19 ms·

Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine

403 points by milomildus 5y ago

ffumarola 5y ago
Some thoughts: 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
- boise 5y ago
  2) yes. I follow NYT coooking and there are definitely authors I avoid.
- milomildus 5y ago
  I'm currently working on a data structure for ingredients which significantly improves on the current flat list. It should be able to address plural duplicates / locale duplicates / and hierarchy. 4) is a good idea. The thing I struggle with for pictures is where to put them, but I'll play around with some options. Maybe they can be behind a toggle.
- Spivak 5y ago
  You should start considering the author more, cooks you like will probably sell recipes to a variety of publishers and any given publisher's quality is likely to vary wildly at any kind of scale.
- InfiniteRand 5y ago
  spelling variations are also an issue, like fettuccine vs fettucine, not sure if there's an easy solution for that
rglover 5y ago
This is great, thank you. Do you have any plans to do an Instapaper-style scrape that just reduces the recipe down to the ingredients/instructions?
authed 5y ago
If you search for, "asparagus leg", no quotes, the result appear to point to an incorrect URL
RandyRanderson 5y ago
The search here is great - you can filter by min number of reviews and sort by star rating, which should be the default on amzn, newegg, etc. Ok, I know this filter is not on ecommerce sites b/c money but one day there will be enough competition and then ... Ok, I know there will never be real competition b/c capitalism. Why can't you just let me have this little fiction? Ok, I know b/c reality.
deleted 5y ago
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milomildus 5y ago
Hi HN 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.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Well done. I like the instantaneous results as I type. I wish more search engines worked like that.
- redman25 5y ago
  Love the fast interface. It would be awesome if you could add functionality to filter by diet (vegetarian, vegan, paleo, etc.) For many people, diet determines which recipes are useful more often than any other factor.
  - capitainenemo 5y ago
    I spent a couple of minutes trying to turn it into a usable vegetarian recipe filter by selecting every exclude that was meat related. An overflow auto on the excludes ingredients list would help avoid it spilling over into the results. Not sure why: Quick-Broiled Pork Chops With Peanuts and Gochujang Almond and Dried Fruit Pilaf With Rotisserie Chicken Freestyle Roasted Chicken Parm etc. Still show up even with chicken, pork and 150+ other meat terms in the exclude list. But overall it's much improved. Unfortunately can't find a way to bookmark the exclude list without a JS injection, and the source is obfuscated, so I'm probably not gonna bother figuring out how to do that. ... hm. I see that it does send out a promising looking API request that could be possibly turned into something bookmarkable. Looks like it has a handy array name too. https://pastebin.com/nddrvGcy https://pastebin.com/nddrvGcy <= a start at meat filtering
- jqpabc123 5y ago
  I applaud your effort. Building is the first step, sustaining is the second. A picture is worth a thousand words. Figure out how to sustain the site and info density will become less of an issue.
smallerfish 5y ago
You've got some ingredients that don't map to any recipes, e.g. "tofu scramble". Also please add a facets like feature to avoid the user selecting combinations of ingredients that don't match any recipes.
roofwellhams 5y ago
All recipes are 404 not found
- GrumpyNl 5y ago
  Not all, but a lot of them.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
guerrilla 5y ago
Aside from everything going to 404, the front page table design is a bit crowded. Maybe there's some way you can even that out a bit. Otherwise, very nice.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
anschwa 5y ago
Looks great! https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/ might be another good source of recipes if you're not already using it.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  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.
- twiclo 5y ago
  Based.cooking is great. I have my own instance running on my server. Version controlled recipes are the way of the future
fortydegrees 5y ago
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!
- milomildus 5y ago
  Thanks! From scratch -- I think there are quite a few already existing React components / component libraries for table views like this, but I'll think about if there's anything I can generalize.
uhtred 5y ago
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?
blowski 5y ago
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.
- grogenaut 5y ago
  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.
  - blowski 5y ago
    I've seen five star recipes say things like "Hawaiian pizza - add pineapple, tuna fish, and lasagna". So, yeah, the star ratings are meaningless - but then there are too many recipes to sort the wheat from the chaff.
    - hinkley 5y ago
      The target audience for this recipe is a Venn Diagram of "people who love lasagna but nobody else in their life does" and "people who can't eat ham for religious or dietary reasons" and "people who have no reverence whatsoever for pizza" (which also, according to some, is a superset of Hawaiian pizza eaters to begin with). That's not a tiny number but it's not large either.
- hinkley 5y ago
  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.
james_in_the_uk 5y ago
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.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- milomildus 5y ago
  404 issue should be fixed. 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.)
  - james_in_the_uk 5y ago
    Here are some good UK sites to consider including: The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/tone/recipes https://www.theguardian.com/tone/recipes BBC Good Food: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com https://www.bbcgoodfood.com Jamie Oliver: https://www.jamieoliver.com https://www.jamieoliver.com Delicious Magazine: https://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/recipes/ https://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/recipes/ Great British Chefs: https://www.greatbritishchefs.com https://www.greatbritishchefs.com I should add that there are legal restrictions on scraping and re-use of content from third party websites; I haven't checked if the above permit this.
- OJFord 5y ago
  I gave in and bought a set of US (not the old British, nor the metric..) cups in the end. I don't like it, but it beats using something else for a volumetric measurement.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    IMHO it's better not doing volumetric measurement and doing everything by weight, having your mixing container on a scale the whole time and "resetting the weight" when adding new ingredients.
