesn't so you don't have to find the recipe again later and/or remember the changes you made to it.
It's cross platform (Mac/iOS/Windows/Android) and running it on an older tablet in my kitchen is an awesome experience (timers built in, switch between multiple recipes easily, cross out ingredients after adding them, etc).
I have no connection to the company, I just love the app. If I had 1 request it would be a way to share recipes with friends through some "social"/"friend-ing" concept in the app (not using a social network). You can share a ".paprikarecipe" file that includes everything about the recipe but passing around a file isn't always easy and Discord just cuts off extensions longer than like 12 characters which makes it harder.
My wife and I share the same account to have the same info available on all our devices. This means shopping lists too and thanks to the lightning fast sync our shopping has become distributed, effectively halving the time we spent at the store.
We tried several other apps and this one is worth every penny. Some of my favourite features:
- Customize aisles
- Auto stacking in shopping list
- Clickable timers
- Custom import from web
- Well working scaling
Strongly recommending this app to anyone.
Sidenote: If available, use a portable scanner at the store. This reduces the amount of times you touch an item significantly, speeding up the experience.
Sidenote 2: To make auto stacking in the shopping list work the item name needs to be identical. We found that separating ingredient from processing works best. So 2 kg potatoes as ingredient and cutting in half in the directions instead of 2 kg of potateos cut in half as ingredient.
This is fantastic and does a great job distilling pages of information, ads and videos down too easy to follow steps and ingredients.
We subscribe to a meal service called fresh prep which comes ad the problem from the other side, removing some prep and having to ask the question "What's for dinner". I think this is the killer feature Paprika is missing, browsing meal ideas that can be imported and added to your planner.
There is still lots of room for disruption in this space, thanks for sharing.
Great tool to improve the dismal experience of searching recipes online.
To intrepid cooks I encourage getting a good cookbook, e.g. from Julia Child or Mark Bittman – where you can learn cooking fundamentals and techniques aimed to teach you how to cook self-sufficiently.
Break away from recipes and you’ll be dancing around your kitchen to your own culinary tune instead of recreating mediocre click bait.
Cookbooks have editors, and the recipes are tested so they can be made with common ingredients. They want cooks to be successful!
Oddly I've found cookbook recipes to ALWAYS be better than online recipes. Book recipes tend to be shorter, clearer, and more successful. Online recipes are okay but sometimes don't come out the way I'd expect, they're more fiddly.
I highly recommend Ratio by Michael Ruhlmann. So far I've only used it for basic doughs, cakes, biscuits. Learn the ratios, and why they're like that. Very liberating.
Hey, another fan of vegrecipesofindia/Dassana's Veg Recipes I see! The site has some quirks (best not to try to use the quantity adjustment (which doesn't change everything) or metric/US customary toggle (which is often wrong on at least one side)) but in terms of actual recipes, range of stuff to enjoy making and eating - and quality of photos/general SNR actually - it's really nice, highly recommend it.
I wanted to be able to search recipes from sources I knew I could trust. I also wanted a way to sort recipes by rating and include and exclude ingredients I already had.
Going forward, I aim to add more sources, better ingredient filtering (hierarchical) and more dimensions (cuisine, meal time, etc.)
Let me know what you think! One thing I struggled with was whether to includes mode with pictures or not. I can’t decide if the loss in info density is worth the benefit.
Don't get me wrong, I think yours is definitely a no-bs application, however I think the entire recipe search engines is not working, or at least, not in the way I expect it to work.
I wish it was more a holistic solution, mixing calendar, already available ingredients, non available, shopping list, where to get what you're missing, different profiles (I'm vegan, for instance, but I grew up in Italy so I wish I could mix both profiles), search by available time, by difficulty, requirements, and much more.
Let's say that how to get the recipe is something that isn't the problem I have.
For all the borderline-insane things Luke Smith endorses, I'm glad he has at least one decent contribution to the internet. based.cooking should be a model for everyone else trying to take back the internet on their own terms.
Where is the data coming from? Are you manually entering each recipe, ingredients, rating etc into a database or do you have an automated service pulling it all in from various apis/scraping?
Looks good once the 404 issue is fixed. Perhaps for a future release you could tag / filter sources by country? A big problem for me in recipe search is avoiding localisation issues (e.g. Having to do all the conversions from cups; remembering that 'heavy cream' is somewhere in between single and double cream etc.)
Tagging by country / locale is a good idea. Another thing I'm currently working on is using a data structure of ingredients instead of a flat list. This structure will handle things like different names for ingredients and hierarchy (ie. no dairy will exclude milk and butter as well.)
My normal challenge with recipes is that I have no idea how authoritative the reviews are. On some sites, there are a lot of recipes that make no sense whatsoever, and yet have 5 stars.
