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Show HN: Parsnip – Duolingo for Cooking

• AnhTho_FR 4y ago
  Love it! Shared it with my husband!
• rekttrader 4y ago
  Great idea and product name.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• arcticfox 4y ago
  Sick! I've really been wanting something like this as an extreme newcomer to cooking.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Thanks! Our whole goal is to tackle the pain of "not knowing where to start" and building up the confidence and knowledge to go and try stuff in the kitchen. If building a new product means creating a painkiller and not a vitamin, then this is the pain that we identified among many, many beginner cooks: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/app-store-launch-stats https://parsnip.substack.com/p/app-store-launch-stats
• 3adawi 4y ago
  Awesome - downloaded it
• guggleet 4y ago
  From the privacy policy: > We may collect the following information from you in order to provide our Services: > .... > Your child’s first name; > Your child’s age or birthday; Why?
  • lynndotpy 4y ago
    I believe because they're targeting users under 13. I also saw this and got very concerned, until I read the beginning but of the Privacy Policy. I'd love a clarification, say, that they don't somehow do this for adult users of the app.
    • Alex3917 4y ago
      > I believe because they're targeting users under 13. This. The average age of people who watch cooking shows is ~11.
      • geraldyo 4y ago
        Where'd you get that number from? That's pretty interesting
      • uoaei 4y ago
        Wow, if that's the average I would be very surprised. Median makes more sense, but average?
      • MattSteelblade 4y ago
        Citation needed. I do not believe that number, 11, is close to correct for median or average. https://www.statista.com/statistics/228950/cable-tv-networks-food-network-watched-in-the-last-7-days-usa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/228950/cable-tv-networks... https://www.marketingcharts.com/television-13719 https://www.marketingcharts.com/television-13719 https://brandongaille.com/40-captivating-food-network-demographics/ https://brandongaille.com/40-captivating-food-network-demogr... https://corporate.discovery.com/discovery-newsroom/food-network-and-cooking-channels-2020-by-the-numbers/ https://corporate.discovery.com/discovery-newsroom/food-netw... https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/video/millennials-eat-up-youtube-food-videos/ https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/video/m...
• anosidium 4y ago
  This looks incredible! I would love a macOS app as I spend more time on the Mac than on my iPhone. Well done for not enforcing account registration and letting me actually try the app.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Thanks. Our goal is to make learning to cook as easy as possible, and that includes making onboarding as easy as possible :-) Re: MacOS app: is that the same toolchain as iOS, or totally different? Our iOS app is built in Swift but I'm not an iOS developer, so actually not super familiar with the ecosystem.
    • anosidium 4y ago
      Apple Silicon Mac computers can run iOS apps natively otherwise you have to do some work to port it to the Mac via SwiftUI which is multiplatform framework, or Catalyst with minimal efforts otherwise as an AppKit (Cocoa) app. What framework does it use?
    • Shared404 4y ago
      Similar request - would love this but am not bought into Google Play or Apple. Is there any chance of a web version at some point?
      • mizzao 4y ago
        Yep, here's an extremely early preview (don't tell anyone): https://question-page-test.web.app/question/0CRyWWs1MBLonFhoYego https://question-page-test.web.app/question/0CRyWWs1MBLonFho...
  • abruzzi 4y ago
    I’d much prefer a website—I don’t really download apps anymore, and an application for Mac seems overkill.
    • a-dub 4y ago
• jacobdpeters 4y ago
  great name , great product , team looks killer too
• collegeburner 4y ago
  ooh looks cool! are yall going to support stuff like dietary preferences? and is it ad supported or?
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Our main thesis is to teach the "hows" and "whys" behind recipes so that you can substitute and adjust as necessary for your own dietary preferences instead of having to find recipes that satisfy them. It's more of an edtech approach where we try to get the right knowledge into your brain in an empowering way rather than outsourcing decision making to an algorithm.
• greenie_beans 4y ago
  this looks real cool. wish i could use it but i don't have a smartphone.
• erispoe 4y ago
  You're talking about targeting a billion people. Who is that billion people? Is that the western world? Or people in the world with no cooking skills? Do you have an idea of the distribution of cooking skills in the world / western world? How many people need to develop basic skills?
  • mizzao 4y ago
    There are many ways to get there but our initial thesis is to target beginners in English-speaking countries. Eventually we want to teach intermediate/advanced cooks and any cuisine to anyone regardless of where they lived. These countries (USA, Canada, UK, Aus, NZ) have similar food cultures, a high reliance on processed foods (especially US), and relatively higher cost of labor and food vs. the rest of the world, so have a higher demand for learning to cook. The best way to see the trend and these countries is on Google Trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to%20cook https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to... Fun game: try putting something (or someone) popular on the right side of that graph and see if you can find a higher trendline
    • dangerlibrary 4y ago
      https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to%20cook,tiktok https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to... It was fun, actually
      • mizzao 4y ago
        Was that the first search term you tried? ;-)
        • dangerlibrary 4y ago
          second or third? Don't really remember
      • dathanb82 4y ago
        No surprise here: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to%20cook,jobs https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to...
• tdhz77 4y ago
  Took me way to long to unlock a recipe. But, the questions were good. Where is my skip to recipe button?
  • mizzao 4y ago
    There are lots of ways to skip directly to a recipe all over the Internet. Tell me more, what are you trying to find? Our recipes are actually pretty simple and not particularly special in any way. It's about the journey, not the destination ;-)
    • tdhz77 4y ago
      Ok, as a first time user that’s what I didn’t understand. My impatience grew, and you were saved by the fact I didn’t want to lose my progress so I powered through. Annoyed, but somewhat satisfactory end experience. I’ll have to try the recipe to see the full benefits.
      • mizzao 4y ago
        Thanks for the feedback, I'll think about how to address that. Did you realize that you could save your progress along the way and you didn't necessarily have to unlock the recipe?
        • tdhz77 4y ago
          Nope
• radiojasper 4y ago
  Your website has a massive horizontal scrollbar for me on Firefox latest on Windows 10. If you change the css of .slider.homepage to: .slider.homepage { bottom: 115px; overflow-x: hidden; } It will be fixed.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Thank you so much! In true HN fashion, you've not only identified an issue but provided a solution to it. We really appreciate it!
    • radiojasper 4y ago
      Awesome, I see you've implemented the fix and now it works fine. Good luck!
• lock-the-spock 4y ago
  It seems to be iOS only. Any android/webapp plans? Why limit it to iOS?
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Android is right here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tapforce.parsnip https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tapforce.p... Can you share a bit more about what made you think that? It's probably a bug or issue that we need to fix.