bko 5y ago
Very well done. I love the design and simplicity. 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!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
HunchedOver 5y ago
Excellent stuff and a nice break from the "rewrite it all in in my tasty-flavour-lang" approaches to doing this that crop up often on HN (not that those aren't impressive on a technical level!). This ties in nicely with the recent discussions here over the need for more specialised search engines. Are you able to give any insight into how this works behind the scenes, is it all manually input? Bookmarked for future use.
- milomildus 5y ago
  I'm currently crawling the sources which publish schema.org definitions of their recipes, or the actual html itself. Basically doing whatever google does to create their recipe cards. Everything gets thrown into a Postgres database with a vanilla FTS implementation.
OJFord 5y ago
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.
- milomildus 5y ago
  yeah I'm a big fan -- what other sources / sites do you generally use? I'm trying to aggregate an 'authoritative' list of high quality sources.
  - pjsg 5y ago
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/food https://www.bbc.co.uk/food
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Archana's Kitchen (archanaskitchen.com) sometimes, and I'm currently working through Delia Smith's cookery course book, many (all?) recipes of which are available at deliaonline.com actually. I'm also working through Dishoom's (restaurant) book, which I think is not available online. Aside from those I don't really have go-to places, I tend to prefer to read through a few (i.e. just whatever top few results searching for the thing I'm thinking of making) for a general idea and inspiration of particular flavours, then 'wing it'. In future I'll try using Stovetop for that search :). Edit: Oh yes and BBC Goodfood as sibling commenter pointed out. That's often where I search actually (because it's multiple author) rather than a general search engine, so if it were a Stovetop source I could definitely use it for that purpose.
  - sflicht 5y ago
    foodwishes.com cookingissues.com ladyandpups.com
named-user 5y ago
You're gonna get C&D imminently like that other site did. I can't find the name of it, sorry. I fully support what you're doing. I am not fussed with someone's back stories about how their great grandmother's auntie's friend had her hair dyed when walking her dog to pick cherries... Blah blah... Just want the recipe and method But unfortunately... Advert revenues are a thing.
- milomildus 5y ago
  I hope not -- unlike the other site you still have to go to the source to read the recipe, so hopefully this doesn't have an impact on their ad revenue.
- lkbm 5y ago
  This is linking to the websites in question. It's not too different than GWS, except in that it's not linking to any sites that include back stories.
whoomp12342 5y ago
no bs, yet NYTIMES has a modal popup that you cant unclick....
m12k 5y ago
Great idea! But please read https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...
- milomildus 5y ago
  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.
  - MayeulC 5y ago
    For another similar rating system, there's also this one: https://steamdb.info/blog/steamdb-rating/ https://steamdb.info/blog/steamdb-rating/ Not exactly sure how the two compare.
    - driscoll42 5y ago
      He compares it at the bottom of the article: Compared to Wilson's formula, it's very short, and it's not nearly as difficult to understand the idea behind how it works. One could easily get the question "Why would this random formula give better results than what a very established mathematician came up with?" I can't really answer that, but it would seem a lot of you agree that it does indeed produce better results when rating Steam's games. I can, however, try to give some insight into this. For one, Wilson's formula isn't really meant to be used quite like this. It takes a rating and the sample size (the number of reviews), and outputs a confidence interval. And a confidence interval basically says that “We are some% sure that the score is between x and y”. If you increase the % of how sure you are, the distance between x and y also increases, and vice versa. But to get a single rating, it's not quite okay to just take the lower bound of that interval. Secondly, because of what was mentioned in the last paragraph, it always gives us a lower rating than the original. This is clearly the incorrect behaviour, as something that just came out and gets a single negative review will be marked as having a score of 0%. Meanwhile, an established terrible game can have 10 positive and 500 negative reviews, and it will rank higher. This is also the reason why one of the two rules I listed was that all ratings should be biased towards the average. Finally, while Wilson's formula probably gives us a more “precise” rating, so to say, it's not necessarily what we want to see. There's a lot of mathematics behind why what it does is correct, while the previously mentioned numbers of 2 and 10 that I picked for my formula were rather arbitrary. Still, I selected them so that the result would also account for the high number of reviews when assigning a good score. It's why you'll probably notice a lot less games with a low review count among the top games than before. I think that's important because a game that is very popular and very highly rated should be ranked higher than a game that isn't as popular and is also very highly rated. Not because we can be more certain that this rating is indeed correct, but because you, as a random person who has yet to try that game, will more probably like it if a lot of other people have liked it as well — if it's not a niche game. And I think this aspect is definitely important and should be accounted for when trying to represent an entire game with just a single number.
artursapek 5y ago
I have wanted to build something like this, but the real pain point to solve is recipe blogs are a pain to navigate. They’re covered in ads, popups, and the first 50% of the page is some story that nobody wants to read. What we need is wikipedia for cooking.
- OJFord 5y ago
  The problem with that is that recipes are inherently more like blog than Wikipedia articles - they're so personal. Who are you to edit the number of chillies in OJFord's palak paneer, for example? Wikipedia has a 'first come first stays' policy for British/American spelling - applying that to recipes would be disastrous, giving me the final say on how to make the de facto custard, just because I created the page before anyone else?
  - artursapek 5y ago
