It would be amazing if there was something that would convert recipes to the format used on Cooking For Engineers. It’s so intuitive and easy to read. I never want to look at steps to make a recipe again.
I have ADHD so I often find my self taking a non-linear route to following a recipe: Step 1, Step 3, Step 4, oops! Step 2, now where was I? Is that salt or baking powder in the bowl?
Modernist Cuisine has recipes with a similar format. They also have an ingredient list with baker's percentage using the largest ingredient by weight as the baseline.
Thanks for sharing. I made digital recipe viewers to replace the old binders in our restaurants’ kitchens. They’re old iPad minis on Mosyle’s free MDM plan. I made an HTML/CSS website hosted on Netlify/GitHub, created a home screen shortcut on the iPad using a web clip, and hide all other iOS apps so that they can only launch the recipe viewer.
Everyone thinks I made an “app” because it launches in full screen thanks to the MDM. One of our kitchens doesn’t have Wi-Fi, but once the recipe viewer is launched, it doesn’t need connection anymore since it’s a single HTML page and the refresh button is hidden.
The recipes on my “app” use HTML tables fairly similar to the tables on the link you shared. I didn’t know HTML tables could be formatted like they are on cookingforengineers.
It actually seems to mix visual metaphors though, since "Butter and flour a loaf pan" and "Preheat oven" are temporally top-to-bottom, until it gets to the ingredients, when it switches to (depending on how one interprets it) temporally left-to-right or a dependency tree, but without any visual indication that change has happened
I would actually expect the whole process could be laid out in graphviz since all of those are dependencies of the ultimate outcome (heh, "enjoy"). I originally thought it may be a DAG, but I can recall a few recipes that explicitly have a looping step in them
I have always been interested in seeing a database which had consistent units and ingredients as well, such that pulling the full database and doing visualizations could be easily done.
This would also make the adjustment to the batch size for each recipe on each webpage much simpler.
"Want 1 Liter of dough for 2 banana bread loafs? Just change the amount output field and watch the values change". Type of thing.
Obviously I know heat transfer effects need to be taken into account and such for some things, but it would be at least a start . Then the real mass/heat transfer and such engineering fun can begin.
Still a lot of text to get up and go, even if the context can be helpful.
Personally I am a fan of the Food Network recipes online, especially Alton Brown’s. Straight to the point with no fluff, and maybe a Good Eats segment if you’re lucky.
There's a Recipe Card button in the top right; doesn't get more compact than that. Though I think I'd struggle cooking an unfamiliar recipe using only the card, like you said, the context is helpful (and so are some photos, I might add).
It can get frustrating skimming through text walls just to find the recipe on blogs/sites. Authors do it to get high ranking on Google.
You can use OnlyRecipe.app to extract the recipe information. It works on almost all sites/blogs which follow a recipe standard when they post.
You can also save it to your phone directly using the app. Scan recipe QR code using your phone camera and voila.
Technology companies selling a solution to a problem created by technology companies instead of coming together to fix the original problem. This is the world we live in.
They're full of shit, though. Crack open the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook and find a cookie recipe, then search for the same recipe name online. You're going to find 1000 word essays about Dear Meema's Secret Snickerdoodle recipe... followed by the same damn recipe as the BH&G cookbook.
Wrong, "foodies" are about to get eaten alive by people sick of their shit. The only people complaining loudly about that were the people propagating the BS. I certainly don't see any complaints from users mentioned in that article.
If your business model relies on people scrolling past a bunch of filler to get to a short list of instructions, be prepared for people to get tired of it and solve the problem.
Spending time writing user-hostile recipe for SEO purpose, then someone else building an app trying to undo this and finally the end user spending time installing app, scanning QR code and going back to the original user-hostile website because the app didn't get milk quantity. Now I'm too tired to cook anything.
Recipes can be protected under copyright law if they are accompanied by “substantial literary expression.” This expression can be an explanation or detailed directions, which is likely why food and recipe bloggers often share stories and personal anecdotes alongside a recipe’s ingredients.
So besides SEO, there's this thing where the recipe itself is basically defenseless against someone stealing it and calling it theirs but the sum of the fluff around it plus the recipe on the other hand can be copyrighted and enjoys all the protections afforded to these kinds of things. So, if say, Jamie Oliver likes your recipe and puts it in a book passing it as his, you can now legally tell him to stop doing that because of said fluff.
Even if the description of the recipe is sufficiently creative and copyrightable, the copyright will not cover the recipe’s ingredient list, the underlying process for making the dish, or the resulting dish itself, which are all facts. It will only protect the expression of those facts. That means that someone can express the recipe in a different way — with different expression — and not infringe the recipe creator’s copyright.