• sakerbos 4y ago
  I love this! Already completed the "Scrambled Eggs" series. I really enjoy cooking and this is a fun way to enhance my skills, thank you!
  • sakerbos 4y ago
    One thing that I'd like to suggest is to make the questions a bit less ambigious / more straight forward. E.g. One of the questions is "Which part of an upright blender is the most dangerous?". My initial reaction was the blades but apparently the answer was steam. In this case, I'd suggest rephrasing the question to "Which part of an upright blender is the most dangerous with hot liquid in is most dangerous".
    • mizzao 4y ago
      Thanks, I've re-posted this in our feedback channel on Slack.
      • sakerbos 4y ago
        Great thanks! Just to correct my copy and paste typo, "Which part of an upright blender with hot liquid in is most dangerous?" :)
  • sakerbos 4y ago
    After completing "Scrambled Eggs", I unlocked the recipe but after competing "Avocado Toast" the recipe was not unlocked and I'm not sure what to do to unlock it. What am I missing?
    • mizzao 4y ago
      Did you do all the levels in Avocado Toast? If so, that's a bug :(
• mattknightlewis 4y ago
  What I really need is a browser extension that recognizes I'm on a recipe website and automatically scrolls past the recipe writer's whole autobiography to the section with the ingredients and instructions.
  • cossatot 4y ago
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter...
    • timgarner0 4y ago
      Can't believe I didn't know this exists, just installed the Chrome version, thanks! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlcdjbkdaegmljnnncfnhiioiadakae?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...
      • jmckib 4y ago
        I tried it and it didn't even work on seriouseats, a very well known recipe site with (IMO) way too much text before the recipes.
  • simsla 4y ago
    I remember there being a very good extension that did exactly this. It got review bombed by food bloggers, and they ended up taking it offline.
  • bovermyer 4y ago
    This doesn't help your wider problem, but here's the recipe section of my website. I believe it has more of a content style that you're looking for. https://www.benovermyer.com/recipe/ https://www.benovermyer.com/recipe/
  • mizzao 4y ago
    There are dozens of variants of this app, here's one built by a friend of mine: http://getrecipecart.com/ http://getrecipecart.com/ Like colpabar said, I think this is somewhat of a problem for experienced cooks but it's not the main issue faced by beginners, nor a big pain point. I believe this is true because I saw at least 20 startups build some version this in 2020-2021 and they mostly perished in the idea maze.
• pj_mukh 4y ago
  This is awesome. Would love to buy food-type packs from an app like this! Like, “Teach me the basics of Salads”, or “Advanced stir fry recipes”.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing about willingness to pay — the bete noire of consumer apps :) One of our eventual goals is to transition to a creator-driven system where anyone can teach others about how to cook, and monetize that too. There is so much food knowledge hiding all over the world waiting to be shared.
    • pj_mukh 4y ago
      Yea that could work. I was thinking like, “This is how Kenji Lopez breaks down his salad recipes so he can get creative with what’s in his pantry”
      • mizzao 4y ago
        That reminds me of this article, and a few others Kenji has written: https://www.seriouseats.com/behind-the-scenes-in-kenjis-home-kitchen-aka-home-of-food-lab-slideshow https://www.seriouseats.com/behind-the-scenes-in-kenjis-home...
• lampe3 4y ago
  How will this make money?
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Ooh, that's a great question. We're building in the open and writing about it at https://parsnip.substack.com/ https://parsnip.substack.com/ so if you subscribe, you'll see the answer in a future issue! Otherwise, if you're a seed investor I can pitch you? :-D
• im3w1l 4y ago
  I found duolingo extremely frustrating when I tried to practice a language I already had some knowledge in. It forced me to do a bunch of stuff I didn't care about. As most people will have some knowledge of cooking I think applying this concept to cooking is a bad idea.
  • Bedon292 4y ago
    What did it force you to do that you didn't care about? I don't have any other language skills but it offered me ways to test out to higher levels and such. I figured that would get people with knowledge to a better spot.
    • im3w1l 4y ago
      It was a few years ago now so I don't can't recall the details. But the way I remember it, the testing out system was better than nothing but not good enough.
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    Yeah, it doesn't seem good for that at all. It bogs you down in things that are very easy (or even encourages you by gamifying flawless performances.) Even if you test out of units, the farther you move along, the more you realize that Duolingo sets up a very specialized arbitrary mapping of translations from English to the target language as you learn. If you've skipped ahead, you'll be missing questions because you translated "waste" as "malgastar" instead of "desperdiciar." Couldn't be more frustrating.
• KennyBlanken 4y ago
  What's with the numerous throwaway astro-turf-y comments from low-activity accounts?
  • mizzao 4y ago
    I honestly don't know. It's just me from the team that uses HN. Truthfully, one of them is an angel investor who saw us of his own accord and decided to say hi. But maybe the others just really like the app?
• LegitShady 4y ago
  I don't get it. there are literally millions of people offering free cooking videos on youtube, and getting better at cooking isn't difficult at all - you just follow instructions (often in video) and try over and over again until you find something you like. Is this sort of like a meal service without the delivery of ingredients?
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Our idea is that as a beginner/novice, trying to find the right free cooking video, and getting better through repeated trial and error, is inferior to knowing that you have trustworthy information, a path to improvement, and the ability to track your progress over time. Re: meal service without delivery of ingredients...yes! That's basically what experienced home cooks already do. But there's a few steps before we get there. Here's the vision: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/vision-part-one https://parsnip.substack.com/p/vision-part-one
    • LegitShady 4y ago
      I'll admit its been many years since I was a novice at cooking but it seems like its going to be a big challenge monetizing something you can get for free from hundreds of thousands of sources with detailed video instructions. You might have a very narrow niche of 'nerdy enough for cooking app, not nerdy enough to search on youtube and doesn't want video instructions' which is a lot more limited than any beginner cook. From my experience once you find someone on youtube whose videos you like their video history is a huge library of recipes from them, so it isn't always difficult to look through youtube and find recipes - I have a double handful of channels I know and like and earning credibility isn't their challenge given their videos wide success.
• Tepix 4y ago
  I haven't seen an recipes. Do you only support US measurements (cup, pint, oz, quart. etc)? That would be a pity.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    We actually think recipes are mostly unimportant, but teaching the underlying principles are what's important. Measurements are more important for pastries but less important for stovetop/oven cooking. The recipes we have right now are pretty easy for any English speaker to use. Our main content creator is from Australia, lives in Canada, and makes fun of the Imperial system all the time :)
    • junon 4y ago
      American living in Germany. The thing you're not understanding is that "use roughly an ounce or so" will mean nothing to anyone in Europe. It's not about "recipes aren't important" but speaking the language of people who use your app. Locality is just as important.
      • isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
        Same goes for cups.
      • defterGoose 4y ago
        I mean honestly though, if your problem is not being able to figure out unit conversions with a smartphone in your hand you might be putting the cart before the horse trying to learn how to cook well. Learning to "eyeball things" is actually one of the most important skills I think you can have in the kitchen (not for baking of course), but when I see that I need 200g of an ingredient for a recipe, my first thought isn't "I can't believe the person writing this is from Europe!" OTOH, it would literally take a few lines of code for the app to have conversions ready to go for you.
        • junon 4y ago
          ... but my hands are full, messy, or contaminated when I'm cooking, and your condescending arguing point kind of flies out the window at that point.
• staindk 4y ago
  This looks great! I will definitely be trying it out. I haven't seen this asked or answered anywhere and am curious - how do you guys plan to make this profitable? Charging for more "advanced" features? Ads? I already have the Duolingo owl chasing after me for money (and more time).
  • mizzao 4y ago
    In my opinion the ad-based business model is mostly dead. We'll have to find a new one. We're building in the open at https://parsnip.substack.com/ https://parsnip.substack.com/ and you can subscribe if you'd like to follow along with how we figure out the business model!
    • staindk 4y ago
      Thanks, and best of luck!
• thebigspacefuck 4y ago
  I like the idea but it would be good if the recipes were tied to skills. It also doesn’t matter if you select a different level, you can still only pick the same things. It would also be good to select vegan or keto or gluten free to customize choices. The dishes seem very limited after starting, there’s nothing I don’t already know how to make. On the positive side I like that there’s no need to create an account to get started since I’ll probably delete this from my phone now that I’ve checked it out.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Right now we're mostly focused on beginners and don't have more advanced content / more international cuisines yet. But we have some baking and Ukrainian dishes landing soon! Is that what you mean by recipes tied to skills, or something else?
• productceo 4y ago
  What is the technology stack for your app?
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Native iOS, native Android, and Firebase. At this stage of a product, iteration speed matters more than anything else.
• acchow 4y ago
  WOW this is basically what I've been wanting to build! Bravo!
• asiachick 4y ago
  Why is it an app only? When I cook and follow a recipe I use my laptop as the screen is bigger and I can more easily press the keys with dirty fingers than I can a touch screen.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    The core idea is that we don't really care about recipes, but about the underlying building blocks of knowledge to execute them. It's an app because we realized that the best way to approach this problem is to actually separate cooking from learning to cook — instead of trying to do them at the same time, which is painful. This product was a pivot from a previous thesis, which I explain here: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope
• ParksNet 4y ago
  A filter for Pressure Cookers, adjustable by size, would be great. Since buying a non-stick electric pressure cooker, I've gone from 95% takeout 5% cooking to the reverse. So incredibly easy to throw ingredients in and come back to multiple perfectly cooked meals.
• HidyBush 4y ago
  Very US centric so I won't use it for now, but it's a good start!
  • mizzao 4y ago
    What country are you in and how do you feel it's US centric?
• fatcat500 4y ago
  Love the idea, will definitely try it out. One bit of feedback I want to give is: when I'm answering questions on the iPhone app, there's a dialog that shoots up from the bottom... this is too much motion and I don't like it. Especially since there are multiple questions back-to-back, it feels a bit nauseating to see that dialog shoot up over and over. I think a quick fade in (or no transition at all) may be better suited for that part of the app.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Thanks, we'll take a look. Do you remember what that dialog was specifically? I think the one you're referring to is only supposed to appear once, but if it's appearing multiple times we'll fix it.
• asiachick 4y ago
  I found this very "white people in middle america" centric (sorry but I'm banging my brain to find a better way to describe it). My options as a beginner are 'greek salad', 'spaghetti & meatballs', 'cheeseburger', 'deli sandwich', 'avocado toast'. Even on advanced it only added 'scrambled eggs', and 'tomato bisque' To put it another way I found it very non-inclusive. Not that I expect one app to teach me all the world's cuisine but it would be nice to at least acknowledge up front the bias of the app in its description? There's nothing wrong with teaching these things but they are not the "beginning" things for a great many cultures including cultures in the USA itself. I doubt the kids of most parents of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Mexican, descent would start with these items. Sorry if I'm not making any sense. I'm not trying to be negative. I'm just pointing out that the selection offered clearly shows a bias.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    I'm actually ethnically Chinese but I learned to cook Western cuisine before Chinese food (which you can see plenty of on our Discord: https://discord.gg/P4qpxsJ6A8 https://discord.gg/P4qpxsJ6A8) We'll be adding more ethnic foods in soon, which is very exciting to me.
• biophysboy 4y ago
  An idea for the long-term future: I've often felt like cooking would be a perfect use case for very simple augmented reality. Often times my hands are messy while cooking, making it hard to deal with a book or smartphone. Also, recipes are often very time-sensitive. If I could see the ingredients/steps quickly, that'd be terrific. Better yet, it'd be nice to see a demo of what I am making, for things that are difficult to describe in words (e.g. whipping egg whites - what does a "stiff peak" mean?). Obviously the hardware would be an issue, given that you're often standing over heat, steam, oil, etc. But its still a dream I have.
  • pc86 4y ago
    This might be the one good use case for something like Google Glass. AR to tell you what ingredient to grab (even highlighting/circling/whatever the item if it's already out), timers, notifications ("those egg whites look done!"), etc.
    • atlasunshrugged 4y ago
      The other good one is identifying people for me at a party who I'm pretty sure I've met before but just can't place!
      • Fnoord 4y ago
        Secret service agents are exempted from that API.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    That's part of our plan! The idea is to build a data platform that can drive a 10x better AR/VR experience that teaches you interactively. Doing it from an app like this is just the first step. New products need a wedge. I've heard from the grapevine that this application is one of the huge efforts in Facebook's metaverse effort. Let's see if we can do it better...
• dilliwal 4y ago
  Just used it and completed a course and I am so much loving this, thanks for your work, will let you know if there are any constructive feedback, so far gooooooood
• _marlowe_ 4y ago
  Fantastic stuff!
