9 ms·

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 plau

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.
- EddySchauHai 4y ago
  > 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". Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying. Because of you. Learn to make 'mother sauces' straight away guys! They're simple and flavorful.
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    Yes! But that's something you can teach! Ricotta isn't traditional at all, but that's a trade-off you can choose to make. I think telling people that, presenting the options and trade-offs, and teaching each level, makes it all so much more accessible while still helping people appreciate the traditional side! A good example is carbonara. So many people learn to make it with cream etc because they think it'll be easier, or the person they are learning from believes it's easier to make, but when you look at the differences it's actually barely easier to do than the traditional, or even harder in some cases, so why not just learn the traditional.
blindseer 4y ago
I tried the app too and experienced exactly the same thing. I’m surprised the app is getting as much positive reception on here as it is. Sure it is cute and “gamey”, but I don’t particularly think it’s even useful. I’d rather have the knowledge graph displayed to me in a way I can easily find information or navigate it. Why would I EVER want to use this to learn something new when I could just read the information and ingest it. To be fair I feel the same way about duolingo but the knowledge graph is so deep and dense there that i wouldn’t be able to consume information in a couple of sittings. With recipes, I am pretty sure I could “learn” everything I wanted to learn about eggs or tomatoes or bread in just one evening. There’s probably real life experience that would add to that knowledge but that’s not something I would get from this app anyway.
- mizzao 4y ago
  As the knowledge graph gets bigger, we're definitely going to have to find better ways to present it. The challenge is that most people don't want to see the whole knowledge graph, they want an extremely simple experience. Do you think your perspective represents something that would appeal to the mass market? Here's the technical approach we're taking with the goal of taking a very hairy knowledge graph and turning it into a remarkably simple, even magical, user experience: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope
  - blindseer 4y ago
    I think the knowledge graph in this case is mostly derived from first principles, e.g. understand roasting, searing, broiling etc and you can apply that to any vegetable or meat. Ideally one would be able to learn language with the same kind of etymological study, however I put it to you that is FAR more complex and boring and doesn't have more fact / science based rules than cooking does. Also, cooking is a very personal / familial / cultural experience. Recipes can be passed down a single family, whereas language is much more broad. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the knowledge graph for cooking is smaller and more personal, and is better served as a personalized note taking system as opposed to a gamified interface to a public database. For example, if I would prefer recipes with eggs and potatoes as opposed to recipes with spinach and mushrooms, I should be able to cater my knowledge graph to learning more about recipes that use those ingredients (ideally with some balance in nutrients).
mizzao 4y ago
It sounds like you're a pretty experienced chef and we're targeting beginners (that experience question was more to get a sense of who our users are). If you consider that we're trying to start with levels 1, 2, and 3 of cooking before moving on to the far more advanced topics, do you still think it's useless? Or does your perspective change? Thanks for the note about the questions that are potentially culturally insulting. I actually have a wok at home so I'm gonna look into that one personally!
- tdeck 4y ago
  I'm curious if you've actually interviewed users who can't identify a friend vs scrambled egg and how much of this demographic exists. That example seems like something you'd learn from simply ordering breakfast a couple of times.
  - chki 4y ago
    Or by learning the meaning of the word "scrambled".
  - tdeck 4y ago
    Apparently my phone chose "friend" rather than "fried" but hopefully that was pretty clear.
EligibleSpatula 4y ago
Apologies if the wok explanation came across as insensitive or racist. The wording used was 'a wok is unwieldy and uncommon in a lot of home kitchens'. As one of the two Asian writers who this got past, we believed that this statement was true enough for North American beginners looking to learn how to make scrambled eggs. I have changed the copy there and endeavour to make sure that we are more culturally sensitive in the future.
- blub 4y ago
  How did we get to a point where somebody with an English sounding name is teaching lessons on racism against Asians to an Asian? You did nothing wrong. As a European I didn’t even have a clue what a wok might be for most of my life. Buying one would make no sense.
  - ziddoap 4y ago
    >English sounding name is teaching lessons on racism They didn't "teach" a "lesson" on racism, they said an entire 15 words in an edit and gave a range of "sheltered" to "at worst, practically racist". A bit hyperbolic? Sure. A lesson? No.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  Not a racist comment.
- bastardoperator 4y ago
  It's not racist, but I would consider it an invalid assumption. You should ask what people have available from a tools and ingredients perspective. Take for instance everyone I know owns a wok, I have two.
- powersnail 4y ago
  It's not racist. It's just untrue. While the wok is indeed uncommon in NA, as compared with skillets, there's nothing unwieldy about it, in terms of scrambling an egg. You can scramble eggs in a wok in exactly the way as you would a skillet.
- 4y ago
ac29 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. The picture of quizzes on their blog post was odd too. The idea of washing ground beef to make a hamburger is very weird. Sounds like the result of an algorithm that decided that washing {ingredient} was always the first step in any recipe.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Washing ground meat? Just no.. There are few cases when it might make sense like when the skin has impurities like feathers or hair, but generally it is not recommended. I would throw instructions right out if they even suggest something going against modern basic foot safety.
  - dymk 4y ago
    It’s why it’s important to wear close toed shoes in the kitchen
  - mandarax8 4y ago
