Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

[mizzao]

We're building Parsnip to create a "tech tree" of cooking skills that allows anyone to level up on the building blocks of cooking knowledge while tracking their progress over time. It took us a few iterations to figure out the right product; here's the story of our latest pivot: [https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope]

The goal is to create a personalized way to learn any recipe on the Internet, then use this as a springboard to help home cooks of all levels solve the problem of repeated meal planning in a 10x better way: [https://parsnip.substack.com/p/vision-part-one]

We believe that solving this problem at scale is good for people and for the planet [https://parsnip.substack.com/p/why-we-started-parsnip] and that now is the perfect time in history to do it: [https://parsnip.substack.com/p/why-now].

Would love any suggestions, feedback, or advice; and happy to answer any questions!

[ajb]

Please, please, please, avoid status cuisines. It's going to be hard to do, because they make good PR. But you will be helping your users a lot more of you hold them off with a ten foot pole. What do I mean by a status cuisine? They are meals that are intended to show that the cook is a worthy person, rather than that the meal is practical, healthy, and good to eat. Here are some examples:

The endurance cuisine: designed to show that the cook has time to spare, the endurance cuisine requires that no ingredient is pre-processed in any way. Grind your own grain, bake your own breadcrumbs, chop your own veg. Using grapes? You should have peeled them!

The hair-shirt cuisine: you have to endure some discomfort if it's good for you, right? This cuisine specialises in sour tastes and unpleasant mouthfeel - often using grains that our stone-age ancestors sensibly gave up for nicer ones.

The gold plated cuisine: this one's obvious. Pricier ingredients must be better - or at least show how much the cook can spend

The obscurantist/connoisseur's cuisine: it can't be good if it's easy to find. The cook can only be good if they know exactly how many 'extras' you need in your virgin olive oil, and what classification of wine you should put in your coq'au'vin.

(Okay this is a bit tongue in cheek - but only a bit. I really do think a lot of recipes are unnecessarily onerous in some way)

[mizzao]

We agree with you 150%. Because of the algorithms driving social media, so much of food content is meant to be entertainment, not education, and far from accessible. Because of the focus on attention, cooking appears way harder than it has to be. Here are some of the principles driving what we're doing:

Cooking fundamentals rather than recipes

Education rather than entertainment ("food porn")

Don't have the right tool? No problem! Here are 3 ways to improvise

Missing that ingredient? No problem! Here are 3 substitutes

Scaling primarily using software/data/ML instead of hardware (capital-intensive) or physical delivery (operations heavy)

Exponentially less content to create with knowledge blocks ("legos") rather than recipes ("what you build with the legos")

"Learn to make this with Parsnip" rather than "buy these groceries" or "order this food" or "watch this video"

Encouraging you to be the creative process vs. outsourcing work to someone else

I believe we have a few aces up our sleeve for avoiding the status trap. You can get a sense of how we're thinking about it here: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/why-now

[dkarl]

I have a different take. Cooking for status is a gateway to cooking for other reasons, kind of like how people start working out to look hot and then stick with it for the other benefits.

Also, when you start out, it inevitably feels like a big complicated formal deal anyway, no matter what you're cooking, so why not actually make coq au vin or beef Wellington or something super cool like that? Julia Child's classic beginner's cookbook The Way to Cook paired classic French recipes with "home cooking" versions of the same recipes, and as a twenty-something with virtually no cooking skill, I found the classic versions much more motivating than the home cooking versions. When I got excited by Thai cooking, I made my own curry paste, something I would never bother with now. Some beginners are full of energy and enthusiasm for big challenges, and it would be great to have resources for them, even if other beginners should be steered to different resources according to their goals and motivations.

[munk-a]

Endurance cuisine spreading via social media is quite silly but I did want to provide a brief counter example. My SO and I are lactose intolerant so we make occasional big batches of cheese at home - given that we're doing this if we're making lasagna or calzones we'll often set aside a portion of the cheese to tune it to the right moist/dryness level and that makes a big difference in the final product.

Knowing how to make homemade cheese and applying that skill economically when it'll make a significant difference in the final product is useful... that ends up going with a home made puttanesca sauce instead of some canned pasta sauce... but those two end up covering some store bought noodles because I have priorities about my time.