• danpalmer 4y ago
  I've done a few quizzes on the app now, and I don't get it. The questions feel very contrived, like someone had a quota to fill so just put whatever looked plausible together. They are also _very_ culturally specific. Questions about eggs barely made sense to me being from the UK, with incorrect pack sizes, animal welfare terms, and completely missed our great standards body that makes it easy to know which eggs have met a reasonable quality bar. It's not that the info is globally applicable, it's that it's an awkward combination of wrong and useless depending on where you live. Starting another quiz about kitchen equipment it seems this is a pattern throughout. Cooking is deeply embedded into culture, tradition, region, climate, regulatory environment, retail infrastructure, and more. I don't think these quizzes will be able to overcome this without being fully localised per country. The recipes? Maybe they're better. I don't know, I'm still 7 levels away from being able to know how to make scrambled eggs. Edit: when I opened the app the first time it asked me how experienced I am and I answered the 3rd out of 4 options, I know my way around a kitchen. The app just asked me to match pictures of eggs to how they have been cooked: fried, scrambled, etc. I'm not sure I can survive this level of patronisation, it's honestly a bit insulting. Edit: "what sort of pan should you cook eggs in"... "no not a wok, people don't have those at home". Ouch. At best that's incredibly sheltered for a food writer, and at worst it's practically racist.
  • teacpde 4y ago
    Pretty much same experience, I also chose the 3rd level in the beginning, and some of the questions I got are just tedious. I did learn something new, but I feel like overall the questions are not tailored to the level.
    • mizzao 4y ago
      They're definitely not tailored to the level. We only have beginner and intermediate content on the app right now. I mean, this is supposed to be a Show HN right? Don't shoot! :)
  • danpalmer 4y ago
    To perhaps be a bit more constructive, and to suggest a way forward... I'd like to see a cooking teaching app that allows users to work through a recipe in varying levels of detail. For example, consider a Lasagna. A lower level recipe may use ricotta for a quick and easy version, a higher level might explain step by step how to make a bechamel, and the "hardest" level may just say "make a bechamel". As a user, being able to select a difficulty level and see the differences not only allows me to learn new techniques at a pace that suits me while experimenting, it also teaches me more about the dishes and how recipes can be changed while keeping the spirit of a dish, or the flavour profile. The best cooking videos on YouTube, people like J Kenji Lopez-Alt and Chef John from Food Wishes dot com, tell viewers what's truly necessary, and what's not. What "makes the dish" and what they're replacing in the recipe themselves because they ran out of the proper ingredient. I've learnt so much from this sort of thing, and am far more confident both creating my own recipes and modifying existing ones, having been a to-the-letter recipe follower for many years.
• y42 4y ago
  Aside from the great idea: I found the naming a little confusing, as there is a online dating platform called Parship and this sounds like a mock.
• gigglesupstairs 4y ago
  The app looks yummy!
• logophobia 4y ago
  Tried a quiz. I'd be nice if there was more explanation about the things I missed. I get a question about naming ingredients. I get some wrong. Afterwards it might be nice to get an explanation about the missed items so I don't have to google myself. Even an in-app link to wikipedia would be enough. I also suspect that most things I got wrong were because of language differences, so translations might be nice as well.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Thanks for your suggestion! We definitely have an "in-app wiki" of sorts in our future plans.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• econner 4y ago
  There is a weird bug on your "What do you want to learn about first?" question. I am able to select both "Cheeseburger" and "Greek Salad" but not "Greek Salad" and "Spaghetti & Meatballs". If I tap "Greek Salad" after first tapping "Spaghetti & Meatballs" then it deselects the "Spaghetti & Meatballs" and selects "Greek Salad" (even with only 1 item selected). Anyway, cool concept.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Are you on iOS or Android? You are supposed to be able to only select one dish at a time. In RPG gaming terms, that is your "quest" and the levels are basically what you need to complete the quest. If you can select multiple dishes then there's a bug we need to fix, please let us know!
    • econner 4y ago
      On iOS
• markstos 4y ago
  For vegetarians or vegans browsing the site, it's not clear if they should even bother to install the app, because there's no clarification of whether the app has a single idea of what "good food" is. One of the examples on the front page is unlocking a cheeseburger recipe.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Are you saying that there should be a single idea of what "good food" is? I personally don't think any particular dish is good or bad, but how well it's cooked.
  • Spivak 4y ago
    If your definition of "good food" excludes literally the most popular dish in America then you might want to consider that your tastes are a bit niche. I don't understand why so many people consider anything part of US culinary tradition to be bad while seemingly giving a pass to everyone else like it isn't a different arrangement of meat, dairy, carbs, salt, and acid.
• taco_emoji 4y ago
  It asked me a true/false question about whether I should buy meat at the deli counter or not. That is completely a matter of opinion, so I uninstalled
• ajb 4y ago
  Please, please, please, avoid status cuisines. It's going to be hard to do, because they make good PR. But you will be helping your users a lot more of you hold them off with a ten foot pole. What do I mean by a status cuisine? They are meals that are intended to show that the cook is a worthy person, rather than that the meal is practical, healthy, and good to eat. Here are some examples: The endurance cuisine: designed to show that the cook has time to spare, the endurance cuisine requires that no ingredient is pre-processed in any way. Grind your own grain, bake your own breadcrumbs, chop your own veg. Using grapes? You should have peeled them! The hair-shirt cuisine: you have to endure some discomfort if it's good for you, right? This cuisine specialises in sour tastes and unpleasant mouthfeel - often using grains that our stone-age ancestors sensibly gave up for nicer ones. The gold plated cuisine: this one's obvious. Pricier ingredients must be better - or at least show how much the cook can spend The obscurantist/connoisseur's cuisine: it can't be good if it's easy to find. The cook can only be good if they know exactly how many 'extras' you need in your virgin olive oil, and what classification of wine you should put in your coq'au'vin. (Okay this is a bit tongue in cheek - but only a bit. I really do think a lot of recipes are unnecessarily onerous in some way)
  • itsoktocry 4y ago
    >I really do think a lot of recipes are unnecessarily onerous in some way Cooking is different things for different people. I feel like tech people see it as nothing but sustenance (yay Soylent!), so the idea is for it to be quick, cheap and easy. For other people it's a hobby and they actually enjoy the process. Grinding your own grain or peeling grapes can increase the food quality, and it takes nothing but time, so why not? Same goes for buying better ingredients. We probably all waste a lot of money on things that aren't necessary, but we enjoy.
    • ajb 4y ago
      Sure - as I said, partly tongue in cheek. The problem is really that as a cooking-ignorant person, it's work to figure out if a recipe is going to be time consuming, expensive, or require obscure, or (to the naive palate) unpleasant ingredients. I've no problem with other people doing whatever floats their boat, but if the app is supposed to be an easy introduction to cooking it should at least place that stuff behind a flag of some kind.
