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Opensource.cooking: A simple, bloat-free cooking site
- jlkuester7 5y agoVery nice! Most recipe websites these days are horrible (poor layout, annoying popups/popovers, crazy amounts of content that have little or nothing to do with the recipe....). The minimalism of this website is refreshing. I only wish the website itself was also open source. It would be pretty cool to be able to collaborate on and enhance the site (and a SCM hosting platform like GitHub or GitLab would provide a built-in way for maintainers to evaluate new recipe submissions, etc.)
- fersarr 5y agoopen source ++
- benjaminclauss 5y agoI have been thinking about how to solve this problem a lot lately. With the pandemic, I have been learning more recipes at home. I too share the frustration of browsing a recipe website and then getting a 7 paragraph story behind it. Just give me the recipe! started uploading some personal recipes to https://benjaminclauss.github.io/minimalchef/ https://benjaminclauss.github.io/minimalchef/ with Hugo (PR's welcome) but this definitely will not scale I would definitely use a Strava for Cooking.
- locua 5y agohttps://github.com/locua/oscooking https://github.com/locua/oscooking
- fersarr 5y agohmm someone is messing it up already, I think. Spaghetti carbonara is under the tag 'banana'
- a2tech 5y agoAnd submitting recipes is throwing an nginx error
- primis 5y agoWould be nice to be able to tag vote to be able to fix something like this
- banana_giraffe 5y agoAnd Spaghetti carbonara apparently involves no cook time at all.
- TheAdamAndChe 5y agoCool! Looks fun. What exactly is open source on the site? Is it the recipes? If so, then what license do they use? Is there any disclaimer of that on submission? I'm not dissing, just making sure your ducks are in a row. It's a fun idea!
- cratermoon 5y agoRecipes cannot be copyrighted.
- neaden 5y agoThe recipe itself can't be, but you can't just copy and paste recipe text from one website to another.
- cratermoon 5y agoThe basic directions (beat egg, stir in vanilla, etc) are part of the recipe. The courts have ruled that there must be substantial content to make it copyrightable. That, along with ads and the need to "drive engagement" is why most recipe sites have long articles around the list of ingredients.
- D13Fd 5y agoWrong. Lists of ingredients cannot be copyrighted. But the accompanying explanation can be copyrighted if it is substantial enough: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html Beyond the recipes themselves, the collection may be copyrighted. The photos accompanying the recipes are also copyrighted.
- cratermoon 5y agoThe basic directions (beat egg, stir in vanilla, etc) are part of the recipe. The courts have ruled that there's need to be substantial content to make it copyrightable. That, along with ads and the need to "drive engagement" is why most recipe sites have long articles around the list of ingredients. "A recipe is a statement of the ingredients and procedure required for making a dish of food. A mere listing of ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions, is uncopyrightable. As a result, the Office cannot register recipes consisting of a set of ingredients and a process for preparing a dish." https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf
- neaden 5y agoSo as someone who cooks a lot, and gets frustrated by long blog like posts that lots of recipes have this day, this website is probably even less useful for me. The tagging system isn't being used correctly, Ham Sandwich is tagged with Banana for some reason. Speaking of Ham sandwich some of the recipes are just way too simple, this just tells me how to assemble a sandwich which I don't think anyone really needs. Those are issues that can be solved long term, the other thing that will cause a problem long term is once this site starts getting repeat recipes. The blog like start to recipes may be annoying, but at least it sometimes helps you understand the decisions different people make for their recipes, or suggest substitutions/modifications. Edit: The Spaghetti Carbonara recipe actually has multiple mistakes. it says the cook time is 0 minutes, it tells you to add the beaten eggs but never tells you to beat them, the recipe includes butter as an ingredient but the recipe tells you to heat the oil, and never says to grate the cheese. If this was a wiki or something I could try to fix those issues, but as it currently is I don't see any way to even flag it. It's also tagged as Banana and Greasy.