So they can still put your recipe in a Jamie Oliver cookbook, they just have to put it in their own words as opposed to copy pasting it verbatim.
I don't think that's the case. He'd only get in trouble if he reproduced the "substantial literary expression." The actual list of ingredients and step-by-step procedure aren't copyrightable.
Funny running into you here! I'm the 'maintainer' of the Firefox version (it doesn't take much work.) I just got a request to do imperial to metric conversion, which I had to politely decline based on the idea of looking up the density of every ingredient involved; not to mention writing an actual parser for recipies proved to be quite a challenge given the wide diversity of how the recipes are layed out.
I get loads of really kind emails and messages on a daily basis from the users. It's been really rewarding in that way. A couple ideas that people have put forth seem really reasonable, such as unit conversions, print-friendly pages, and automatic nutrition labels. In fact, I'd actually love those too as a cook!
One feature that would improve the recipe recognition and unlock lots of other features where it's found would be JSON-LD support. I'm seeing lots of recipe pages containing those handy, structured formats lately.
But all of these things stray from the fundamental simplicity of what it does. The code is just 92 lines of JS and works (or breaks!) transparently. If I started adding features, it would quickly become another complex system to maintain and I have plent of that at work ;)
Thanks for creating this! I use this plugin all the time.
I often don't remember it's running, but then I invariably land on a recipe site, and then the Recipe Filter modal pops up, and instantly brings a smile to my face.
Not the OP, but I maintain an extension for using keyboard and mouse on Xbox xCloud.
I'd love to support Safari, and like OP I have it technically working as well, but as the extension is free and open source it's hard to justify the $99 price tag just to share it with the world. https://github.com/idolize/xcloud-keyboard-mouse/issues/13
The comments on recipe sites are often useful. Things like: pre-heat your mason jars before pouring in the caramelized sugar or they'll crack. You can find clarifications, or things people have substituted, or just how a recipe has failed for some folks.
There's a handful of recipe sites I tend to stick to. Smitten Kitchen, All Recipes, Serious Eats, NYT Cooking. I also have a few favorite cooking books: On Food and Cooking, Joy of Cooking, The Art of Simple Food. Then I have some speciality cooking books for desserts, ice creams, and soups.
My wife transcribes recipes we really like to 4" x 6" index cards. The recipe box is up to probably about 200-300 recipes we've collected over our 25 years together.
FWIW, on current iPadOS, Only Recipe isn't showing up in the Share menu for me.
I agree the comments are often important. I also agree with your list of sources, and would add that the magazine Cook's Illustrated is nice.
I think the reason that people are all upset about the spammy recipe sites is they are too cheap to pay anything for content, so they are stuck with the spammers. The easy solution is to just look at yourself and stop being such a cheapskate. Buy a recipe book. Buy a magazine. Subscribe to a newspaper.
Nice if you get the recipes right on the first time but tedious if you like to update recipes and add comments. At least for handwriting perfectionists.
But it’s even more complex than that. The stories are personal. They’re cultural. They’re often told from the perspective of women, immigrants and people of color who have created and invested in a platform to share their stories. The recipe aggregator sites, bloggers note, basically tell the creators that their stories have no value. It’s the same message America has told immigrants and women for centuries, now just in electronic form.
I think that may be taking it too far, particularly since Google effectively created this entire syndrome.
I’ve got to be honest: those stories hold no value to me. That’s the truth. I don’t know why the WaPo wants those us who are like me to pretend otherwise.
I don't think it is taking it too far honestly. Even if it can be a bit jarring to see it written out like that. Part of trying food from other cultures/countries/families is getting to see how their history is reflected in the food they prepare. I read cookbooks to get a feel for a place, even if I don't plan to cook everything in the book. Or more correctly couldn't.
The complexity is imagined. It's not complex at all. People using Google for a free recipe are looking for...the recipe. If they were looking for stories from immigrants, they would have googled that.
I mean, this is true. But it’s weird being in the center of that raging fire. We were worried about getting sued personally (there were lots of threats) and or having our family or work brought it into it. Lots of people tried to get me fired. In the moment, it just wasn’t a fight we wanted to fight.
Maybe keep ads so that the bloggers can keep their current revenue stream. As someone who loves this idea, all I care about is easy access to the recipe. Its ok with me to have not too intrusive ads.
The site is back up, although it now seems to contain exclusively "free" recipes (i.e. coming from CC sites and old books).