    Fair points, I'm not saying all of Wiki's policies need to apply. I'm just saying the format and ease of consuming content is good, and there's nothing popular for cooking with those qualities.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Yes, sorry if I seemed too dismissive, I agree and like the idea on the surface, it's just to me what makes the format and ease of consuming Wikipedia good is that there's one page for everything, not a bunch of conflicting entries for the same thing. (Well, any encyclopaedia!) But you can't achieve that with recipes, because they're not encyclopaedic entries, they're one person's opinion piece on how to make a nice <whatever>, like a blog post. I suppose the slight flaw in my argument is that you can have competing encyclopaedia publishers - choose your namespace, your single source of truth, within which there's the one entry...
      - artursapek 5y ago
        There's probably ways to handle that. Grouping variations together and letting the community rank them for example. It's not a new problem
whoomp12342 5y ago
next level: mining the sites for the content and getting rid of the recipe's life story. to me, no-bs means ingredients and instructions. Maybe a few pictures of the target meal. thats it.
- Spivak 5y ago
  You don't have to mine the site at all. There's a schema for the data that basically all cooking sites support if they want SEO https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/recipe https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...
  - chaxor 5y ago
    Perhaps I'm dim, but I don't understand how that means you don't have to mine the site. Doesn't that simply mean you could perform the process all of the URLs in the database here by making the http request, grabbing those`recipeIngredient` sections, converting units and such, and then populating your simpler database from that? That seems like pretty textbook (albeit very simplistic) mining to me.
- lkbm 5y ago
  A lot of sites have a "Jump to Recipe" link. If this linked directly to that section, it'd be okay.
- mfashby 5y ago
  https://plainoldrecipe.com/ https://plainoldrecipe.com/ does this!
  - VRay 5y ago
    Man, what a disappointing thread.. the BBC site is great except it’s all weird British ingredients and units (how do I convert grams of British flour into cups of American flour without a scale?) The OP’s site is a really nice search engine, but it dumps you into the recipes’ unreadable SEO trash pit websites instead of parsing out the data PlainOldRecipe isn’t working to strip recipes down for me
pachico 5y ago
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.
- milomildus 5y ago
  I already support time and includes / excludes ingredients, but saved profiles and the other filters are good ideas!
  - pachico 5y ago
    Ideally, I would use it this way (as a narrative): Calendar: dinner with Anna and John next Friday. I know Anna is vegan and John hates hot spicy food. Go through a possible list of menus (not recipes) for the night, based on food that takes X time to be prepared. Get me a complete list of what I need for y amount of guests (and a cost estimation). Add what I need to an online grocery store list making sure it arrives the day before at the latest (but not too soon since I want it fresh). Another use case. I have a profile where I set I'm vegetarian, I don't like soups, blah and blah. I am hungry. I go to the fridge and I make a list of what I have and how much I have. I now search for recipes with those ingredients that can be done in less than 40 mins. Or, I'm preparing something that requires different timers: go and set them for me! Tell me that it's now time to put that thing in water if I want to prepare it tomorrow morning, or that I can now don't pay attention to this process during 45 minutes and alert me after that. As I was saying, the recipe is really the easy part for me :)
liminal 5y ago
Are the filters working properly? I tried filtering for "almond flour" which comes up as an ingredient option, but got no results
- milomildus 5y ago
  hm, I'll take a look at this. Thanks for reporting.
wzy 5y ago
Be careful not to point your scraper at those mommy recipe bloggers that have a story about their grandma before the recipe. Most of the well know ones are making 6 figures a year from their blog and will fight, tooth and nail, to make sure their content is not reproduced anywhere on the internet (not even the title), except for a SERP.
admn2 5y ago
Some actual pagination would be great (instead of just next / previous having page numbers)
roshansingh 5y ago
Great idea. Can you add a filter for food and drinks. I want to look for lunch/dinner recipes.
par 5y ago
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!
- ptrhvns 5y ago
  Well, maybe this tool, or you personally, could pipe the recipe through https://www.justtherecipe.com/ https://www.justtherecipe.com/.
igaloly 5y ago
Which bs there's when searching for recepies?
tonymet 5y ago
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.
- cushychicken 5y ago
  My latest favorite is Cook it in Cast Iron from Cook's Country. 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?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00X2E308K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
  - tonymet 5y ago
    America's Test Kitchen, which Produces Cooks Illustrated and Cooks Country – is my single favorite publishing resource. A perfect balance of technical information & pragmatic recipes for the amateur cook to be very productive in the kitchen with minimal tools & ingredients.
    - cushychicken 5y ago
      I've come to like Cook's Country a little more. Cook's Illustrated is great, and the food is always excellent, but it always seems to me that it's more work than you strictly need to do to get that quality. Cook's Country recipes are about 90% as good for about 80% less work, in my opinion.
- john-tells-all 5y ago
  This! 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!
anonu 5y ago
awesome - bookmarked! small bug: go to page 2 of some search results and enter a different search term. You'll stay on page 2 and if there are not enough results to fill page 2, it will just be blank.
horsawlarway 5y ago
So, ah... is it just me or is "Maangchi" just entirely faking their reviews? Toggle that slider up to 5k and it's just them sitting there at ridiculous numbers all pegged at 5 stars.
- brianjlogan 5y ago
  Yeah they must have falsified reviews or the parser is broken. New York Times doesn't even break the first page of results. Edit: Also they should add a filter for "paywall" recipe sites. I haven't been able to find any of the top recipes as browseable.
the_arun 5y ago
Great job! I wish there was a way sort data by columns.
schleck8 5y ago
Cool! Sorting by number of ratings, the first 30 or more results are all by "Maangchi". I think there is something wrong with their ratings.
RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
Can't type an apostrophe. ' breaks it.
goshx 5y ago
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.
- LordAtlas 5y ago