- slow_donkey 5y agoI'm building a search engine for this exact issue - there's 10000 recipes for every dish but they have to be contextualized: Do I want mac and cheese in the next 30 minutes or am I serving this for Thanksgiving? Those are 2 different experiences and recipes. Even the base issue of at least ranking recipe blogs by quality isn't solved by other aggregators such as Google / Yummly which are more of a recipe dump. If you or anyone else is interested I'm planning to release a version in the coming weeks - email is in profile.
- berkes 5y agoMy unsolicited advice: try to split up basics, common-recipes and specialties. Basics are "how to bind soup", "choosing and cooking pasta", or "frying onions". Common recipes are then "bound vegetable soup" or "maccharoni with tomatosause (and fried onions)". Specialities would be those recipes you try for christmas, or when the in-laws come over next month. It's highly frustrating to find a recipe that says "bind the soup with starch" without going into how to do this (or even worse: what ingredients this needs!). But for someone more experienced, it is highly frustrating to have to read through five lines explaining how to fry the onions. As with most education, cooking is layered: you build on top of existing knowledge, without repeating it each and every time. I presume this is partly a classification issue and organisation challenge. You don't want "how to bind soup without milk or eggs" to turn up when someone is searching "vegan tomato-soup". The web has hyperlinks, which would probably be a very good way to organize recipes.
- seattle_spring 5y agoTangentially related, but if I were to run for president I'd run on a single issue platform: Imprison anyone involved with the current state of online recipes. Want to write your 10 page life story for baked mac & cheese? Boom, 5 years in the slammer. Want to put 12 different ads on your recipe for baked Alaska Char? 10 year minimum sentence. Involved in encouraging this behavior from the inside of Google? Sorry bub, that's gonna be three consecutive life sentences.
- yurielt 5y agoWell you have h my vote ( and my axe)
- bluefirebrand 5y agoI'd vote for this, this is truly the most pressing issue of our time.
- acomjean 5y agoWeirdly recipes aren’t copyrightable.. But personal stories are, And descriptive text is too. Probably why they’re added. I’ll agree about the ads. Thus we signed up for platejoy (YC 2017?)
- HaloZero 5y agoPlatejoy sounded like what I want but they don't even list the price of their service on their site which seems sketch.
- robotpony 5y agoThe price isn't even that bad, but it produces so much more packaging waste than cooking from scratch. We enjoyed the recipes, the price was good enough, but our recycling load doubled or more.
- acomjean 5y agoI think you may have this mistaken for another meal kit company. Platejoy just gives recipes. You buy your own groceries(or at least that’s how we use it) It’s mainly about meal planning.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- flatiron 5y agoI’ve always wanted to make a GitHub for recipes. You can fork recipes. Submit pull requests. Public and private repositories. Versioning and commit history. Share with friends, Etc.
- jka 5y agoYou may be in luck: - https://www.cinc.kitchen/ https://www.cinc.kitchen/ - https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/based.cooking/ https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/based.cooking/ (which the submitted site may be derived from?)
- dan1234 5y agoThat sounds like something I’d use. Especially if it could convert between American and metric units.
- banana_giraffe 5y agoI have a little pet project from a long time ago that I tried to start with this, it lets me describe recipes like this: Recipe|Turkey Stuffing I|4 C==French bread hand torn into small pieces (about 1/4 inch pieces) I|3/4 C==Butter I|3/4 C==Onion (minced) I|1 C==Celery I|1 Tbsp==Salt (less if bird is butterball or self basting) I|pinch==Pepper I|2 Tbsp==Sage, thyme, and marjoram mixture D|Melt butter in large skillet over low heat D|Add onion and celery & spices, stirring often until it all smells great. D|Pour 1/3 of the hot mixture over all the bread, then toss, then 1/3 more, toss, then last 1/3 and toss. From there it can produce a pretty webpage to view the recipe, or produce an ingredient list for shopping (and it has some basic concept of combining shopping lists sanely), and lets me search by ingredient. I always debate fleshing it out. 99% of the time spent with something like this is curating the recipes themselves, which I'm far from an expert in, and I don't want it to become a big time waster.
