10 ms·

Show HN: CookTime – Recipe index

73 points by guhidalg 4y ago

Hi HN, COVID lockdowns made me and my wife cook a lot more at home, and we had a need to streamline our recipe management woes. These were some of the problems we identified: - Most recipe websites are what I call "mommy blogs", and the principal problem is that the recipe ingredient list and instructions are buried in a SEO-laden essay that we don't care about. We were sharing links to our favorite recipes, but links don't allow you to skip past the unnecessary essay prefacing the recipe. We knew we wanted a way to have recipes uncompromised by unrelated essays. - Popular recipe aggregating websites are run by publishing companies that do not want you, the reader, to contribute your own recipes. This is not true for all of them; Allrecipes.com does allow you to enter recipes but that UI leaves a lot to be desired. We knew we needed a way for us (and you) to write your own recipes. - Most recipe websites do not allow you to scale recipe ingredients. We like to cook a lot at once, and we don't like to keep track of a 2x, or 3x multiplier in our heads while cooking. We knew we wanted a simple way of scaling ingredients. - Most recipe websites do not contain adequate nutrition information about their recipes. When they do, they don't show their math, or their sources. We knew we needed an automatic nutrition calculation for recipes based on ingredients and their quantities. After a few months of nights and weekends, we are ready to share https://letscooktime.com https://letscooktime.com . We solved all of the primary problems listed above, and more! Our features: - Recipe creation - Ingredient highlights in recipe text - Recipe components - Automatic nutrition calculation - Grocery lists - Scaling recipes - Tagging - No blogging, just recipes! No bullshit essay to scroll through. - Dark mode! We think the closest thing to CookTime is https://www.paprikaapp.com https://www.paprikaapp.com. Paprika is a paid native app, CookTime is a free mobile-ready website you can try _today_. I do not believe that recipe management really requires the performance, development cost, and App Store cost of a native app. Without a CookTime account, you can: - Browse recipes - Read their nutrition facts - Scale ingredients temporarily - Share links to recipes With a CookTime account, you can: - Add your own recipes - Add recipes to your personal groceries list Let me know what you think! Would you use it? What are you currently using to track your recipes? What missing feature is stopping you from using CookTime?

tveyben 4y ago
I really like the concept(!) I have been looking around for something like this, but selfhosted (any chance of it being opensourced?) I learned about this site from a comment in another HN thread, thus did not read your "ShowHN" intro. After visiting the site I could see what it was about (looks great), but I was not able to quickly find a description of the concept, thus what to expect, what is required etc. So here's my feedback: 1. Promote the "ShowHN" blog post https://letscooktime.com/Blog/2022/04/29/hn-post.html https://letscooktime.com/Blog/2022/04/29/hn-post.html (that I eventually found and read) to the "About" page thus let people like me answer the why, who, when etc questions. 2. Will the site be worth investing in for me? If I start adding my own recipies there, can I export my data eg. to a local backup? I know everything is being cloudified these days, but I'm old school and I know that nothing is for ever, even the good stuff. It's possible that you loose interest in the project or (hopefully not) an accident occurs with the sideeffect of the site being terminated. One comment in the other thread was about another similair site that was terminated, hence data was lost for the end users perspective. 3. Units In Denmark (an likely in the rest of Europa) the use of "cups" is not de facto, in stead volume measurements are used (for small amounts) or weight (for large amounts). Eg. in stead of 1/3 cup, then ~80ml would be used (well 78,66...) and when baking use 1kg of flour Farenheit versus Centigrades Is it possible to auto detect Farenheit and get it converted to Centigrades (or vice versa), either by auto detecting it and adding the other value in parens? I typically see it refernced as '425°F' or 425F, so a regex might do the trick. For large values (either via scaling the recipe or when a lot is needed for a normal serving) Eg.: https://letscooktime.com/Recipes/Details?id=f9b12e31-c6fa-479b-91b7-ef8381fa89a1 https://letscooktime.com/Recipes/Details?id=f9b12e31-c6fa-47... '1 gallon (22656 grams) apple juice' You should use the appropriate unit (> 1.000 grams => kg ...) NB.: Something must be wrong with this conversion as 1 (us) gallon (~3,785 l) is not the equivalent of 22,656 kg, more likely ~3,785 kg), thus 'x6'. Nitpick: I prefer 'l' in stead of the 'L' as the unit of "litre" as it looks nicer: 'ml' versus 'mL' 4. User settings I have yet to create an account so I am unaware if these features already exist, so sorry if this do not apply. If one is not interested in the nutricion data, it would be nice to have a preference that turns displaying this off (both 'Nutricion Facts' as well as 'Nutricion by Ingredient'). Support "locale" or even better, allow a setting that defines how to represent values (again in dk/europa we use `.´ as a thousand seperator and `,´ as a decimal point - the US is opposit (I'd have to say wrong ;-) 5. Incorrect conversions Something is wrong with the conversions. In this recipe https://letscooktime.com/Recipes/Details?id=2474dfcc-7804-4eb3-b468-89fb7b133e19 https://letscooktime.com/Recipes/Details?id=2474dfcc-7804-4e... '350 ml' water is referred to as '35 grams' (where it should be 350 grams, thus 10x) Also see the example in 3) 6. Index (original serving size) It might be nice to know the original size if one often scales up as you'd like to know how much off the sizes might be (x2 - x4 is ok, but at x10 soe values might get off). I know I can F5 to get the original recipe (which I presume is in the originally size asd it was entered).