  Disable Javascript for the site. Fixes the problem. Or run it through Outline.com
MisterTea 5y ago
I searched for flan and the first two results were for pumpkin flan and then almond flan but the rest of the recipes were for flank steak.
joshstrange 5y ago
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. [0] https://www.paprikaapp.com/ https://www.paprikaapp.com/
- namrog84 5y ago
  Ive heard great things about it. And while it is cross platform but you do have to buy it per platform. Which is a bummer. 5 for ios. Free on android. And 30 for windows. And seemingly no browser version? :(
  - joshstrange 5y ago
    No, no browser version but it’s not been an issue for me since they have apps everywhere I need. Also, their (undocumented) API is simple enough if you want access. As far as having to purchase per-platform, it’s a steal for the utility I get from it and there is no subscription fee, it’s 1-time.
- 5y ago
leobg 5y ago
I love the tabulated recipes shown on cookingforengineers.com [1]. 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-Bread http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/108/Banana-Nut-Bre...
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  This site still holds up better than most today. Imagine if we had how-tos and tutorials like this instead of a youtube video for everything.
  - WhyCause 5y ago
    I get so frustrated nowadays looking for origami instructions; everything seems to be a video when all I want are the diagrams that used to get posted.
    - bbkane 5y ago
      I buy origami books. It's a great way to leave the computer for a bit and of course they're readable outside, don't have ads... I recommend John Montroll's origami books.
      - WhyCause 5y ago
        Oh, don't get me wrong, I've got a bunch of books (including quite of few of Montroll's) that I've collected over the years. I just the old man who hates seeing interesting creations being posted on /r/origami, only to find a video instead of diagrams when I click through.
- chrisgat 5y ago
  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.
throw89vv 5y ago
What search engine does it use?
snihalani 5y ago
feature request: link to archive.is url of the ny times link to break paywall bs
netman21 5y ago
Tried it out. Searched for lamb curry. First listed is a paywalled NYT recipe. Was hoping for no BS as in no paywall, no extraneous narrative. Oh well.
charlieb 5y ago
Is there a way for you to get the nutritional info into this page as well? Sticking to a diet is really hard when you have to scroll through pages and pages of exposition and adds to get macro counts.
jakamau 5y ago
Does anyone know of a site that connects recipes by correlated ingredients? Example: If you made recipe X, you should try recipe Y which uses 75% of those same ingredients, or recipe Z which has 80% of the ingredients in common. That way you can buy those core ingredients in bulk but still have something new and fresh for dinner. The meal-prep dream for me is 10-15 recipes that taste good, are as distinct as possible, but have the majority of their ingredients in common. To butcher a phrase, spice needs to be the variety of life in this scenario.
- felix_n 5y ago
  I'm hacking on a project that does this, but kind of in reverse: give it a list of ingredients and the respective quantities, tell it how many servings you want per day and for how many days, and it generates sets of recipes that don't require additional ingredients. There are other bells and whistles I've added or plan to add, like factoring in diet restrictions or nutrition goals, but the core of it was to basically to find what I could cook without going to a store.
dadlangia4 5y ago
This is awesome, nice work
AaronNewcomer 5y ago
I think that for the ingredients you need to treat the entire phrase as a single unit. For instance, when i put in apple as an ingredient you return results that need apple cider vinegar or pineapple.
gowld 5y ago
Do we need another hundred recipe search engines? Or do we need a recipe search engine search engine? Are their open source projects making progress instead of everyone independently reinventing the same wheel?
nickstinemates 5y ago
Feels good. Will use it more. I searched for 2 recipes which are not particularly common - watermelon juice and scallion pancakes and there was an abundance of results, including ones I have used before.
justinlloyd 5y ago
I love your website but unfortunately you link to seriouseats recipes, which to me is the equivalent of quora for food. When searching online for recipes, I always "-seriouseats" or have the entire website in Firefox Block SERPs addon.
- sflicht 5y ago
  wow, pretty surprised by this. I often explicitly search for the seriouseats recipe -- they're usually much better than allrecipes, food.com, etc. Also Kenji's book (the Food Lab) is awesome.
  - justinlloyd 5y ago
    Ah, yeah, that's the problem right there. If seriouseats is the quora of recipe websites then allrecipes is the "Yahoo! Answers" to that. Food.com just needs a shitty MIDI tune autoplaying and a couple of animated underconstruction signs and we could relaunch myspace all over again. These days I have all three of those recipe websites, and others, blocked in my SERPs block add-on in the browser. I guess I unintentionally turned in to a recipe snob over the years. But I simply don't trust a lot of online recipes.
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herpderperator 5y ago
1. This makes an API request for every keystroke. Perhaps adding debouncing would be a good idea? 2. 500 error when typing a quotation mark - needs escaping: https://api.stovetop.app/recipes?q=%27 https://api.stovetop.app/recipes?q=%27 { "statusCode": 500, "code": "42601", "error": "Internal Server Error", "message": "syntax error in tsquery: \"':*\"" }
subless 5y ago
Similar to https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/
musicale 5y ago
The "no-BS" feature isn't working: "Unlock New York Times recipes and your personal recipe box with a free account."
secretsatan 5y ago
For no BS recipes, BBC food is great ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/food https://www.bbc.co.uk/food ), they normally get right to the point. I would filter out the ones from Ready Steady Cook though
jonplackett 5y ago
This is great… right up until I go to a recipe and all the BS comes flooding back. We do not want your life story recipe person! We want to cook dinner!
n2j3 5y ago
please pair it with https://plainoldrecipe.com/ https://plainoldrecipe.com/ ^^
gardnr 5y ago
Just some feedback: The links appear to be some sort of magic that doesn't work with cmd-click (open in the tab) This means I have to click and the browser navigates to the recipe webpage. When I click the back button my filters are reset and the order of everything is different. Please consider opening recipes in new tabs.
- milomildus 5y ago
  Done, thanks for the feedback!