Much like a lot of we programming folks learned the basics in university (assembly programming, building basic data structures in C++) comprehending the basics can let you make a judgement call on when it's appropriate to put in the extra effort. Someone who has never cooked a load of break may find that task daunting and insurmountable... but someone who regularly cooks fresh rolls for their daily grain and just keeps a weeks worth of dough in a tin in the fridge can whip up fresh rolls for dinner in a matter of minutes.

[Ntrails]

> The endurance cuisine: designed to show that the cook has time to spare, the endurance cuisine requires that no ingredient is pre-processed in any way. Grind your own grain, bake your own breadcrumbs, chop your own veg. Using grapes? You should have peeled them!

This makes no sense to me at all. Where does it stop?

"You didn't use pre-peeled carrots, you're doing this for status" "You actually made shortcrust instead of using pre-made, you're doing this for status" "You made your own pesto, you're doing this for status"

Like, this is just some subjective line you're laying down and I do not see the point

[itsoktocry]

>I really do think a lot of recipes are unnecessarily onerous in some way

Cooking is different things for different people. I feel like tech people see it as nothing but sustenance (yay Soylent!), so the idea is for it to be quick, cheap and easy.

For other people it's a hobby and they actually enjoy the process. Grinding your own grain or peeling grapes can increase the food quality, and it takes nothing but time, so why not? Same goes for buying better ingredients. We probably all waste a lot of money on things that aren't necessary, but we enjoy.

[sequoia]

This list of no-nos hilariously inverts the "shaming" you're trying to avoid: instead of feeling bad for using shortcuts, now I'm supposed to feel bad for not using them?

I chop onions instead of buying them pre-chopped (is this even a thing?) and you see that as some sort of expression of snobbery or a status signalling behaviour? I can't help but laugh here.

[asdajksah2123]

Endurance Cuisine: As long as it's labelled properly, those who have the time, energy, inclination, and/or desire can make the ingredient the long way. Those who don't won't and can sub in pre-prepared ingredients.

2) Hair-shirt cuisine: I'm curious which grains you're talking about. But a lot of the "old world" grains that have become popular are not popular because people find them uncomfortable to eat. They're popular because they taste good. And many people enjoy the additional texture.

3) More expensive ingredients don't have to be better. But they often can be. And in many cases even if the upfront expense is higher the actual value over a period of time may be equivalent and even cheaper. A classic and common example of this is parmesan. Yes, a block of parmesan will be more expensive than the pre-grated stuff. But it will also be more flavorful so you don't need to use as much and will probably last you longer than the pre grated stuff. It will also usually fit recipes a lot better because the pre-grated stuff has anti-caking agents which will ruin recipes.

[bkandel]

> chop your own veg

Is there a way to avoid this? I can get some chopped vegetables at the grocery store, but the vast majority of vegetables are only available whole.

[sealthedeal]

WTF is a status cuisine? I cook French and Italian food. Simple, delicous, and teach you the fundamentals of cooking. Plus every dinner looks like I went and paid $200 for it at a nice restaurant.

Cooking has a few rules.

1. Use good fresh ingredients 2. Care about what you are cooking and who you are cooking for 3. Enjoy yourself

[danpalmer]

I've done a few quizzes on the app now, and I don't get it. The questions feel very contrived, like someone had a quota to fill so just put whatever looked plausible together. They are also _very_ culturally specific.

Questions about eggs barely made sense to me being from the UK, with incorrect pack sizes, animal welfare terms, and completely missed our great standards body that makes it easy to know which eggs have met a reasonable quality bar. It's not that the info is globally applicable, it's that it's an awkward combination of wrong and useless depending on where you live. Starting another quiz about kitchen equipment it seems this is a pattern throughout.

Cooking is deeply embedded into culture, tradition, region, climate, regulatory environment, retail infrastructure, and more. I don't think these quizzes will be able to overcome this without being fully localised per country.

The recipes? Maybe they're better. I don't know, I'm still 7 levels away from being able to know how to make scrambled eggs.

Edit: when I opened the app the first time it asked me how experienced I am and I answered the 3rd out of 4 options, I know my way around a kitchen. The app just asked me to match pictures of eggs to how they have been cooked: fried, scrambled, etc. I'm not sure I can survive this level of patronisation, it's honestly a bit insulting.

Edit: "what sort of pan should you cook eggs in"... "no not a wok, people don't have those at home". Ouch. At best that's incredibly sheltered for a food writer, and at worst it's practically racist.

[danpalmer]

To perhaps be a bit more constructive, and to suggest a way forward...