• pessimizer 4y ago
  I've had very similar ideas, and although I can't quite get the vision of how you're organizing the material since your last pivot, I want to throw in a few ideas (that you may be already doing.) 1) Cooking skills are physical acts of dexterity and timing that can be explained and modeled by text and videos, but not mastered. This is a good place for the use of spaced repetition; every time someone makes a recipe that uses that technique, ask them how they did (and give them the criteria e.g "was the sauce shiny?") Make practicing fading or weak skills, or taking advantage of mastered skills, a criteria for suggesting recipes to the user. i.e. "do you want an Easy, Challenging, or Difficult recipe?" and select based on their current skill level at the techniques involved (and the ingredients at hand.) Choosing Easy would be biased towards recipes utilizing techniques and ingredients that they have mastered, Challenging would be for techniques that they are learning, and Difficult would be for introducing new techniques. 2. Organize learning more around techniques than ingredients. Some techniques only apply to a single ingredient, but most apply to many ingredients. If techniques are verbs, ingredients are conjugations - many irregular, but most regular. Some ingredients require a higher level of a particular technique than others. Figure out what ingredients they like by asking what meals they like, and use those to help suggest future techniques to learn. 3. Many people want to become vegetarian, or vegan, or paleo/Mediterranean/whatever, but don't like the food yet. If a program like this suggests logical progressions to train the palate towards a user's goal, it could help them switch to these diets (clinically picky eaters, or people who have discovered they are pre-diabetic, diabetic, celiac, or that they have fatty liver disease, have a serious problem with this.) This could be amenable to a machine learning recommendation approach if you ask what meals people enjoyed, you know the techniques they're good at, and you know their diet goals. You could say "buy avocados on your next shopping trip and you can try X, Y, or Z, which people who like what you like also seem to like."
  • whimsicalism 4y ago
    > 1) Cooking skills are physical acts of dexterity and timing that can be explained and modeled by text and videos, but not mastered. Not sure I agree - I actually get a lot of value out of videos for cooking techniques and they can often nip bad habits in the bud. For instance, I recently discovered a new method for matchsticking carrots from a video that i really like.
• jenny91 4y ago
  The idea sounded kinda cool at first but the first screenshots have "deli sandwich" and "you've unlocked the cheeseburger recipe"... really?
• aszantu 4y ago
  there a web version? My phone is too old.
• namecheapTA 4y ago
  Was this developed in house or was a good portion of it outsourced?
  • mizzao 4y ago
    It was built by an awesome team (mostly Ukrainian) called Tapforce: https://www.tapforce.com/ https://www.tapforce.com/ Here's a story about them that will knock your socks off: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/engineering-plot-twist https://parsnip.substack.com/p/engineering-plot-twist And, here's another one: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mizzao_my-hands-are-trembling-and-i-am-tearing-up-activity-6902720407242432512-4bXE https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mizzao_my-hands-are-trembling... If you need work like this, hire them. They will blow your mind.
• theonething 4y ago
  Does it help with organizing meal planning and generate shopping lists? Those would be killer features. Bonus is automatic online ordering of ingredients. Something that generates weekly meal plans taking into consideration food preferences, nutrition, time, availability of ingredients, etc and then tells me what to buy or orders it for me.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    That's the plan! I've actually written a memo about that: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/vision-part-one https://parsnip.substack.com/p/vision-part-one It'll take us a few years to get there, though.
• a-dub 4y ago
  this looks cool but the data collected label in google play claims that it collects emails (under the messages heading). i believe it's probably meant to indicate that email addresses are collected, but the way it's presented it sounds like it collects actual email content. (these new labels are self-reported, right?)
  • mizzao 4y ago
    We definitely don't collect any e-mail content, nor do we request access to your e-mail!
    • a-dub 4y ago
      you should definitely fix this! find "Messages -> Emails" here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.tapforce.parsnip https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.tapforc... and as per the google play documentation: --snip-- Messages Emails Your emails, including the email subject line, sender, recipients, and the content of the email. --snip-- https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/11416267 https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/11416267
• colordrops 4y ago
  I really think an open source clobe of Duolingo would be really popular. People could upload and share courses similar to Anki.
  • hk__2 4y ago
    > People could upload and share courses similar to Anki. If it’s not curated it can be a mess. Italki has a feature that lets people make their own language quiz and it’s like this: some quiz are great, a lot of them are average or repetitive, and some are bad/useless or even contain mistakes. Also, you don’t really need open-source to have a crowdsourced service (see: YouTube, HN, etc).
    • colordrops 4y ago
      Doesn't have to be open source, but I certainly wouldn't contribute, and many others wouldn't as well. Curation and/or rating is a layer that would be added on top, and I agree it would be necessary to make it useful.
• thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  > Recipes are surprisingly deceptive. They seem like instructions you can follow, but a more apt analogy is that the recipe is an iceberg and beginner cooks are steaming along on the Titanic. Devil's advocate (and very serious home cook): Food Youtube solves all of these problems in various and (IMO) much more entertaining and informative ways. There's a plethora of content ranging from highly-technical restaurant inspired recipes to "authentic" home cooking traditions passed down through generations. Tracking a progress meter isn't going to make me a better cook: having access to lots of different ideas and styles and trying the ones that speak to me will make me a better cook. Also, our tastes are largely inspired by what we ate growing up and there few universally-loved recipes. That's one of the most beautiful things about cooking: there's a million different ways to do it. You don't know how to chop an onion? There are a million videos on how to do that. Want to know the history of a certain spice? There's a channel for that.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    I appreciate the perspective, it's a common objection. Similar arguments I've heard are that in order to learn to cook, you need to do one of: - read a lot of cookbooks and understand them - go watch a ton of YouTube videos and triangulate the best way to do it - go get a job in a kitchen (essentially, apprentice) I learn the way you do and I totally get where you're coming from. But this only works for serious autodidacts. For everyone else, doing any of the above is a pain in the butt. So that's the problem we're trying to solve. The magic of the tech tree is that it addresses the issue of "you can't type what you don't know into Google."
    • IanCal 4y ago
      > go watch a ton of YouTube videos and triangulate the best way to do it I don't understand this, you can watch one video of someone just cooking a thing you think sounds tasty.