403 points by milomildus 5y ago

Some thoughts: 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

boise 5y ago
2) yes. I follow NYT coooking and there are definitely authors I avoid.
milomildus 5y ago
I'm currently working on a data structure for ingredients which significantly improves on the current flat list. It should be able to address plural duplicates / locale duplicates / and hierarchy. 4) is a good idea. The thing I struggle with for pictures is where to put them, but I'll play around with some options. Maybe they can be behind a toggle.
Spivak 5y ago
You should start considering the author more, cooks you like will probably sell recipes to a variety of publishers and any given publisher's quality is likely to vary wildly at any kind of scale.
InfiniteRand 5y ago
spelling variations are also an issue, like fettuccine vs fettucine, not sure if there's an easy solution for that

rglover 5y ago

This is great, thank you. Do you have any plans to do an Instapaper-style scrape that just reduces the recipe down to the ingredients/instructions?

authed 5y ago

If you search for, "asparagus leg", no quotes, the result appear to point to an incorrect URL

RandyRanderson 5y ago

The search here is great - you can filter by min number of reviews and sort by star rating, which should be the default on amzn, newegg, etc. Ok, I know this filter is not on ecommerce sites b/c money but one day there will be enough competition and then ... Ok, I know there will never be real competition b/c capitalism. Why can't you just let me have this little fiction? Ok, I know b/c reality.

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milomildus 5y ago

Hi HN 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.

hellbannedguy 5y ago
Well done. I like the instantaneous results as I type. I wish more search engines worked like that.
redman25 5y ago
Love the fast interface. It would be awesome if you could add functionality to filter by diet (vegetarian, vegan, paleo, etc.) For many people, diet determines which recipes are useful more often than any other factor.
- capitainenemo 5y ago
  I spent a couple of minutes trying to turn it into a usable vegetarian recipe filter by selecting every exclude that was meat related. An overflow auto on the excludes ingredients list would help avoid it spilling over into the results. Not sure why: Quick-Broiled Pork Chops With Peanuts and Gochujang Almond and Dried Fruit Pilaf With Rotisserie Chicken Freestyle Roasted Chicken Parm etc. Still show up even with chicken, pork and 150+ other meat terms in the exclude list. But overall it's much improved. Unfortunately can't find a way to bookmark the exclude list without a JS injection, and the source is obfuscated, so I'm probably not gonna bother figuring out how to do that. ... hm. I see that it does send out a promising looking API request that could be possibly turned into something bookmarkable. Looks like it has a handy array name too. https://pastebin.com/nddrvGcy https://pastebin.com/nddrvGcy <= a start at meat filtering
jqpabc123 5y ago
I applaud your effort. Building is the first step, sustaining is the second. A picture is worth a thousand words. Figure out how to sustain the site and info density will become less of an issue.

smallerfish 5y ago

You've got some ingredients that don't map to any recipes, e.g. "tofu scramble". Also please add a facets like feature to avoid the user selecting combinations of ingredients that don't match any recipes.

roofwellhams 5y ago

All recipes are 404 not found

GrumpyNl 5y ago
Not all, but a lot of them.
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guerrilla 5y ago

Aside from everything going to 404, the front page table design is a bit crowded. Maybe there's some way you can even that out a bit. Otherwise, very nice.

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anschwa 5y ago

Looks great! https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/ might be another good source of recipes if you're not already using it.

smoldesu 5y ago
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.
twiclo 5y ago
Based.cooking is great. I have my own instance running on my server. Version controlled recipes are the way of the future

fortydegrees 5y ago

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!

milomildus 5y ago
Thanks! From scratch -- I think there are quite a few already existing React components / component libraries for table views like this, but I'll think about if there's anything I can generalize.

uhtred 5y ago

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?

blowski 5y ago

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.

grogenaut 5y ago
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.
- blowski 5y ago
  I've seen five star recipes say things like "Hawaiian pizza - add pineapple, tuna fish, and lasagna". So, yeah, the star ratings are meaningless - but then there are too many recipes to sort the wheat from the chaff.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    The target audience for this recipe is a Venn Diagram of "people who love lasagna but nobody else in their life does" and "people who can't eat ham for religious or dietary reasons" and "people who have no reverence whatsoever for pizza" (which also, according to some, is a superset of Hawaiian pizza eaters to begin with). That's not a tiny number but it's not large either.
hinkley 5y ago
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.

james_in_the_uk 5y ago

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.)

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milomildus 5y ago
404 issue should be fixed. 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.)
- james_in_the_uk 5y ago
  Here are some good UK sites to consider including: The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/tone/recipes https://www.theguardian.com/tone/recipes BBC Good Food: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com https://www.bbcgoodfood.com Jamie Oliver: https://www.jamieoliver.com https://www.jamieoliver.com Delicious Magazine: https://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/recipes/ https://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/recipes/ Great British Chefs: https://www.greatbritishchefs.com https://www.greatbritishchefs.com I should add that there are legal restrictions on scraping and re-use of content from third party websites; I haven't checked if the above permit this.
OJFord 5y ago
I gave in and bought a set of US (not the old British, nor the metric..) cups in the end. I don't like it, but it beats using something else for a volumetric measurement.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  IMHO it's better not doing volumetric measurement and doing everything by weight, having your mixing container on a scale the whole time and "resetting the weight" when adding new ingredients.

bko 5y ago

Very well done. I love the design and simplicity. 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!