- egeozcan 5y agoI see some other open source recipe attempts but I could not find the source of this site. Am I getting it wrong? https://duckduckgo.com/?q=opensource.cooking https://duckduckgo.com/?q=opensource.cooking
- locua 5y agoSource is now linked. https://github.com/locua/oscooking https://github.com/locua/oscooking
- jabo 5y agoI recently built a recipe search site that lets you filter by ingredients: https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ https://recipe-search.typesense.org/ OP - if you have a JSON export of the data, I’d love to include it in the index.
- douglasquaid84 5y agoIs this not a clone of based.cooking?
- locua 5y agosorta, https://github.com/locua/oscooking https://github.com/locua/oscooking, in style yes
- cratermoon 5y agoIsn't this just https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26419717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26419717 reskinned?
- d_theorist 5y agoDefinitely looks like it.
- challengly 5y agoProbably literally using their source code, but not linking back to it? https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/based.cooking https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/based.cooking
- domdev 5y agohttps://github.com/locua/based.cooking https://github.com/locua/based.cooking Their github with their fork of that repo.
- locua 5y agohttps://github.com/locua/oscooking https://github.com/locua/oscooking Yes inspired by based.cooking, but wanted a simpler interface than git, so anyone could submit, will add users, editing and comments when i have a mo...
- 7sidedmarble 5y ago>SoyDevs DESTROYED Epic Style by Based Cooking Sounds like a great guy to have a conversation with
- lupire 5y agoWell, they added a donation feature to make money. Hacker style!
- locua 5y agoWell when we have 2TB of recipes someone will have to pay for server costs... ;)
- tyingq 5y agoIs is the code, formatting, etc, that we're supposed to be looking at? Or the data itself? The data catches my eye because there seems to be quite a lot of bad data. Recipes with cooking time of 0, when it's clear that's not true. Typos like "Spahetti Carbonara". "Ham Sandwich" tagged as "Fruit". If we're supposed to ignore all that and just evaluate the CMS bit, it looks fine. But it doesn't seem very specific to cooking. Just tag organized text.
- doersino 5y agoVery neat! I've recently taken a stab at something like this, too – the result is a Pandoc-and-Bash-script-based static site generator for my personal recipe collection. Recipes are written in a format based on Markdown (with ingredients listed separately for each step, which comes in real handy while cooking), and the end result is a lightweight, responsive, searchable website. I've received very positive feedback when I shared it as a "Show HN" a week and a half ago. It's available as open source here: https://github.com/doersino/nyum https://github.com/doersino/nyum There's also a demo: https://doersino.github.io/nyum/_site/index.html https://doersino.github.io/nyum/_site/index.html Finally, here's what the Markdown source for an example recipe looks like: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/doersino/nyum/main/_recipes/cheesebuldak.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/doersino/nyum/main/_recipe...
- kslacroix 5y agoHere's another one https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/ who's also open soruce. You can submit recipes with PRs https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/based.cooking https://github.com/lukesmithxyz/based.cooking
- swebs 5y agoThanks, that's an awesome site. Or as the young people say these days: based.
- axaxs 5y agoThere's been a load of these on HN over the last few months. While I applaud the efforts (truly!), I hope the community can get behind one. Where I sit, I don't want to sit and type out my wife's recipes on a site that'll be gone in a year. So I'll wait.
- zaptheimpaler 5y agoContent is king..
- markdown 5y agoThere's a recipe on your site called Refried Beans. I've never heard of that dish, but in any case, either the recipe is wrong, or the name is. The recipe only calls for frying the beans once.
- Tomte 5y agoFrom Wikipedia: > As described by Rick Bayless, "they're refritos—not fried again, as you might assume, but "well fried" or "intensely fried," as that re translates from Spanish.
- markdown 5y agoTIL, Thanks!
- mattkrause 5y agoIt's a false cognate for the Spanish 'frijoles refritos'. Frito = fried, but re is an "intensifier" that can mean "done again" but may also mean "done thoroughly" or even "in excess". Thus, they are beans that have been fried thoroughly.
- markdown 5y agoTIL, Thanks!