      • blakesley 4y ago
        No? I'm clearly the prime demographic for this app because your comment makes no sense to me. Most recipe videos skip the tedious (but important) bits, and many ALSO don't give notes about needed techniques. I often find that 1 recipe video results in me watching at least 5 other videos to clarify things that were left out, usually in pairs so I can compare/contrast the info provided. Because, again, I'm new to this whole thing and I can't tell which advice is good/relevant/etc Just to clarify, I'm not defending their app, I'm defending the problem statement.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• chefandy 4y ago
  I'm a culinary school graduate and former professional chef. I appreciate this app touching on techniques and ingredients rather than just throwing recipes at you. Trying to learn how to cook by following recipes is like trying to learn a language by reading pamphlets. The 'why' behind recipes is learnable, the knowledge is useful before you master it, and the shift in results is dramatic. Resources: Maybe this app? Haven't really dug into it but it looked hopeful from the description. An approachable, well-written introductory read on the topic is Michael Ruhlman's Ratio. Start there. Most tech types start with more technical books like Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. Don't. Technical knowledge helps, but isn't required. Cooking is an art! Approaching it like organic chemistry yields enjoyable nerding but mediocre food. A biology class would be useful for an artist, but if you're learning to draw, take a life drawing class. Taking biology first won't help. Once you are comfortable with Ratio, grab the Flavor Bible for reference. It's a huge paper database of flavor affinities. After getting comfortable with the art of cooking, read McGee. It's well-written enough to read straight through but dense enough to use as a reference. Many decry his less-than-perfect understanding -- his PhD is in Poetry, after all. I've never seen a critic as good at cooking as criticizing people. If they were as interested in cooking as criticizing people, they'd have paid more attention to his book. Advice on learning to cook really damn good food: 1) Season. Get comfortable with seasoning. Maybe 70% of professional cooking polish stems from proper seasoning. Your tongue only senses 5 things: saltiness, sweetness , sourness , bitterness, and savoriness (glutamates.) Everything else is sensed by your olfactory bulb. Activating your tongue with those senses makes your brain pay much closer attention to what you smell. If your food tastes flat or boring, there's a 90% chance it's under-seasoned. This requires considering ALL of those senses, not just salt. Your folk explanations of seasoning or "common knowledge" approaches to seasoning are probably wrong. 2) Smell everything. Taste everything. Eat a spoonful of Dijon mustard. Bite a bit off of a sage leaf and compare that with dried sage. Contemplate Worcestershire sauce. Let it sit in your mouth and breath through your nose so you really hit your olfactory bulb. Smell that cooking oil that's been sitting around for a few months and compare it to a brand new bottle. Ponder the differences. This practice avoids putting bad ingredients in your food and expands your palate. 3) Move away from recipes. Start thinking about cooking in terms of ingredient ratios and techniques rather than recipes. 4) Learn about heat. Get comfortable with the appropriate application of heat. Learn about dry heat and moist heat techniques. Figure out how things like ingredient temperature and salt content can change that. Pay attention to browning and searing. Learn why you shouldn't crowd a pan. 5) Stop timing things. Start using your 5 senses and tools like a thermometer to tell when something is done. If Rice-a-roni can cook by time, why can't you? The ingredient size, density and moisture content is pretty uniform. Boiling water is uniform enough to yield predictable results. None of that is true when you're, say, roasting broccoli or cooking a steak. 6) Watch relationships. Pay attention to what happens to ingredients when treated in specific ways, and how they interact. E.g. caramelizing onions vs sauteing vs raw... and how they hit differently in salad or onion dip or meat loaf. These differences exist in most ingredients we use. 7) Get experience. Push yourself to experience new things and challenge your reflexive food rejections. 8) Nobody owes it to you to like your dish. Accept that food is emotionally complicated for people. Tastes vary widely and are influenced by everything from cultural exposure to genetics. No matter how much effort you put into a dish, some people just won't like it, and that's fine. 9) Be humble. Deep understanding of food is not a superpower. Little ol' gram gram made the same 15 dishes her whole life, but probably knows more about the subtleties of those dishes and their ingredients than I know about everything else. Complexity is not the pinnacle of good taste or sophistication. Simplicity executed perfectly is often more sophisticated and more difficult than complexity. Focus and good taste are the keys. Here's a related anecdote. I worked in nightclubs in my early twenties. We got free, ice-cold bottom-of-the-barrel light beer after our hot, stressful, exhausting shifts. I still enjoy reliving that on a hot summer day. I also regularly drank with some household names in craft beer, and a few Sommeliers. Their focused education and experience blew mine away, but my palate was easily on par. So when I order a lawnmower beer in some mediocre bar the 23 year bartender says "here's your glass of horse piss. You know there are some craft options that are just as..." well... he should just be very thankful I'm no longer a chef.
• Mikeb85 4y ago
  I wish you good luck but I don't get it either. The thing that makes Duolingo great is that right away you learn words in a new language. It hooks you. Within 1 lesson you know several words or a phrase with a few variations. This is more just random trivia about food that no one cares about. I started with the cheeseburger recipe (apparently an advanced lesson or something). Right away it's asking me a bunch of questions about ground meat but teaching me nothing. Where's the hook? I want to see a recipe and learn to make it, not feel like I'm taking a test about a bunch of stuff I was never taught with no obvious path to simply making the thing I want to make. In the 5 minutes I spent on it I feel like I was just getting grilled (metaphorically). The first 5 minutes of Duolingo I actually learned something. Anyhow, suggestion would be to start right away with the thing people actually want... How to cook the food and make the recipe.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    The goal we're building toward is that you can pick any recipe on the Internet and learn it in this way. But first we have to start with a small group (beginners) and make sure it's actually fun and interesting for them. I explain how this works at https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope The unintuitive observation for beginners is that their pain doesn't seem to be cooking the food and making the recipe. It's "I don't know where to start", and building up confidence, and not being intimidated by that literal fire on your stove.
    • Mikeb85 4y ago
      Just curious if you've ever actually taught someone to cook before? Like, I can definitely see a market for something that teaches skills versus recipes. I've thought about doing it myself. But if someone wants to learn to cook an egg, it's because there's an egg in their fridge and they're hungry. So start with actually cooking that thing. Like, getting a suitable frying pan, setting the right temperature, throwing some butter in and then cracking and flipping the egg, learning to recognise when it's cooked to the desired doneness. No one cares about how to buy eggs... And if they're scared to buy eggs it's not because they don't know ABOUT eggs, it's because they don't know how to cook them. Anyhow no need to take my advice, I just don't see the 'hook' or value versus a blog that teaches cooking, the millions of books geared towards beginners, TikTokers and YouTubers that teach cooking, etc... In a past career I was a chef (worked in restaurants up to a place that was top 100 in the world) and for beginnners who never cooked the first step was always to put food in their hand and have them cut it, season it, cook it and taste it. Extra information was always on a strict need to know basis mainly because it's overwhelming. The very first time you make a burger you don't care about lean versus fatty meat, you just want to not get e-coli and have something edible. Also, just want to compare some food apps that are successful. - Cookpad works because it skips a ton of BS involved in reading recipes and simply gives you the recipe. - TikTok (IMO the best food app there is) works because you see the entire recipe start to finish in one minute or less. It grabs you, then you can usually go to a link or something to get the actual recipe. I like your goal and the methodology is sound enough, just seems like there's not a ton of experience with actually teaching cooking...