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HunchedOver 5y ago

Excellent stuff and a nice break from the "rewrite it all in in my tasty-flavour-lang" approaches to doing this that crop up often on HN (not that those aren't impressive on a technical level!). This ties in nicely with the recent discussions here over the need for more specialised search engines. Are you able to give any insight into how this works behind the scenes, is it all manually input? Bookmarked for future use.

milomildus 5y ago
I'm currently crawling the sources which publish schema.org definitions of their recipes, or the actual html itself. Basically doing whatever google does to create their recipe cards. Everything gets thrown into a Postgres database with a vanilla FTS implementation.

OJFord 5y ago

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.

milomildus 5y ago
yeah I'm a big fan -- what other sources / sites do you generally use? I'm trying to aggregate an 'authoritative' list of high quality sources.
- pjsg 5y ago
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/food https://www.bbc.co.uk/food
- OJFord 5y ago
  Archana's Kitchen (archanaskitchen.com) sometimes, and I'm currently working through Delia Smith's cookery course book, many (all?) recipes of which are available at deliaonline.com actually. I'm also working through Dishoom's (restaurant) book, which I think is not available online. Aside from those I don't really have go-to places, I tend to prefer to read through a few (i.e. just whatever top few results searching for the thing I'm thinking of making) for a general idea and inspiration of particular flavours, then 'wing it'. In future I'll try using Stovetop for that search :). Edit: Oh yes and BBC Goodfood as sibling commenter pointed out. That's often where I search actually (because it's multiple author) rather than a general search engine, so if it were a Stovetop source I could definitely use it for that purpose.
- sflicht 5y ago
  foodwishes.com cookingissues.com ladyandpups.com

named-user 5y ago

You're gonna get C&D imminently like that other site did. I can't find the name of it, sorry. I fully support what you're doing. I am not fussed with someone's back stories about how their great grandmother's auntie's friend had her hair dyed when walking her dog to pick cherries... Blah blah... Just want the recipe and method But unfortunately... Advert revenues are a thing.

milomildus 5y ago
I hope not -- unlike the other site you still have to go to the source to read the recipe, so hopefully this doesn't have an impact on their ad revenue.
lkbm 5y ago
This is linking to the websites in question. It's not too different than GWS, except in that it's not linking to any sites that include back stories.

whoomp12342 5y ago

no bs, yet NYTIMES has a modal popup that you cant unclick....

m12k 5y ago

Great idea! But please read https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...

milomildus 5y ago
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.
- MayeulC 5y ago
  For another similar rating system, there's also this one: https://steamdb.info/blog/steamdb-rating/ https://steamdb.info/blog/steamdb-rating/ Not exactly sure how the two compare.
  - driscoll42 5y ago
    He compares it at the bottom of the article: Compared to Wilson's formula, it's very short, and it's not nearly as difficult to understand the idea behind how it works. One could easily get the question "Why would this random formula give better results than what a very established mathematician came up with?" I can't really answer that, but it would seem a lot of you agree that it does indeed produce better results when rating Steam's games. I can, however, try to give some insight into this. For one, Wilson's formula isn't really meant to be used quite like this. It takes a rating and the sample size (the number of reviews), and outputs a confidence interval. And a confidence interval basically says that “We are some% sure that the score is between x and y”. If you increase the % of how sure you are, the distance between x and y also increases, and vice versa. But to get a single rating, it's not quite okay to just take the lower bound of that interval. Secondly, because of what was mentioned in the last paragraph, it always gives us a lower rating than the original. This is clearly the incorrect behaviour, as something that just came out and gets a single negative review will be marked as having a score of 0%. Meanwhile, an established terrible game can have 10 positive and 500 negative reviews, and it will rank higher. This is also the reason why one of the two rules I listed was that all ratings should be biased towards the average. Finally, while Wilson's formula probably gives us a more “precise” rating, so to say, it's not necessarily what we want to see. There's a lot of mathematics behind why what it does is correct, while the previously mentioned numbers of 2 and 10 that I picked for my formula were rather arbitrary. Still, I selected them so that the result would also account for the high number of reviews when assigning a good score. It's why you'll probably notice a lot less games with a low review count among the top games than before. I think that's important because a game that is very popular and very highly rated should be ranked higher than a game that isn't as popular and is also very highly rated. Not because we can be more certain that this rating is indeed correct, but because you, as a random person who has yet to try that game, will more probably like it if a lot of other people have liked it as well — if it's not a niche game. And I think this aspect is definitely important and should be accounted for when trying to represent an entire game with just a single number.

artursapek 5y ago

I have wanted to build something like this, but the real pain point to solve is recipe blogs are a pain to navigate. They’re covered in ads, popups, and the first 50% of the page is some story that nobody wants to read. What we need is wikipedia for cooking.

OJFord 5y ago
The problem with that is that recipes are inherently more like blog than Wikipedia articles - they're so personal. Who are you to edit the number of chillies in OJFord's palak paneer, for example? Wikipedia has a 'first come first stays' policy for British/American spelling - applying that to recipes would be disastrous, giving me the final say on how to make the de facto custard, just because I created the page before anyone else?
- artursapek 5y ago
  Fair points, I'm not saying all of Wiki's policies need to apply. I'm just saying the format and ease of consuming content is good, and there's nothing popular for cooking with those qualities.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Yes, sorry if I seemed too dismissive, I agree and like the idea on the surface, it's just to me what makes the format and ease of consuming Wikipedia good is that there's one page for everything, not a bunch of conflicting entries for the same thing. (Well, any encyclopaedia!) But you can't achieve that with recipes, because they're not encyclopaedic entries, they're one person's opinion piece on how to make a nice <whatever>, like a blog post. I suppose the slight flaw in my argument is that you can have competing encyclopaedia publishers - choose your namespace, your single source of truth, within which there's the one entry...
    - artursapek 5y ago
      There's probably ways to handle that. Grouping variations together and letting the community rank them for example. It's not a new problem

whoomp12342 5y ago

next level: mining the sites for the content and getting rid of the recipe's life story. to me, no-bs means ingredients and instructions. Maybe a few pictures of the target meal. thats it.