IMHO there are ways to make recipe-scraping resistant to copyright claims.
1. hide all scraping actions behind a login page; that makes content private, hence uninfringing.
2. every time a user "publishes" or shares content, present only an extract of the recipe, like the ingredients and first few steps; expanding the extract sends you to the original site (ideally to the specific anchor of the procedure).
Some blogs do the extra stuff right. Sally’s Baking Addiction’s preceding blog is often invaluable with tips about timing, temperatures, possible places things can go wrong, etc.
It has the floating “skip to recipe” button which is handy when you come back to a familiar recipe for some details.
The clutter isn’t the problem as much as the content quality is most often for me.
Reading good food writers is the whole point of having good food writers. They can build an evocative sense of the time and place, the sense of why a recipie is the way it is. Its sometimes a personal journey, its sometimes escapism. And yes it changes - Elizabeth David sounds outrageously prissy to modern ears - but food has always been part of human culture, and as we evolve so will our food.
Its fine to read the wikipedia "plot" section if you want a shortcut. But its nice to know you can just read the whole book. Slowly.
I like the Serious Eats format, where they provide both a brief recipe and an optional backstory. Some of the research and reasoning is interesting for certain recipes (like pressure cooker French Onion soup), though when actually cooking the story makes finding the details a bit more work.
Agreed. I would even be ok with the SE format if they didn't split out the main recipe from the backstory, because with them the backstory is usually something of substance. They often go through multiple iterations, explaining what tweaks they introduced and what the effects were, so that you can understand not only the final recipe but also the principles that went into making it.
That they also give you a quick-and-easy "here's just the recipe" page is just an added bonus, for me.
I love good food writers, but most people who publish recipes online are not good food writers, and SEO tactics lead them to preface their recipes not with information about the development of the recipe or the food's cultural context, but with rambling space-filler about how it's summer now, and how it's nice to eat summer foods in the summer, and there are delicious farm-fresh veggies in the summer, and this summer veggie salad really tastes like summer, and how as a kid the author would also eat veggies in the summer, and how even though the author's husband ("the Truck-Drivin' Man") and their three boys ("Colt, Smith, and Wesson") normally don't like veggies that much, they really love this salad...
Interspersed liberally with enormous high-res photos of the finished product, the ingredients, stock photos of summertime, etc. And because those SEO tricks seem to work, this type of site absolutely dominates the search results for recipes. The recipes are often fine, too (probably because they're frequently cribbed from cookbooks with a few tweaks).
Save it for a read that someone would seek out deliberately for the long-form content though. This wouldn't exist if people loved the long rambling intros about how ever since the 1400s Spaghetti Bolognese has captured the hearts and minds of italians and their diaspora. blah blah blah
Readit News
Scroll to the bottom to see what I’m talking about: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/108/Banana-Nut-Bre...
I have ADHD so I often find my self taking a non-linear route to following a recipe: Step 1, Step 3, Step 4, oops! Step 2, now where was I? Is that salt or baking powder in the bowl?
Example (second image) https://modernistcuisine.com/recipes/pressure-cooked-vegetab...
https://thecookbookapp.com/
Currently, some different money for recipes as a service, and the weird price of $41 for a "lifetime" subscription
It will interest this audience that they have a public roadmap, too: https://roadmap.thecookbookapp.com/cookbook
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Everyone thinks I made an “app” because it launches in full screen thanks to the MDM. One of our kitchens doesn’t have Wi-Fi, but once the recipe viewer is launched, it doesn’t need connection anymore since it’s a single HTML page and the refresh button is hidden.
The recipes on my “app” use HTML tables fairly similar to the tables on the link you shared. I didn’t know HTML tables could be formatted like they are on cookingforengineers.
https://mo-nomz.herokuapp.com
I would actually expect the whole process could be laid out in graphviz since all of those are dependencies of the ultimate outcome (heh, "enjoy"). I originally thought it may be a DAG, but I can recall a few recipes that explicitly have a looping step in them
I know tastes differ, but personally I think it’s terrible.
I have always been interested in seeing a database which had consistent units and ingredients as well, such that pulling the full database and doing visualizations could be easily done.
This would also make the adjustment to the batch size for each recipe on each webpage much simpler.
"Want 1 Liter of dough for 2 banana bread loafs? Just change the amount output field and watch the values change". Type of thing.
Obviously I know heat transfer effects need to be taken into account and such for some things, but it would be at least a start . Then the real mass/heat transfer and such engineering fun can begin.
https://www.cookbookfornerds.com/
Personally I am a fan of the Food Network recipes online, especially Alton Brown’s. Straight to the point with no fluff, and maybe a Good Eats segment if you’re lucky.
https://mo-nomz.herokuapp.com
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You can also save it to your phone directly using the app. Scan recipe QR code using your phone camera and voila.