I'd like to see a cooking teaching app that allows users to work through a recipe in varying levels of detail. For example, consider a Lasagna. A lower level recipe may use ricotta for a quick and easy version, a higher level might explain step by step how to make a bechamel, and the "hardest" level may just say "make a bechamel".

As a user, being able to select a difficulty level and see the differences not only allows me to learn new techniques at a pace that suits me while experimenting, it also teaches me more about the dishes and how recipes can be changed while keeping the spirit of a dish, or the flavour profile.

The best cooking videos on YouTube, people like J Kenji Lopez-Alt and Chef John from Food Wishes dot com, tell viewers what's truly necessary, and what's not. What "makes the dish" and what they're replacing in the recipe themselves because they ran out of the proper ingredient. I've learnt so much from this sort of thing, and am far more confident both creating my own recipes and modifying existing ones, having been a to-the-letter recipe follower for many years.

[blindseer]

I tried the app too and experienced exactly the same thing. I’m surprised the app is getting as much positive reception on here as it is. Sure it is cute and “gamey”, but I don’t particularly think it’s even useful. I’d rather have the knowledge graph displayed to me in a way I can easily find information or navigate it. Why would I EVER want to use this to learn something new when I could just read the information and ingest it.

To be fair I feel the same way about duolingo but the knowledge graph is so deep and dense there that i wouldn’t be able to consume information in a couple of sittings. With recipes, I am pretty sure I could “learn” everything I wanted to learn about eggs or tomatoes or bread in just one evening. There’s probably real life experience that would add to that knowledge but that’s not something I would get from this app anyway.

[ac29]

> I've done a few quizzes on the app now, and I don't get it. The questions feel very contrived, like someone had a quota to fill so just put whatever looked plausible together.

The picture of quizzes on their blog post was odd too. The idea of washing ground beef to make a hamburger is very weird. Sounds like the result of an algorithm that decided that washing {ingredient} was always the first step in any recipe.

[whateveracct]

Cooking has become a very weird thing - people both overrate its difficulty and complexity to the point of phobia..and also consume content of people cooking without ever doing it themselves. So many cooking tik tok etcs are so obviously not good food to make compared to normal stuff.

Scrambled eggs are a good thing to learn for a beginner, and maybe the app does try to teach you the real "hard" part of them: Heat control. If you understand the heat of your stove and your pan, you can make scrambled eggs.

You can learn it by getting a carton of eggs, a stick of butter, and a frying pan. You'll learn how butter burns and gets too hot, and you'll learn when you jump the gun and put the egg in too cold of a pan.

People want steps and skills and tricks. But the real way to learn how to cook is to look at & listen to your pan, taste your food, and then repeat and learn from your mistakes.

[EligibleSpatula]

Apologies if the wok explanation came across as insensitive or racist.

The wording used was 'a wok is unwieldy and uncommon in a lot of home kitchens'.

As one of the two Asian writers who this got past, we believed that this statement was true enough for North American beginners looking to learn how to make scrambled eggs.

I have changed the copy there and endeavour to make sure that we are more culturally sensitive in the future.

[quasarj]

lol, I read your comment and was like "pfft look at this smug UK-er thinking his best-eggs-in-the-world mean the app sucks" and then the first question I got was ridiculous and suggested I should always buy the cheapest eggs haha. You were absolutely right.

[teacpde]

Pretty much same experience, I also chose the 3rd level in the beginning, and some of the questions I got are just tedious. I did learn something new, but I feel like overall the questions are not tailored to the level.

[mizzao]

It sounds like you're a pretty experienced chef and we're targeting beginners (that experience question was more to get a sense of who our users are).

If you consider that we're trying to start with levels 1, 2, and 3 of cooking before moving on to the far more advanced topics, do you still think it's useless? Or does your perspective change?

Thanks for the note about the questions that are potentially culturally insulting. I actually have a wok at home so I'm gonna look into that one personally!

[bearmode]

>Edit: "what sort of pan should you cook eggs in"... "no not a wok, people don't have those at home". Ouch. At best that's incredibly sheltered for a food writer, and at worst it's practically racist.

I didn't do the eggs one, but that's hilarious. Also from the UK, also own a wok, and also agree that scrambled eggs are best in a wok.

[bogota]

100% agree about this not working unless it’s culture and country specific. It’s also not very interesting to me if i can’t go in and say i want to learn how to cook Venezuelan cuisine today.