As I mentioned elsewhere, quality of a recipe can't be plotted on a line. It's at least a 2D space. The wrong mix of ingredients can be bad, but the instructions can also not be repeatable. And repeatability might even have dimensions of its own. Some ingredients age better than others, for instance, and some measuring systems are more consistent. Baking powder and spices are examples of the former, and brown sugar for the latter, or possibly both.
I'm confused by what you mean by authoritative. Cooking isn't really like math, there's no canonical pineapple pizza recipe unless you go too vague like: dough, sauce, ham, pineapple, delicious. Or do you mean real reviews where the stars mean something?
For recipes, stars often let me down as they seem to be more related to how the recipe worked and could be followed, not how good it tasted. And the flavors seem to be pretty bland.
There are Facebook groups that offer reviews in exchange for reviews. You will see very new recipes, that have had zero chance to rank and be cooked, with comments like:
I would be cool if you could search by ingredients or food allergies. Somewhere you can basically state the ingredients you have and then it'll suggest recipes, but I understand if you don't have all the recipes indexed by ingredients
The search feature is nice, but I was sad when it took me to the normal recipe page. What I would really love to have is a very concise and succinct view of the recipe itself. Hopefully the next step is smart parsing of the recipe!
I love the idea, but the first recipe I clicked happened to be from the New York times and they have this BS that I need to create an account to read the recipe. Still, your tool helped me find it, so it is a win.
Great job! Love the UI. Did you build this from scratch or is it an extended, existing database front-end? The search/filters/sorting would be really useful to generalise as its own package!
[+] [-] leobg|4 years ago|reply
Ever since I first saw this, whenever I get a recipe, from anywhere, I convert it by hand to this format.
Perhaps you can automate that process? That would be rad!
[1] http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/108/Banana-Nut-Bre...
[+] [-] chrisgat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dunham|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caspar|4 years ago|reply
Personally I find RxOL hard to read & edit though, so I have been thinking about whether it would be doable able to infer such tree structures from CookLang's more readable recipe format[1][2].
Ingredients and times are already marked, so surely verbs & follow up mentions of ingredients can be extracted from the text without further annotation? Haven't tried doing it yet though.
[0] http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/CompCook.html
[1] https://cooklang.org/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28997309
[+] [-] freetinker|4 years ago|reply
Some of the comments on the site from ~2005 are so quaint ("Great site. Am linking to you!", etc.). Makes me feel like I'm in a quaint old-world town: proud of its anachronisms that morph into charm and wisdom with the passage of time.
[+] [-] dom_hutton|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] savingGrace|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubercore|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MeinBlutIstBlau|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m12k|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huhtenberg|4 years ago|reply
If I search for "doughnuts", it's rather unlikely that I'm interested in "Chapssal doughnuts" (top spot), "Pumpkin Doughnuts" (second spot) or even "Gluten-Free Baked Chocolate Doughnuts Recipe" (third spot).
The list should be ordered (somehow, no idea how) by classic or common interpretation of the query first and pushing exotics, varieties and fusion stuff down to the very bottom.
Another one is "sourdough" - "Caesar Salad with Sourdough Croutons" is the top suggestion, followed by "Hard-Boiled Eggs and Parmesan on Toasted Sourdough" and "Radicchio Salad with Sourdough Dressing". Not exactly relevant.
[+] [-] milomildus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amflare|4 years ago|reply
Is there anywhere that details the changes necessary to use for other rating scales (such as the 5-star/10-star system)?
[+] [-] lighttower|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukashrb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshstrange|4 years ago|reply
It's a recipe app that can import from just about every recipe site/blog/etc and if it can't auto-import it then you can use the really easy tools to grab all the pertinent information. Once imported you can edit/scale/rate/tag/categorize/etc the recipe. Furthermore it has meal planning tools and a grocery list built in. I love the grocery list feature because you can easily click "Add to Grocery List" (of which you can have multiple if you want) and then just uncheck all the things you already have. It has a "Pantry" feature but I've never used it, I assume it will auto-uncheck items you already have when you go to add them to the grocery list but I'm not sure about that.
It's great to import a recipe and then tweak it after making it and see what works/doesn't so you don't have to find the recipe again later and/or remember the changes you made to it.
It's cross platform (Mac/iOS/Windows/Android) and running it on an older tablet in my kitchen is an awesome experience (timers built in, switch between multiple recipes easily, cross out ingredients after adding them, etc).
I have no connection to the company, I just love the app. If I had 1 request it would be a way to share recipes with friends through some "social"/"friend-ing" concept in the app (not using a social network). You can share a ".paprikarecipe" file that includes everything about the recipe but passing around a file isn't always easy and Discord just cuts off extensions longer than like 12 characters which makes it harder.