- pezezin 5y agoI would like to point out a minor detail: "re-" as an intensifier is characteristic of the dialects of Argentina, Chile, and Mexico: https://www.fundeu.es/recomendacion/recontra-re-rete-requete-requetecontra-prefijo/ https://www.fundeu.es/recomendacion/recontra-re-rete-requete... (article in Spanish) In most other dialects it just means "to do again", same as English. Your confusion is understandable, because even for me as a native Spanish speaker, using it as an intensifier sounds funny.
- 5y ago
- racl101 5y agoNo fucking stories about how grandma used to make this dish before Poland was invaded and the entire history thereafter before we even get to the ingredients! I'm am down!
- peter_retief 5y agoI see a ham sandwich under fruit?
- yepthatsreality 5y agoThe evergreen Internet website idea.
- qznc 5y agoWhat is Open Source about it? Could not find license or anything.
- wanderingjew 5y agoIf you're talking about the recipes, it's open source in that it's public domain. Or it's not open source, because it can't be copyrighted and therefore all the frameworks that allow for open source don't apply. [1] This is actually _really, really interesting_ and could spur some really great discussion, so I was ready to check out the HN comments only to find... griping about recipe sites. Ctrl+F 'Open Source' to find this comment. Man, HN sucks. [1] https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html#:~:text=A%20mere%20listing https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html#:~:text=...
- locua 5y agoSource here: https://github.com/locua/oscooking https://github.com/locua/oscooking
- ShaneMcGowan 5y agohttps://based.cooking https://based.cooking is also a similar site
- hardwaregeek 5y agoHaha adding garlic to carbonara. That'll get you some angry Italian comments. As I mentioned before[1], I'm skeptical of this premise. Recipes are hard to get right, hence the use of cross testers and standardized language in professional test kitchens. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26420783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26420783
- pessimizer 5y agoI'd like a recipe site that included techniques at the same level as ingredients, and steps of preparation expressed as functions of techniques, utensils, and ingredients. Functional cooking. If I don't have the technique or the pans, I don't need the recipe to come up in a search.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoI really wish a curated site existed with the intent of the author, but there is more to this than just putting up a database and letting everyone pile on. This site, started in 1999, attempted OP's goals: https://foodgeeks.com/ https://foodgeeks.com/ ... it was probably one of my fave sites for years that was actively curated, but it took a LOT of time to keep healthy. I appreciate the effort, but this isn't as easy as it looks.
- locua 5y agoJust playing really. This one looks nice.
- k2enemy 5y agoThank you for the effort! You might consider using the recipe schema [0] for better interoperability with other recipe managers. [0] https://schema.org/Recipe https://schema.org/Recipe
- locua 5y agoNice.
- uhtred 5y agoI think it needs some way for users to rate the recipes, otherwise I have no way of knowing which recipes are worth trying out. Trouble is you then are in the realm of having registered users, and life becomes no fun anymore.
- tecuan 5y agogods speed. Let me know when you have a keto tag.
- sto_hristo 5y agoA fruit banana ham sandwich. Maybe add a upvote/downvote functionality so that such things can be send to the bottom.
- linsomniac 5y agoMaybe 6 months ago a previous discussion here led me to Paprika, an Android/iOS app, and I've been loving it. It is a paid app, $5, IIRC. The killer feature is that you can be on a recipe in the browser and do "Share", pick Paprika, and it'll grab, almost without fail, the recipe from within the pages and pages of prose that most recipes have these days. I also use the sharing so my wife has access to the same recipe set, though she doesn't use it as much as I do. I use the Photos feature, and also take notes about how it comes out if I want to make changes.
- macrael 5y agoI've been loving paprika. I like to cook from recipes to keep trying new things and with paprika I have: * a list of things I've cooked, with notes if I like * a list of things I'd like to cook * an easy way to build a grocery list from a set of recipes It's great. And it syncs between my laptop and my phone. 10/10
- 7sidedmarble 5y agoI've been using paprika for a while but switched to whisk.
- linsomniac 5y agoCan you tell our listeners why? :-)
- buzz27 5y agoI still use the old Berkeley SOAR archive (which is now at recipesource.com).