Basic cooking skills are easy enough to find on youtube.

[throwaway675309]

"what sort of pan should you cook eggs in"... "no not a wok, people don't have those at home". Ouch. At best that's incredibly sheltered for a food writer, and at worst it's practically racist.

FALSE. Even the most irrationally minded human being who deliberately tries to intepret things in the worst possible manner would have gotten racism out of a declarative sentence like "most people don't have woks at home", which is likely an accurate assessment given the North American demographic they seem to be targeting. Unbelievable

[Mikeb85]

I wish you good luck but I don't get it either.

The thing that makes Duolingo great is that right away you learn words in a new language. It hooks you. Within 1 lesson you know several words or a phrase with a few variations.

This is more just random trivia about food that no one cares about. I started with the cheeseburger recipe (apparently an advanced lesson or something). Right away it's asking me a bunch of questions about ground meat but teaching me nothing. Where's the hook? I want to see a recipe and learn to make it, not feel like I'm taking a test about a bunch of stuff I was never taught with no obvious path to simply making the thing I want to make. In the 5 minutes I spent on it I feel like I was just getting grilled (metaphorically). The first 5 minutes of Duolingo I actually learned something.

Anyhow, suggestion would be to start right away with the thing people actually want... How to cook the food and make the recipe.

[thr0wawayf00]

> Recipes are surprisingly deceptive. They seem like instructions you can follow, but a more apt analogy is that the recipe is an iceberg and beginner cooks are steaming along on the Titanic.

Devil's advocate (and very serious home cook): Food Youtube solves all of these problems in various and (IMO) much more entertaining and informative ways. There's a plethora of content ranging from highly-technical restaurant inspired recipes to "authentic" home cooking traditions passed down through generations. Tracking a progress meter isn't going to make me a better cook: having access to lots of different ideas and styles and trying the ones that speak to me will make me a better cook. Also, our tastes are largely inspired by what we ate growing up and there few universally-loved recipes. That's one of the most beautiful things about cooking: there's a million different ways to do it.

You don't know how to chop an onion? There are a million videos on how to do that. Want to know the history of a certain spice? There's a channel for that.

[mizzao]

I appreciate the perspective, it's a common objection. Similar arguments I've heard are that in order to learn to cook, you need to do one of:

- read a lot of cookbooks and understand them

- go watch a ton of YouTube videos and triangulate the best way to do it

- go get a job in a kitchen (essentially, apprentice)

I learn the way you do and I totally get where you're coming from. But this only works for serious autodidacts. For everyone else, doing any of the above is a pain in the butt. So that's the problem we're trying to solve.

The magic of the tech tree is that it addresses the issue of "you can't type what you don't know into Google."

[biophysboy]

An idea for the long-term future: I've often felt like cooking would be a perfect use case for very simple augmented reality. Often times my hands are messy while cooking, making it hard to deal with a book or smartphone. Also, recipes are often very time-sensitive. If I could see the ingredients/steps quickly, that'd be terrific. Better yet, it'd be nice to see a demo of what I am making, for things that are difficult to describe in words (e.g. whipping egg whites - what does a "stiff peak" mean?). Obviously the hardware would be an issue, given that you're often standing over heat, steam, oil, etc. But its still a dream I have.

[pc86]

This might be the one good use case for something like Google Glass. AR to tell you what ingredient to grab (even highlighting/circling/whatever the item if it's already out), timers, notifications ("those egg whites look done!"), etc.

[mizzao]

That's part of our plan! The idea is to build a data platform that can drive a 10x better AR/VR experience that teaches you interactively.

Doing it from an app like this is just the first step. New products need a wedge.

I've heard from the grapevine that this application is one of the huge efforts in Facebook's metaverse effort. Let's see if we can do it better...

[asiachick]

I found this very "white people in middle america" centric (sorry but I'm banging my brain to find a better way to describe it).

My options as a beginner are 'greek salad', 'spaghetti & meatballs', 'cheeseburger', 'deli sandwich', 'avocado toast'. Even on advanced it only added 'scrambled eggs', and 'tomato bisque'

To put it another way I found it very non-inclusive.

Not that I expect one app to teach me all the world's cuisine but it would be nice to at least acknowledge up front the bias of the app in its description?

There's nothing wrong with teaching these things but they are not the "beginning" things for a great many cultures including cultures in the USA itself. I doubt the kids of most parents of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Mexican, descent would start with these items.