• kelseydh 4y ago
  I went through the app, and I've answered like 30 questions now on food storage/safety and it feels like I'm taking a tedious course. Weird. Is that all it is, food preparation trivia? Please don't lead with this stuff. Teach me how to make tasty things!
  • kelseydh 4y ago
    So far the best thing in the burger course was learning how to deglaze, I never knew that trick. The questions on types of cheeses or how to cut an onion were weird and felt wrong. (What about the easy root method for cutting?!)
• motbus3 4y ago
  question to OP. The company who owns Parsnip is Seed & Stone? the same who sells weed online?
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Nope, we definitely don't sell weed. Seed & Stone comes from the idea that a small, tiny seed can grow and grow into a plant with thick enough roots to be as strong as (or even split in two) a stone. So, a metaphor for starting from the fragility of a startup and transforming into a lasting organization.
    • motbus3 4y ago
      nice to know! thank you for the info. but maybe you guys want to check this naming stuff. I was much more skeptical about the service before, but I decide to ask.
• tarunkotia 4y ago
  Obligatory mention: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/ http://www.cookingforengineers.com/
• romellem 4y ago
  FYI, when I sign up with the form at the bottom, the "Thank you! Your submission has been received!" message appears under the white parsnip SVG (`.footer-snippy`) and obscures some of the text. Observed on Firefox v102. Otherwise, this looks really cool!
  • jadepeach 4y ago
    Thanks for pointing this out! We really appreciate this kind of valuable feedback. We hope you enjoying playing the levels and look forward to having any suggestions from you!
• breadchris 4y ago
  TL;DR ive been consolidating my cooking knowledge in an open source recipe site https://github.com/cookwherever/cookwherever https://github.com/cookwherever/cookwherever Hey! I am excited to see people developing in this space since this is where my head is also at. Up until two years ago I was eating canned chili and soylent before I was shown the light with The Food Lab and Salt, Fat, Acid and Heat. Ever since I have been trying to share my knowledge on cooking with others with varying levels of success. What has become clear to me is that there is no one size fits all approach to teaching cooking since it is usually a very cultural experience for most people (as many in the comments have pointed out). That said, SFAH makes the argument that most cuisines are much closer than people think when you consider the functional properties of the ingredients that you are cooking. Pizza is just pasta with yeast *Italian grandmothers slowly turn their heads towards this atrocity* All of this to say, I believe recipes are critical to jump start the creative process of cooking. When any type of possible failure on the path to completion is experienced (ex. missing ingredient, burnt cookies, etc.) there MUST be some way of recovering or at the very least understanding how that happened. I have been slowing taking notes on all the cooking knowledge I have come across and have been putting it along side the recipes that inspire me. Forcing learning on someone in the kitchen, who is already probably pretty hungry if cooking is seen as a chore, is not productive. Sharing the joy you get from the art that is cooking is IMPERATIVE for any type of educational resource. If you are interested in my progress, or want to contribute go check it out! https://github.com/cookwherever/cookwherever https://github.com/cookwherever/cookwherever
• OJFord 4y ago
  I'm not sure whether to apologise for this being off-topic/too tangential or not, but it seems too good an opportunity to pass up: Yesterday I was on the verge of Ask-HN-ing if there was anything like Duolingo for mathematics? I studied it as much as anyone (well..) in EE/CS, but don't use much professionally (less than many, I'm sure). I'm not necessarily looking to advance further than I've studied before (I'd like to, but for me Duolingo wouldn't be a good format for it) - but there's so much I've forgotten and wish I still had an intuition for or could draw on as the reason or an analogy for something. Can anyone recommend a 'Duolingo for mathematics'?
• tempe1h1 4y ago
  what I don't like about this (in general) is that it's part of the overruling ideology that will turn the internet from a place where you can look up how to make any recipe for free into a place where you have pay somebody a monthly fee to look up how much sugar per cup of flour goes in some dish (to put an example) of course, this is not exclusive to this project in particular, but it's a crummy trend that just keeps getting worse. and this project is part of this wave.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    I've thought about this and I think the choices here are: - get everything for free, but it's all disorganized and someone else is selling your data to target you with ads - you can pay $45k for 3 months of cooking school - pay ~ $9.99 a month to both learn what you need and get help planning your weekly meals In that case, is the third option all that bad? You can always go back to option 1 if you want.
• bordercases 4y ago
• no_circuit 4y ago
  Sorry, it seems like a whole lessons section is missing from the app. The only way someone can learn currently is by guessing all of the quiz sections. First question received: "The best indicator of freshness for ground beef is: a) smell, b) whether it was frozen, c) the manufacture date, d) color. The answer "a" smell was marked incorrect, "c" manufacture date was the "correct one". Uh... maybe... unless it wasn't stored properly. Other questions: Is all ground beef the same? How long can fresh ground beef can be kept in the refrigerator for? It really isn't helpful to guess my way through some quizzes to get access to a recipe.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    The wisdom from Duolingo is that 90% of users didn't care about lessons but 10% really wanted them. So out of the Pareto principle, we skipped the lessons for the MVP. Definitely plan to add them in later.
    • no_circuit 4y ago
      People may enjoy guessing during quizzes on Duolingo because they either have the capability of guessing because they know another similar language for example. But cooking is like an art and a science. A random fact like how long ground beef takes to spoil has no relation to how long you need to cook ground beef and to what temperature according to the food safety guidelines of the country in which one currently resides. I assume I'm like the other commenters that love cooking, but are trying to find a nice way of saying that guessing food trivia doesn't seem fun.
  • EdgyMann 4y ago
    That's insane. How often do you have the manufacture date of your meat? If you buy it from a supermarket in plastic packaging then sure. But I usually get my mince in a bag from the butcher, it's cheaper and fresher. Smell and colour is all I can go off.
• drc500free 4y ago
  Tried the cheeseburger recipe. Got the question: "The best indicator of freshness for ground beef is:" I chose "(B) Smell." Because, you know, that's the answer (though I'm not sure why I'm starting out with a food safety question). I got a snotty response that I wouldn't be able to smell things that are in a sealed package, and I should always go by the manufacturing date printed on the package. No. You're wrong. And you're wrong about food safety, which is really not good. You go by smell, sliminess, color. The printed date is a nice guide but NOT what anyone should be using for food safety. And on top of that, your question doesn't say that you're not allowed to open the package (which... why? in what situation would you be staring at your package of ground beef and refuse to actually open it?) (Edit: Later on it's revealed that this is a quiz about shopping. So a bit of framing/context setting is missing.) Now I've completed the food safety and "do you know what lean meat is" quiz, and I immediately go into another quiz about buying cheese. It wants me to say which cheese is hard and how to store cheese. What does this have to do with cooking a cheeseburger? I gave up. It's like you're trying to suck the life and enjoyment out of cooking. This is boring and nothing to do with what I want. It seems like a knowledge graph the way you've done it is an anti-pattern of actual cooking. You're decomposing every recipe into its ingredients and then asking arbitrary questions about each one. Those questions have nothing to do with the final dish, or how the ingredients work together, or the choices you would make in making this specific dish. It's just "oh, a burger has onion, here is a random question about the history of onions." What you need is something that shows how the ingredients interact. This is the opposite. EDIT: I don't mean to be TOO harsh here; I like your mission and the effort you've put into this so far. I don't think a framework of focusing on ingredients in a vacuum, having people get quizzes wrong, and calling them "Junior Chef" is the way to do it.