- aimor 5y agoIn general I've given up on recipe aggregate sites. I have to be half-familiar with the dish just to fix all the things wrong with the recipes I find. In my opinion, divorcing the recipe from the curator is a huge mistake and no amount of user reviews overcomes this. What I really want to see are the recipes that some specific person actually makes in their daily life. Not icons who publish more recipes under their name than a single person could make in a lifetime, or test kitchens obsessed with creating the scientifically proven ideal form of a chocolate chip cookie, and definitely not bloggers churning out stories to grow an audience. I want John, who likes to cook, to let me leaf around in his recipe box (the one he actually uses), and if I make a dish and like it I want to be able to go back and dig around for more. I know this authenticity exists online, but I don't know how to find it. I imagine it as a big list of personal recipe box websites.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- samdafi 5y agoShameless plug but I tried to do that at https://www.sammakesfood.com https://www.sammakesfood.com. I made videos for the recipes too, but you do not have to watch those. It was a hobby project (not monetized) so no garbage. If somebody did this with maybe 30-75 mainstays and added search, is that kinda what you’re looking for? I stopped because I wasn’t sure if it would help anybody. My family enjoyed the videos during the pandemic as an alternate way to see me though, so, still worth it :D
- interestica 5y agoI love the simplicity of this. So readable.
- samdafi 5y agoThanks! I was going for no frills so I’m glad it came out that way for you.
- fordsmith 5y ago
- jarrell_mark 5y agoOpen source is nice but these recipes need to be stored on the blockchain
- JackFr 5y agoWanna buy the NFT for my chocolate chip cookies?
- dguaraglia 5y agoYou laugh, but I've heard that NFTs taste better than the actual cookies they vaguely represent in JSON form.
- memset 5y ago(Semi related: I maintain plainoldrecipe.com, which makes it easy to create printable plain text versions of recipes online)
- kampsun 5y agoThis reminds me that there's also recipes in Wikibooks. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Table_of_Contents https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Table_of_Contents https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Category:Recipes https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Category:Recipes I also usually get good results with recipes from Serious Eats[1], I also find that the in depth articles go into reasons behind the recipes, really help with knowing the "why", not only the "how". 1. https://www.seriouseats.com/ https://www.seriouseats.com/
- erwald 5y agoYeah Serious Eats is great. Usually very high quality recipes.
- mongol 5y agoI think the ideal recipe website starts from well known dishes where each recipe is associated as a variant of a famous dish. There is no true Swedish meatballs recipe, so the heading "Swedish meatballs" should not have a recipe, it should have several. And then some kind of rating system should bubble the best ones to top.
- thrower123 5y agoPeople love to slag on recipe sites, and most of them are terrible, but the platonic ideal of the recipe site already exists. It's AllRecipes, provided you have UBlock Origin enabled. Even if you don't, the printer version of their recipes is perfect, and exactly what I would want. Example: -> https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/242040/egg-salad-with-chopped-gherkins/?printview https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/242040/egg-salad-with-chop...
- lggy 5y agoI have been working on https://pancakes.cloud https://pancakes.cloud for the same reasons. No prose, strong sense of community and the recipes being just plaintext in the end. However, without good contributions, I don't think any such site can thrive.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- megous 5y agoWhat is needed are cooking methods and a general sense of what combines well with what and in what proportions. Once you learn those, you can apply them to anything. Recipes are maybe useful for baking, where precise portions matter somewhat more (but you can get away with a lot there too), or for people who want to reproduce some particular food. But, it's not like you're trying to create a restaurant that may need good reproducibility of outcomes. Most home based cooks just want to feed themselves and their families and have some variability, and for the food to taste reasonably well. Buying ingredients also gets less frustrating, because you don't need a precise list, just a general idea of what you want to make that day. There are even books that help you discover taste affinities for ingredients.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- locua 5y agoSource here: https://github.com/locua/oscooking https://github.com/locua/oscooking. Removed the dodgy test recipes for all you pedants...
- always_left 5y agoBanana and lime salad... please tell me no one is actually eating this.