Sorry if I'm not making any sense. I'm not trying to be negative. I'm just pointing out that the selection offered clearly shows a bias.

[mizzao]

I'm actually ethnically Chinese but I learned to cook Western cuisine before Chinese food (which you can see plenty of on our Discord: https://discord.gg/P4qpxsJ6A8)

We'll be adding more ethnic foods in soon, which is very exciting to me.

[markstos]

For vegetarians or vegans browsing the site, it's not clear if they should even bother to install the app, because there's no clarification of whether the app has a single idea of what "good food" is. One of the examples on the front page is unlocking a cheeseburger recipe.

[Spivak]

If your definition of "good food" excludes literally the most popular dish in America then you might want to consider that your tastes are a bit niche.

I don't understand why so many people consider anything part of US culinary tradition to be bad while seemingly giving a pass to everyone else like it isn't a different arrangement of meat, dairy, carbs, salt, and acid.

[mizzao]

Are you saying that there should be a single idea of what "good food" is?

I personally don't think any particular dish is good or bad, but how well it's cooked.

[no_circuit]

Sorry, it seems like a whole lessons section is missing from the app. The only way someone can learn currently is by guessing all of the quiz sections.

First question received: "The best indicator of freshness for ground beef is: a) smell, b) whether it was frozen, c) the manufacture date, d) color.

The answer "a" smell was marked incorrect, "c" manufacture date was the "correct one". Uh... maybe... unless it wasn't stored properly.

Other questions: Is all ground beef the same? How long can fresh ground beef can be kept in the refrigerator for?

It really isn't helpful to guess my way through some quizzes to get access to a recipe.

[guggleet]

From the privacy policy:

> We may collect the following information from you in order to provide our Services:

> ....

> Your child’s first name;

> Your child’s age or birthday;

Why?

[mizzao]

My co-founder handled the privacy policy so I've pinged him to provide a response. We'll get back to you as soon as possible!

EDIT: lynndotpy was right; it's required by law under COPPA if we have users under 13. It's the same reason that sites ask people for their age/birthday to check if they're under 13.

We want kids to be able to learn to cook too!

[lynndotpy]

I believe because they're targeting users under 13. I also saw this and got very concerned, until I read the beginning but of the Privacy Policy.

I'd love a clarification, say, that they don't somehow do this for adult users of the app.

[JLCarveth]

Makes it easier to sell your firstborn if they have that information already /s

[bearmode]

Initial comments:

- On a question that was supposed to load gifs as the answers, only one gif loaded. And it wasn't the correct one, so I had to pick blind.

- You should try some localisation, e.g. 'grilling' is 'barbecuing' in the UK. What you'd call a broiler, we'd call a grill. Could cause some confusion. There's a lot of localisation issues from what I've seen, it's very USA-centric.

- I answered a question about cheese storage, it told me I got it wrong and that modern refrigerators were the way to go. So I clicked the only answer that mentioned a fridge, and I got told it was wrong again.

- I don't understand how I'm supposed to be learning anything? It just feels like I'm doing a Buzzfeed quiz

- 'Burger sauce' is just ketchup and mayo, with any other mix-ins you want. There's a lot of variety in burger sauces. The app describes it as "creamy, tangy, onion-y and with little chunks of pickle". The next question says that the 'five main components of burger suace' are mustard, ketchup, pickle relish, onion powder, mayo. Only 2/5 are essential. You can argue for mustard.

- Q: 'Why make burger sauce' - A: 'It's convenient' - what? You're making a new sauce because you want the taste of all the sauces combined, you presumably wouldn't just be putting all of the ingredients on your burger individually as an alternative?

I think it'd be worth looking at actual culinary school curricula rather than making a short buzzfeed-style quiz for each individual ingredient in a dish, there's potential here but I don't think it's going to be a great learning tool in its current form

[erispoe]

You're talking about targeting a billion people. Who is that billion people? Is that the western world? Or people in the world with no cooking skills?

Do you have an idea of the distribution of cooking skills in the world / western world? How many people need to develop basic skills?

[kelseydh]

I went through the app, and I've answered like 30 questions now on food storage/safety and it feels like I'm taking a tedious course. Weird. Is that all it is, food preparation trivia?

Please don't lead with this stuff. Teach me how to make tasty things!

[anosidium]

This looks incredible! I would love a macOS app as I spend more time on the Mac than on my iPhone.

Well done for not enforcing account registration and letting me actually try the app.