  • themodelplumber 4y ago
    There seems to be a bit of useful feedback in here, wrapped in quite a strangely emotional comment. Did you use the app for six hours straight and forget to hydrate or something? Or is there some other reason to make your message this intense, that I'm missing? Surely there's a way to get the same message across without so much hyperbole. It's just beef!
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  I love how the criticisms about this app are the same criticisms against Duolingo, which also has arbitrary choices that it tries to classically condition you with, while providing you no rhyme, reason, or context as to why a rule would be the way it is, something an actual class would do and to the benefit of people actually trying to learn something.
• muzani 4y ago
  I love this app! It's a little culturally/regionally specific (things like herbs and the types of tomatoes). But that's fine, hopefully this inspires people to do a similar app with thai curry, coconut milk, etc. One of the reasons I cook is because it's possible to taste food you'd never taste before. I can't get a good halal spaghetti bolognese. Sure, there are restaurants, but they tend to be way overpriced for something that's an everyday recipe. I think it would be interesting to teach people about more exotic ingredients as well. Also I've been cooking for decades, and even did a recipe startup. And yet I've learned a lot from the beginner tier alone. Big fan of this.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Thanks! We may get some Thai cuisine in Parsnip sooner than you think ;-)
• saasxyz 4y ago
  Looks awesome. Is this bootstrapped or raised?
• petesergeant 4y ago
  Hey, there's a lot of highly-rated negative feedback here. For what it's worth, I _love_ the idea, it's exactly what I want, I'd pay a bunch for it. I really hope y'all keep at it and are able to take constructive pointers out of some of the harsher feedback, because if you _do_ nail this, it'll be incredible.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    Thank you, we really appreciate that. FWIW, any disruptive consumer product has to be met with dichotomous love/hate reactions when it first comes out — it's never indifference / no one cares. So I'm loving what I see here: if this thread is any indication, we're definitely on to something.
• bearmode 4y ago
  Initial comments: - On a question that was supposed to load gifs as the answers, only one gif loaded. And it wasn't the correct one, so I had to pick blind. - You should try some localisation, e.g. 'grilling' is 'barbecuing' in the UK. What you'd call a broiler, we'd call a grill. Could cause some confusion. There's a lot of localisation issues from what I've seen, it's very USA-centric. - I answered a question about cheese storage, it told me I got it wrong and that modern refrigerators were the way to go. So I clicked the only answer that mentioned a fridge, and I got told it was wrong again. - I don't understand how I'm supposed to be learning anything? It just feels like I'm doing a Buzzfeed quiz - 'Burger sauce' is just ketchup and mayo, with any other mix-ins you want. There's a lot of variety in burger sauces. The app describes it as "creamy, tangy, onion-y and with little chunks of pickle". The next question says that the 'five main components of burger suace' are mustard, ketchup, pickle relish, onion powder, mayo. Only 2/5 are essential. You can argue for mustard. - Q: 'Why make burger sauce' - A: 'It's convenient' - what? You're making a new sauce because you want the taste of all the sauces combined, you presumably wouldn't just be putting all of the ingredients on your burger individually as an alternative? I think it'd be worth looking at actual culinary school curricula rather than making a short buzzfeed-style quiz for each individual ingredient in a dish, there's potential here but I don't think it's going to be a great learning tool in its current form
• SergeAx 4y ago
  One question: why not web app? I don't see anything that needs to be enclosed into proprietary Apple/Google ecosystem.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    We actually tried building a PWA for a previous iteration of Parsnip and it was a terrible experience. You can still try it here: https://beta.parsnip.ai/ https://beta.parsnip.ai/ I don't think PWAs are ready for mass adoption yet... and they may never be, as they are trying to shoehorn an old technology into a new mode of interaction. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32276188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32276188.
    • SergeAx 4y ago
      Thank you for the link! I briefly skimmed the content and my experience was quite normal for website. Maybe load time was suboptimal couple of times, but it should be improved by CDN. It is much easier to just click the link and get to the the content momentarily, without the need to download and install app (thinking in process: is it too big? Why it should be that big?) and occasional "login with X" stage. It could even be a classic website, without PWA, using server-side rendering (good for search engines too, giving you free organic traffic).
• nerdyadventurer 4y ago
  Not strictly related to the post, does anyone know a good resource to learn cooking?
  • apsurd 4y ago
    salt fat acid heat book
• dannyhodge 4y ago
  Not to undermine everybody else's feedback, because I 100% agree with what they said, but I started with the tomato bisque lessons, and the contents were much better. I found it genuinely interesting, and as a beginner home cook, I was learning things, such as stuff about acidity, different types of tomatoes etc. However, I still found it dragged out a bit, with too many random unhelpful questions (e.g. which of these is a tomato?). The app is very well designed in terms of the UX, and the only time I struggled was in getting back to the home page after a lesson. Feels like a third option at the bottom, or replacing the X icon with a home icon would be more intuitive. My last suggestion is a big one, as it changes the app a bit, but why not start with the recipe? Others have mentioned the lack of a hook, and it gives something for the questions to refer to. Good luck, I sincerely hope you're successful, there's an odd shortage of cooking apps.
• bearmode 4y ago
  Idea: start with the recipe, have the lessons based around explaining why the recipe contains certain ingredients, why they work together, how to prepare them (and why we're preparing them in that way). Would be much more informative than just seemingly random, often patronising trivia And it would also fill a niche that no recipe site seems to fill right now. It's almost impossible to find a recipe that actually explains why you're doing everything, why this ingredient works, etc. Knowing why an ingredient works opens the doors to substitution and recipe modification by the 'student', which is a great pathway to learning. And it would be a hell of a lot more engaging.
  • mizzao 4y ago
    We actually did this in a previous version of the product, you can still try it: https://beta.parsnip.ai/ https://beta.parsnip.ai/ Turns out it was a bad idea and we had to pivot, here's why: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope Hence the product that you see now.
• furyg3 4y ago
  'Vegetarian' or 'Vegan' mode :)