- keeblers_n_bits 5y agoI think something like this could be really cool as a Gemini site
- ArtDev 5y agoRecipes are not copyright-able.. so technically the Wordpress recipe site I made my mother is also open-source. The website uses zero custom code and was very quick to assemble from open-source components. I installed Delicious Recipes on it, a solid Wordpress plugin. I only have a couple recipes on it, but you get the idea: gramybee.com
- thelock85 5y agoI will keep coming back to check this out, and maybe add some recipes because I love cooking. But I’m not sure that “bloat” is a problem. For one, almost every recipe page has a “Jump to Recipe” option near the top. More so, with a new recipe I’m prone to start with a blogger who’s recipes I’ve already had great success with. I imagine “success” varies with taste buds, but it’s going to hard to convert me away. Finally, the best thing about cooking frequently (4-6x per week) is experimentation and learning and calibrating to your kitchen (different outcomes for different appliances). At this point, a recipe (or collection of recipes for the same dish) is like a reference point to build upon. I imagine this site would’ve been awesome for me 5 years ago when I felt comfortable only cooking 5 dishes (now around 50), and even then I’d need some consistent outcomes to keep coming back.
- ArtDev 5y agoI use my Google home to get recipes. Its pretty sweet because it cuts the cruft completely. Someone needs to build a nice recipe web scraper for Wordpress :)
- GoodOldNe 5y agoI love the open source model, and there's some good looking recipes here! Along similar lines, with similar goals, my wife and her dad have been building this as a pandemic project: https://www.recipereform.com/ https://www.recipereform.com/ -- I (who am admittedly biased) think it's pretty great. She inherited this style of recipe organization from her grandmother, and I love the formatting it of it, how clean the recipes end up looking and how fast / ad-free the site is. I've been trying to get her hooked on HN for years. I showed her this thread and maybe this will convince her to make it open-source. Any feedback would be appreciated and helpful!
- crftr 5y agoLove the recipe presentation! Years ago I remember seeing a table layout on CookingForEngineers--but this is a significant improvement. One suggestion: Add iconography to indicate cooking apparatus. The gestalt of your nested layout gave me a quick sense of the prep and cooking phases, but it would be nice to see if I need to preheat the oven or pull out the backyard grill.
- GoodOldNe 5y agoThat's great feedback. Thanks! I agree, icons would be helpful and could fit nicely into the aesthetic. I love that CookingForEngineers site. The original name I had suggested to her was Recipes for Engineers, since that was the vibe the table/nested flow layout gave me, it's cool to see someone else doing a similar thing.
- azinman2 5y agoA recipe site that anyone can contribute to has no aesthetic by definition. Having an aesthetic or point of view is one of the most desirable properties of recipe collection — it gives the unifying reason for why the collection is what it is, and who curated it. This isn’t the same thing as global knowledge, because cooking is more akin to art than science of facts.
- MengerSponge 5y agoI've been a "Copy Me That" user for years and years. It's delightful. The meal-planner/shopping list feature is well worth the subscription: Add your meals for the week, then make a shopping list. The shopping list collects like items, joins their volumes/counts (if it can), and makes one big shopping list organized by category. It makes shopping so much nicer.
- mdb0 5y agoDon’t mean to threadjack, but this has been an incredible addition to my cooking: perhaps these projects could share some data: https://recipe-search.typesense.org/index.html https://recipe-search.typesense.org/index.html
- georgewfraser 5y agoUsing the joy of cooking instead of google for finding recipes was a funny revelation for me. The index of a book is so much better than web search for this scenario: - Only one recipe. - Vetted to be high quality. - Gets straight to the point. The internet is amazing but for a lot of domains books are way better.
- chrismsimpson 5y ago1996 called...
- 7373737373 5y agoRelevant: https://recursiverecipes.schollz.com/ https://recursiverecipes.schollz.com/
- fouuler 5y agoThis page has some empty-square glyphs and some crossed-square glyphs. What do I have to install for it to be rendered as intended?
- locua 5y agoEmoji?
- daniel-s 5y agoThis is clearly just a lower quality clone of https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/