[fatcat500]

Love the idea, will definitely try it out.

One bit of feedback I want to give is: when I'm answering questions on the iPhone app, there's a dialog that shoots up from the bottom... this is too much motion and I don't like it. Especially since there are multiple questions back-to-back, it feels a bit nauseating to see that dialog shoot up over and over.

I think a quick fade in (or no transition at all) may be better suited for that part of the app.

[pessimizer]

I've had very similar ideas, and although I can't quite get the vision of how you're organizing the material since your last pivot, I want to throw in a few ideas (that you may be already doing.)

1) Cooking skills are physical acts of dexterity and timing that can be explained and modeled by text and videos, but not mastered. This is a good place for the use of spaced repetition; every time someone makes a recipe that uses that technique, ask them how they did (and give them the criteria e.g "was the sauce shiny?") Make practicing fading or weak skills, or taking advantage of mastered skills, a criteria for suggesting recipes to the user. i.e. "do you want an Easy, Challenging, or Difficult recipe?" and select based on their current skill level at the techniques involved (and the ingredients at hand.) Choosing Easy would be biased towards recipes utilizing techniques and ingredients that they have mastered, Challenging would be for techniques that they are learning, and Difficult would be for introducing new techniques.

2. Organize learning more around techniques than ingredients. Some techniques only apply to a single ingredient, but most apply to many ingredients. If techniques are verbs, ingredients are conjugations - many irregular, but most regular. Some ingredients require a higher level of a particular technique than others. Figure out what ingredients they like by asking what meals they like, and use those to help suggest future techniques to learn.

3. Many people want to become vegetarian, or vegan, or paleo/Mediterranean/whatever, but don't like the food yet. If a program like this suggests logical progressions to train the palate towards a user's goal, it could help them switch to these diets (clinically picky eaters, or people who have discovered they are pre-diabetic, diabetic, celiac, or that they have fatty liver disease, have a serious problem with this.)

This could be amenable to a machine learning recommendation approach if you ask what meals people enjoyed, you know the techniques they're good at, and you know their diet goals. You could say "buy avocados on your next shopping trip and you can try X, Y, or Z, which people who like what you like also seem to like."

[econner]

There is a weird bug on your "What do you want to learn about first?" question.

I am able to select both "Cheeseburger" and "Greek Salad" but not "Greek Salad" and "Spaghetti & Meatballs". If I tap "Greek Salad" after first tapping "Spaghetti & Meatballs" then it deselects the "Spaghetti & Meatballs" and selects "Greek Salad" (even with only 1 item selected).

Anyway, cool concept.

[logophobia]

Tried a quiz. I'd be nice if there was more explanation about the things I missed. I get a question about naming ingredients. I get some wrong. Afterwards it might be nice to get an explanation about the missed items so I don't have to google myself. Even an in-app link to wikipedia would be enough. I also suspect that most things I got wrong were because of language differences, so translations might be nice as well.

[sakerbos]

I love this! Already completed the "Scrambled Eggs" series. I really enjoy cooking and this is a fun way to enhance my skills, thank you!

[dannyhodge]

Not to undermine everybody else's feedback, because I 100% agree with what they said, but I started with the tomato bisque lessons, and the contents were much better. I found it genuinely interesting, and as a beginner home cook, I was learning things, such as stuff about acidity, different types of tomatoes etc. However, I still found it dragged out a bit, with too many random unhelpful questions (e.g. which of these is a tomato?). The app is very well designed in terms of the UX, and the only time I struggled was in getting back to the home page after a lesson. Feels like a third option at the bottom, or replacing the X icon with a home icon would be more intuitive.

My last suggestion is a big one, as it changes the app a bit, but why not start with the recipe? Others have mentioned the lack of a hook, and it gives something for the questions to refer to.

Good luck, I sincerely hope you're successful, there's an odd shortage of cooking apps.

[petesergeant]

Hey, there's a lot of highly-rated negative feedback here. For what it's worth, I _love_ the idea, it's exactly what I want, I'd pay a bunch for it. I really hope y'all keep at it and are able to take constructive pointers out of some of the harsher feedback, because if you _do_ nail this, it'll be incredible.

[mizzao]

Thank you, we really appreciate that.

FWIW, any disruptive consumer product has to be met with dichotomous love/hate reactions when it first comes out — it's never indifference / no one cares. So I'm loving what I see here: if this thread is any indication, we're definitely on to something.