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mysticpeak...
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1602130759
Short 50-seconds video on how recipe camera scanner works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziSNwjv9PXo
Currently working on a feature that lets you share recipe "image cards" with your friends.. Something like this https://i.redd.it/kk1goqsswo981.png
Let me know if you'd use that feature
And how does a site opt out of your scraping? Do you have a unique user-agent when you scrape? A set of IPs?
If your business model relies on people scrolling past a bunch of filler to get to a short list of instructions, be prepared for people to get tired of it and solve the problem.
[1] https://recipeasly.com/
I believe it's more likely that it's to do with whether you can or can't copyright a listing of ingredients and method.
If you add enough of a story, you definitely can.
The recipe is separate from the text that accompanies it
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Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...
FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter...
Source code (there's Safari in there if you don't mind building it yourself): https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter
I was spurred into action by a comment here on HN back in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15755378
It got demoed to the world during WWDC 2020, which was really neat: https://youtu.be/Kwh2y6VkzoA
One feature that would improve the recipe recognition and unlock lots of other features where it's found would be JSON-LD support. I'm seeing lots of recipe pages containing those handy, structured formats lately.
A comment about JSON-LD: https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter/issues/22#issuec...
But all of these things stray from the fundamental simplicity of what it does. The code is just 92 lines of JS and works (or breaks!) transparently. If I started adding features, it would quickly become another complex system to maintain and I have plent of that at work ;)
I often don't remember it's running, but then I invariably land on a recipe site, and then the Recipe Filter modal pops up, and instantly brings a smile to my face.
I'd love to support Safari, and like OP I have it technically working as well, but as the extension is free and open source it's hard to justify the $99 price tag just to share it with the world. https://github.com/idolize/xcloud-keyboard-mouse/issues/13
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There's a handful of recipe sites I tend to stick to. Smitten Kitchen, All Recipes, Serious Eats, NYT Cooking. I also have a few favorite cooking books: On Food and Cooking, Joy of Cooking, The Art of Simple Food. Then I have some speciality cooking books for desserts, ice creams, and soups.
My wife transcribes recipes we really like to 4" x 6" index cards. The recipe box is up to probably about 200-300 recipes we've collected over our 25 years together.
FWIW, on current iPadOS, Only Recipe isn't showing up in the Share menu for me.
I think the reason that people are all upset about the spammy recipe sites is they are too cheap to pay anything for content, so they are stuck with the spammers. The easy solution is to just look at yourself and stop being such a cheapskate. Buy a recipe book. Buy a magazine. Subscribe to a newspaper.
Congrats.
But it’s even more complex than that. The stories are personal. They’re cultural. They’re often told from the perspective of women, immigrants and people of color who have created and invested in a platform to share their stories. The recipe aggregator sites, bloggers note, basically tell the creators that their stories have no value. It’s the same message America has told immigrants and women for centuries, now just in electronic form.
I think that may be taking it too far, particularly since Google effectively created this entire syndrome.
For example I enjoy pad Thai, but I didn't know it was created by the Thai government in the 1930s until I saw a small comment and did some reading. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/04/no...
Or the history of Lebanese immigration into Mexico that led to Al Pastor. https://theeyehuatulco.com/2020/07/29/al-pastor-and-the-leba...
> It’s the same message America has told immigrants and women for centuries
I certainly won't deny this point conceptually, but it assumes that the stories are even true in the first place.
IMHO there are ways to make recipe-scraping resistant to copyright claims.
1. hide all scraping actions behind a login page; that makes content private, hence uninfringing.
2. every time a user "publishes" or shares content, present only an extract of the recipe, like the ingredients and first few steps; expanding the extract sends you to the original site (ideally to the specific anchor of the procedure).
let me know how this goes for private torrent tracker sites
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Edit: Oh, there is also a website.
It has the floating “skip to recipe” button which is handy when you come back to a familiar recipe for some details.
The clutter isn’t the problem as much as the content quality is most often for me.
That they also give you a quick-and-easy "here's just the recipe" page is just an added bonus, for me.
Interspersed liberally with enormous high-res photos of the finished product, the ingredients, stock photos of summertime, etc. And because those SEO tricks seem to work, this type of site absolutely dominates the search results for recipes. The recipes are often fine, too (probably because they're frequently cribbed from cookbooks with a few tweaks).