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.
Because normal people are idiots. They are not going to understand any of this whatsoever. That’s why you have to put the actual instructions with the ingredients.
What if you wanted to first sift, combine and whisk the dry ingredients before folding in, would you put that in the big blank square box?
You add an other column and put the ingredients you use first at the top.
Yes
I’ve also invented similar recipe design on note cards, mainly because I fucking hate having to find quantities of things I didn’t premeasure.
Fuck mise en place I want to see quantities as o add them.
anything can be Marie Kondo’ed, it would seem.
Needs a four chapter novel about something unrelated in front of it.
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?
This recipe is missing something. Maybe throw in a backstory.
Eggs from gay chickens and vanilla from gender-fluid vanilla plants.
Vanilla orchids are not gender fluid at all, they are hermaphroditic. And eggs from happy hens just taste better.
Here’s an open source library for generating these from markdown https://mossblaser.github.io/recipe_grid/tutorial.html
But where am I going to put the six paragraph AI generated anecdote about my grandmother?
In white text on white background at the bottom of the page where the rest of the SEO goes.
You know, I don’t hate this.
Let’s simplify websites significantly. Everything SEO/AI slop appears below the fold in white text.
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?
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.
It started as a SEO thing where websites with longer texts got a better indexing on Google, thus more ad revenue.
Then put it at the top,
ya big fool
“And Nanny only used Hershey cocoa powder. Click my Amazon link to buy it from my shop!”
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
That recipe design reminds me I should learn LaTeX, but I am also lazy, so…
Either I cant calculate or the percentages don’t add up.
What is up wuth the two 100%?I had the same question and found the answer: https://modernistcuisine.com/mc/how-to-scale-a-recipe/
Would’ve probably been helpful to add that, whoops. But once you understand it it makes scaling a recipe much easier. This is less important for stuff like Mac and cheese tbf, but if you go to the bread or pizza book the ratios are much more important
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.
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)
Annoying that they did not even mention the original site: https://www.cookingforengineers.com/
Which does seem down right now, so archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260729050049/https://www.cookingforengineers.com/
The site being down fits with the ‘for engineers’ theme
Joking aside, it was down because it got Reddit hugged to death, since a post on the frontpage of /r/all mentioned it in the top comment.
Now it’s back online
Just because we can’t code for shit and insist on doing everything ourselves…
Damn, even that site has a life story before a recipe
Very cool tho
If you put a recipe on your webpage Google will ignore that shit. Butter and eggs? So few words, many numbers. Boring.
So you have to add a narrative if you want search engines to pay any attention, or even count the page as content.
Google could just fix this, but no, we’ve all adjusted to it.
I had no idea it was about too few words. I always thought it was that they add all that fluff to maximize their advertising revenue, making you scroll and scroll through a story before you find the recipe. Seems like either way, it’s thanks to Google….
Maybe originally a couple decades ago, but every food blog template added a “jump to recipe” button pretty shortly after those started to be a thing.
I found the recipe but apparently the design in the OP wasn’t perfect, they have slightly updated it: https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/327/Espresso-Brownies
Interestingly, not the whole site is down, but the homepage is
This guy was the foundation of my cooking skills… 20 years ago. Damn.
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 …
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.
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.
“When I was eight my great uncle Pete introduced me to his Schweddy balls…”
I actually vibe coded a script that would jump your browser to the recipe for that exact purpose.
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.
justtherecipe.com is pretty great for cutting out that crap, although not as efficient as the system in OP pic
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.
While they were at it, they could’ve solved the problem with “pre-”.
“There are only two states an oven can possibly exist in: heated or unheated!” - Carlin
What does that mean? What does fold in mean?
You just fold in the cheese, David.
You fold it in. I don’t think I can be more clear.
Oh good… now I see bubbles.
David! What does burning smell like?
Means lift some of the mixture with your spoon, turn it over and press it in again. It’s a technique for mixing without squeezing the air out, so it will rise in the oven.
Not sure if joking or not.
When you have a fragile mixture, like whipped eggs, if you mix like standard you will squeeze most of the air out
When you fold, you make a vertical circle, from the bottom and flopping on top, in a what that doesn’t so much ‘beat’ but fluffs.
I didn’t know the meme and this genuinely educated me so thank you
It’s a scene from Schitt’s Creek.