73 points by guhidalg 4y ago

tveyben 4y ago

I really like the concept(!) I have been looking around for something like this, but selfhosted (any chance of it being opensourced?) I learned about this site from a comment in another HN thread, thus did not read your "ShowHN" intro. After visiting the site I could see what it was about (looks great), but I was not able to quickly find a description of the concept, thus what to expect, what is required etc. So here's my feedback: 1. Promote the "ShowHN" blog post https://letscooktime.com/Blog/2022/04/29/hn-post.html https://letscooktime.com/Blog/2022/04/29/hn-post.html (that I eventually found and read) to the "About" page thus let people like me answer the why, who, when etc questions. 2. Will the site be worth investing in for me? If I start adding my own recipies there, can I export my data eg. to a local backup? I know everything is being cloudified these days, but I'm old school and I know that nothing is for ever, even the good stuff. It's possible that you loose interest in the project or (hopefully not) an accident occurs with the sideeffect of the site being terminated. One comment in the other thread was about another similair site that was terminated, hence data was lost for the end users perspective. 3. Units In Denmark (an likely in the rest of Europa) the use of "cups" is not de facto, in stead volume measurements are used (for small amounts) or weight (for large amounts). Eg. in stead of 1/3 cup, then ~80ml would be used (well 78,66...) and when baking use 1kg of flour Farenheit versus Centigrades Is it possible to auto detect Farenheit and get it converted to Centigrades (or vice versa), either by auto detecting it and adding the other value in parens? I typically see it refernced as '425°F' or 425F, so a regex might do the trick. For large values (either via scaling the recipe or when a lot is needed for a normal serving) Eg.: https://letscooktime.com/Recipes/Details?id=f9b12e31-c6fa-479b-91b7-ef8381fa89a1 https://letscooktime.com/Recipes/Details?id=f9b12e31-c6fa-47... '1 gallon (22656 grams) apple juice' You should use the appropriate unit (> 1.000 grams => kg ...) NB.: Something must be wrong with this conversion as 1 (us) gallon (~3,785 l) is not the equivalent of 22,656 kg, more likely ~3,785 kg), thus 'x6'. Nitpick: I prefer 'l' in stead of the 'L' as the unit of "litre" as it looks nicer: 'ml' versus 'mL' 4. User settings I have yet to create an account so I am unaware if these features already exist, so sorry if this do not apply. If one is not interested in the nutricion data, it would be nice to have a preference that turns displaying this off (both 'Nutricion Facts' as well as 'Nutricion by Ingredient'). Support "locale" or even better, allow a setting that defines how to represent values (again in dk/europa we use `.´ as a thousand seperator and `,´ as a decimal point - the US is opposit (I'd have to say wrong ;-) 5. Incorrect conversions Something is wrong with the conversions. In this recipe https://letscooktime.com/Recipes/Details?id=2474dfcc-7804-4eb3-b468-89fb7b133e19 https://letscooktime.com/Recipes/Details?id=2474dfcc-7804-4e... '350 ml' water is referred to as '35 grams' (where it should be 350 grams, thus 10x) Also see the example in 3) 6. Index (original serving size) It might be nice to know the original size if one often scales up as you'd like to know how much off the sizes might be (x2 - x4 is ok, but at x10 soe values might get off). I know I can F5 to get the original recipe (which I presume is in the originally size asd it was entered).