[0] https://www.paprikaapp.com/
[+] [-] strobe999|4 years ago|reply
We tried several other apps and this one is worth every penny. Some of my favourite features: - Customize aisles - Auto stacking in shopping list - Clickable timers - Custom import from web - Well working scaling
Strongly recommending this app to anyone.
Sidenote: If available, use a portable scanner at the store. This reduces the amount of times you touch an item significantly, speeding up the experience.
Sidenote 2: To make auto stacking in the shopping list work the item name needs to be identical. We found that separating ingredient from processing works best. So 2 kg potatoes as ingredient and cutting in half in the directions instead of 2 kg of potateos cut in half as ingredient.
[+] [-] silentrob|4 years ago|reply
We subscribe to a meal service called fresh prep which comes ad the problem from the other side, removing some prep and having to ask the question "What's for dinner". I think this is the killer feature Paprika is missing, browsing meal ideas that can be imported and added to your planner.
There is still lots of room for disruption in this space, thanks for sharing.
[+] [-] namrog84|4 years ago|reply
5 for ios. Free on android. And 30 for windows.
And seemingly no browser version? :(
[+] [-] whoomp12342|4 years ago|reply
to me, no-bs means ingredients and instructions. Maybe a few pictures of the target meal. thats it.
[+] [-] Spivak|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonymet|4 years ago|reply
To intrepid cooks I encourage getting a good cookbook, e.g. from Julia Child or Mark Bittman – where you can learn cooking fundamentals and techniques aimed to teach you how to cook self-sufficiently.
Break away from recipes and you’ll be dancing around your kitchen to your own culinary tune instead of recreating mediocre click bait.
[+] [-] john-tells-all|4 years ago|reply
Cookbooks have editors, and the recipes are tested so they can be made with common ingredients. They want cooks to be successful!
Oddly I've found cookbook recipes to ALWAYS be better than online recipes. Book recipes tend to be shorter, clearer, and more successful. Online recipes are okay but sometimes don't come out the way I'd expect, they're more fiddly.
It's great to have options!
[+] [-] cushychicken|4 years ago|reply
No recipe in it has been bad. One or two have been "too much work to be worth it", but on average, the food has been good to excellent.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00X2E308K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
[+] [-] klondike_klive|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OJFord|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] milomildus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] milomildus|4 years ago|reply
I wanted to be able to search recipes from sources I knew I could trust. I also wanted a way to sort recipes by rating and include and exclude ingredients I already had.
Going forward, I aim to add more sources, better ingredient filtering (hierarchical) and more dimensions (cuisine, meal time, etc.)
Let me know what you think! One thing I struggled with was whether to includes mode with pictures or not. I can’t decide if the loss in info density is worth the benefit.
[+] [-] pachico|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] milomildus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herpderperator|4 years ago|reply
2. 500 error when typing a quotation mark - needs escaping: https://api.stovetop.app/recipes?q=%27
[+] [-] anschwa|4 years ago|reply
https://based.cooking/ might be another good source of recipes if you're not already using it.
[+] [-] smoldesu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twiclo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uhtred|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james_in_the_uk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] milomildus|4 years ago|reply
Tagging by country / locale is a good idea. Another thing I'm currently working on is using a data structure of ingredients instead of a flat list. This structure will handle things like different names for ingredients and hierarchy (ie. no dairy will exclude milk and butter as well.)
[+] [-] OJFord|4 years ago|reply
I don't like it, but it beats using something else for a volumetric measurement.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] blowski|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grogenaut|4 years ago|reply
For recipes, stars often let me down as they seem to be more related to how the recipe worked and could be followed, not how good it tasted. And the flavors seem to be pretty bland.
[+] [-] davestephens|4 years ago|reply
"Ooh I can't wait to make this!"
Or:
"I LOVE making chicken like this!"
...and a five star review.
[+] [-] horsawlarway|4 years ago|reply
Toggle that slider up to 5k and it's just them sitting there at ridiculous numbers all pegged at 5 stars.
[+] [-] ffumarola|4 years ago|reply
1) Clean up the plural duplicates, e.g. peanut/peanuts, leek/leeks, carrot/carrots, etc.
2) I've never considered the author, is that common?
3) Mode to toggle pictures on would help scanning, cooking is very visual
4) Not simple to design, but some way to have either/or ingredients (e.g. peanuts OR cashews) could be useful
[+] [-] bko|4 years ago|reply
I would be cool if you could search by ingredients or food allergies. Somewhere you can basically state the ingredients you have and then it'll suggest recipes, but I understand if you don't have all the recipes indexed by ingredients
Sorting the table too!
[+] [-] par|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goshx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smallerfish|4 years ago|reply
Also please add a facets like feature to avoid the user selecting combinations of ingredients that don't match any recipes.
[+] [-] fortydegrees|4 years ago|reply