Spivak 5y ago
You don't have to mine the site at all. There's a schema for the data that basically all cooking sites support if they want SEO https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/recipe https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...
- chaxor 5y ago
  Perhaps I'm dim, but I don't understand how that means you don't have to mine the site. Doesn't that simply mean you could perform the process all of the URLs in the database here by making the http request, grabbing those`recipeIngredient` sections, converting units and such, and then populating your simpler database from that? That seems like pretty textbook (albeit very simplistic) mining to me.
lkbm 5y ago
A lot of sites have a "Jump to Recipe" link. If this linked directly to that section, it'd be okay.
mfashby 5y ago
https://plainoldrecipe.com/ https://plainoldrecipe.com/ does this!
- VRay 5y ago
  Man, what a disappointing thread.. the BBC site is great except it’s all weird British ingredients and units (how do I convert grams of British flour into cups of American flour without a scale?) The OP’s site is a really nice search engine, but it dumps you into the recipes’ unreadable SEO trash pit websites instead of parsing out the data PlainOldRecipe isn’t working to strip recipes down for me

pachico 5y ago

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.

milomildus 5y ago
I already support time and includes / excludes ingredients, but saved profiles and the other filters are good ideas!
- pachico 5y ago
  Ideally, I would use it this way (as a narrative): Calendar: dinner with Anna and John next Friday. I know Anna is vegan and John hates hot spicy food. Go through a possible list of menus (not recipes) for the night, based on food that takes X time to be prepared. Get me a complete list of what I need for y amount of guests (and a cost estimation). Add what I need to an online grocery store list making sure it arrives the day before at the latest (but not too soon since I want it fresh). Another use case. I have a profile where I set I'm vegetarian, I don't like soups, blah and blah. I am hungry. I go to the fridge and I make a list of what I have and how much I have. I now search for recipes with those ingredients that can be done in less than 40 mins. Or, I'm preparing something that requires different timers: go and set them for me! Tell me that it's now time to put that thing in water if I want to prepare it tomorrow morning, or that I can now don't pay attention to this process during 45 minutes and alert me after that. As I was saying, the recipe is really the easy part for me :)

liminal 5y ago

Are the filters working properly? I tried filtering for "almond flour" which comes up as an ingredient option, but got no results

milomildus 5y ago
hm, I'll take a look at this. Thanks for reporting.

wzy 5y ago

Be careful not to point your scraper at those mommy recipe bloggers that have a story about their grandma before the recipe. Most of the well know ones are making 6 figures a year from their blog and will fight, tooth and nail, to make sure their content is not reproduced anywhere on the internet (not even the title), except for a SERP.

admn2 5y ago

Some actual pagination would be great (instead of just next / previous having page numbers)

roshansingh 5y ago

Great idea. Can you add a filter for food and drinks. I want to look for lunch/dinner recipes.

par 5y ago

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!

ptrhvns 5y ago
Well, maybe this tool, or you personally, could pipe the recipe through https://www.justtherecipe.com/ https://www.justtherecipe.com/.

igaloly 5y ago

Which bs there's when searching for recepies?

tonymet 5y ago

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.

cushychicken 5y ago
My latest favorite is Cook it in Cast Iron from Cook's Country. 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?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00X2E308K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
- tonymet 5y ago
  America's Test Kitchen, which Produces Cooks Illustrated and Cooks Country – is my single favorite publishing resource. A perfect balance of technical information & pragmatic recipes for the amateur cook to be very productive in the kitchen with minimal tools & ingredients.
  - cushychicken 5y ago
    I've come to like Cook's Country a little more. Cook's Illustrated is great, and the food is always excellent, but it always seems to me that it's more work than you strictly need to do to get that quality. Cook's Country recipes are about 90% as good for about 80% less work, in my opinion.
john-tells-all 5y ago
This! 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!

anonu 5y ago

awesome - bookmarked! small bug: go to page 2 of some search results and enter a different search term. You'll stay on page 2 and if there are not enough results to fill page 2, it will just be blank.

horsawlarway 5y ago

So, ah... is it just me or is "Maangchi" just entirely faking their reviews? Toggle that slider up to 5k and it's just them sitting there at ridiculous numbers all pegged at 5 stars.

brianjlogan 5y ago
Yeah they must have falsified reviews or the parser is broken. New York Times doesn't even break the first page of results. Edit: Also they should add a filter for "paywall" recipe sites. I haven't been able to find any of the top recipes as browseable.

the_arun 5y ago

Great job! I wish there was a way sort data by columns.

schleck8 5y ago

Cool! Sorting by number of ratings, the first 30 or more results are all by "Maangchi". I think there is something wrong with their ratings.

RosanaAnaDana 5y ago

Can't type an apostrophe. ' breaks it.

goshx 5y ago

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.

LordAtlas 5y ago
Disable Javascript for the site. Fixes the problem. Or run it through Outline.com

MisterTea 5y ago

I searched for flan and the first two results were for pumpkin flan and then almond flan but the rest of the recipes were for flank steak.

joshstrange 5y ago

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. [0] https://www.paprikaapp.com/ https://www.paprikaapp.com/

namrog84 5y ago
Ive heard great things about it. And while it is cross platform but you do have to buy it per platform. Which is a bummer. 5 for ios. Free on android. And 30 for windows. And seemingly no browser version? :(
- joshstrange 5y ago
  No, no browser version but it’s not been an issue for me since they have apps everywhere I need. Also, their (undocumented) API is simple enough if you want access. As far as having to purchase per-platform, it’s a steal for the utility I get from it and there is no subscription fee, it’s 1-time.
5y ago

leobg 5y ago

I love the tabulated recipes shown on cookingforengineers.com [1]. 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-Bread http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/108/Banana-Nut-Bre...

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
This site still holds up better than most today. Imagine if we had how-tos and tutorials like this instead of a youtube video for everything.
- WhyCause 5y ago
  I get so frustrated nowadays looking for origami instructions; everything seems to be a video when all I want are the diagrams that used to get posted.
  - bbkane 5y ago
    I buy origami books. It's a great way to leave the computer for a bit and of course they're readable outside, don't have ads... I recommend John Montroll's origami books.
    - WhyCause 5y ago
      Oh, don't get me wrong, I've got a bunch of books (including quite of few of Montroll's) that I've collected over the years. I just the old man who hates seeing interesting creations being posted on /r/origami, only to find a video instead of diagrams when I click through.
chrisgat 5y ago
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.

throw89vv 5y ago

What search engine does it use?

snihalani 5y ago

feature request: link to archive.is url of the ny times link to break paywall bs

netman21 5y ago

Tried it out. Searched for lamb curry. First listed is a paywalled NYT recipe. Was hoping for no BS as in no paywall, no extraneous narrative. Oh well.

charlieb 5y ago

Is there a way for you to get the nutritional info into this page as well? Sticking to a diet is really hard when you have to scroll through pages and pages of exposition and adds to get macro counts.

jakamau 5y ago

Does anyone know of a site that connects recipes by correlated ingredients? Example: If you made recipe X, you should try recipe Y which uses 75% of those same ingredients, or recipe Z which has 80% of the ingredients in common. That way you can buy those core ingredients in bulk but still have something new and fresh for dinner. The meal-prep dream for me is 10-15 recipes that taste good, are as distinct as possible, but have the majority of their ingredients in common. To butcher a phrase, spice needs to be the variety of life in this scenario.

felix_n 5y ago
I'm hacking on a project that does this, but kind of in reverse: give it a list of ingredients and the respective quantities, tell it how many servings you want per day and for how many days, and it generates sets of recipes that don't require additional ingredients. There are other bells and whistles I've added or plan to add, like factoring in diet restrictions or nutrition goals, but the core of it was to basically to find what I could cook without going to a store.

dadlangia4 5y ago

This is awesome, nice work

AaronNewcomer 5y ago

I think that for the ingredients you need to treat the entire phrase as a single unit. For instance, when i put in apple as an ingredient you return results that need apple cider vinegar or pineapple.

gowld 5y ago

Do we need another hundred recipe search engines? Or do we need a recipe search engine search engine? Are their open source projects making progress instead of everyone independently reinventing the same wheel?

nickstinemates 5y ago

Feels good. Will use it more. I searched for 2 recipes which are not particularly common - watermelon juice and scallion pancakes and there was an abundance of results, including ones I have used before.

justinlloyd 5y ago

I love your website but unfortunately you link to seriouseats recipes, which to me is the equivalent of quora for food. When searching online for recipes, I always "-seriouseats" or have the entire website in Firefox Block SERPs addon.

sflicht 5y ago
wow, pretty surprised by this. I often explicitly search for the seriouseats recipe -- they're usually much better than allrecipes, food.com, etc. Also Kenji's book (the Food Lab) is awesome.
- justinlloyd 5y ago
  Ah, yeah, that's the problem right there. If seriouseats is the quora of recipe websites then allrecipes is the "Yahoo! Answers" to that. Food.com just needs a shitty MIDI tune autoplaying and a couple of animated underconstruction signs and we could relaunch myspace all over again. These days I have all three of those recipe websites, and others, blocked in my SERPs block add-on in the browser. I guess I unintentionally turned in to a recipe snob over the years. But I simply don't trust a lot of online recipes.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

herpderperator 5y ago

1. This makes an API request for every keystroke. Perhaps adding debouncing would be a good idea? 2. 500 error when typing a quotation mark - needs escaping: https://api.stovetop.app/recipes?q=%27 https://api.stovetop.app/recipes?q=%27 { "statusCode": 500, "code": "42601", "error": "Internal Server Error", "message": "syntax error in tsquery: \"':*\"" }

subless 5y ago

Similar to https://based.cooking/ https://based.cooking/

musicale 5y ago

The "no-BS" feature isn't working: "Unlock New York Times recipes and your personal recipe box with a free account."

secretsatan 5y ago

For no BS recipes, BBC food is great ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/food https://www.bbc.co.uk/food ), they normally get right to the point. I would filter out the ones from Ready Steady Cook though

jonplackett 5y ago

This is great… right up until I go to a recipe and all the BS comes flooding back. We do not want your life story recipe person! We want to cook dinner!

n2j3 5y ago

please pair it with https://plainoldrecipe.com/ https://plainoldrecipe.com/ ^^

gardnr 5y ago

Just some feedback: The links appear to be some sort of magic that doesn't work with cmd-click (open in the tab) This means I have to click and the browser navigates to the recipe webpage. When I click the back button my filters are reset and the order of everything is different. Please consider opening recipes in new tabs.

milomildus 5y ago
Done, thanks for the feedback!