    It is a thing though, look up 'keema matar' for example. But it has nothing to do with cleaning the meat afaik, just a texture thing. Definitely not for making hamburgers though.
- mizzao 4y ago
  I'm 99% percent that washing ground beef is a wrong answer -- what we teach NOT to do is just as important as teaching what to do. Same way how it's more important to know the ways a startup fails than to see what the successful ones did. But if it isn't, mea culpa and I'll get that fixed.
  - ac29 4y ago
    It wasnt a multiple choice question, it was a put the steps in order question. link: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fee05fa3e-0cfd-40c0-9415-134965a41738_2175x941.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
whateveracct 4y ago
Cooking has become a very weird thing - people both overrate its difficulty and complexity to the point of phobia..and also consume content of people cooking without ever doing it themselves. So many cooking tik tok etcs are so obviously not good food to make compared to normal stuff. Scrambled eggs are a good thing to learn for a beginner, and maybe the app does try to teach you the real "hard" part of them: Heat control. If you understand the heat of your stove and your pan, you can make scrambled eggs. You can learn it by getting a carton of eggs, a stick of butter, and a frying pan. You'll learn how butter burns and gets too hot, and you'll learn when you jump the gun and put the egg in too cold of a pan. People want steps and skills and tricks. But the real way to learn how to cook is to look at & listen to your pan, taste your food, and then repeat and learn from your mistakes.
- TheDarkestSoul 4y ago
  > Cooking has become a very weird thing - people both overrate its difficulty and complexity to the point of phobia This is very astute and I think things like this app are probably actually counterproductive for this reason--if we imply learning to cook is comparable to learning a _language_ in its complexity you're only going to make people more wary. Really all you need to do is buy ingredients and follow a recipe; now you're cooking! It isn't that hard. As you say, the real learning process of cooking involves making things, getting a sense for what works, what you like, and iterating, and you can't really get this from an app, or videos, or whatever.
  - blakesley 4y ago
    I think the language analogy is apt. Your statement that "cooking isn't that hard!" is similar to someone who speaks English fluently saying English isn't that hard. I fully defend OP's problem statement with the iceberg analogy. Let's take your other comment: "just buy ingredients and follow a recipe". This makes no sense to me. Sure, I could just make the 10-20 guesses required to buy ingredients & get to the end of the recipe, it would probably result in something edible but bad. At that point, I'll have learned how to make it better next time, but not necessarily how to make it half-decent. So, as OP describes elsewhere, whenever I'm trying to follow a new recipe, I end up looking up an average of 5 vids on prep or technique that I'm unsure about. It gets me something half-decent in the end, but it's a lot of work, and I never feel like I really "get it". Also, your overall tone is so weird to me. You're talking about cooking like it has no fundamentals and it's just loosey-goosey & based on people's preferences, but there are DEFINITELY wrong ways to cook things, and lots of them. I learn more about those wrong ways every time I try cooking.
throwaway675309 4y ago
"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. FALSE. Even the most irrationally minded human being who deliberately tries to intepret things in the worst possible manner would have gotten racism out of a declarative sentence like "most people don't have woks at home", which is likely an accurate assessment given the North American demographic they seem to be targeting. Unbelievable
bogota 4y ago
100% agree about this not working unless it’s culture and country specific. It’s also not very interesting to me if i can’t go in and say i want to learn how to cook Venezuelan cuisine today. Basic cooking skills are easy enough to find on youtube.
quasarj 4y ago
lol, I read your comment and was like "pfft look at this smug UK-er thinking his best-eggs-in-the-world mean the app sucks" and then the first question I got was ridiculous and suggested I should always buy the cheapest eggs haha. You were absolutely right.
- EdgyMann 4y ago
  It's not that our eggs are better. It's that there are a lot of food standards here, and eggs have markings and logos printed on them to tell you which standards they follow. And the egg boxes have even more markings and logos printed on them. Things like a red lion or a red tractor being printed on an egg. They mean a lot in the UK, but don't mean anything to anybody in any other country.
bearmode 4y ago
>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. I didn't do the eggs one, but that's hilarious. Also from the UK, also own a wok, and also agree that scrambled eggs are best in a wok.

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.

EddySchauHai 4y ago
> 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". Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying. Because of you. Learn to make 'mother sauces' straight away guys! They're simple and flavorful.
- danpalmer 4y ago
  Yes! But that's something you can teach! Ricotta isn't traditional at all, but that's a trade-off you can choose to make. I think telling people that, presenting the options and trade-offs, and teaching each level, makes it all so much more accessible while still helping people appreciate the traditional side! A good example is carbonara. So many people learn to make it with cream etc because they think it'll be easier, or the person they are learning from believes it's easier to make, but when you look at the differences it's actually barely easier to do than the traditional, or even harder in some cases, so why not just learn the traditional.

blindseer 4y ago

I tried the app too and experienced exactly the same thing. I’m surprised the app is getting as much positive reception on here as it is. Sure it is cute and “gamey”, but I don’t particularly think it’s even useful. I’d rather have the knowledge graph displayed to me in a way I can easily find information or navigate it. Why would I EVER want to use this to learn something new when I could just read the information and ingest it. To be fair I feel the same way about duolingo but the knowledge graph is so deep and dense there that i wouldn’t be able to consume information in a couple of sittings. With recipes, I am pretty sure I could “learn” everything I wanted to learn about eggs or tomatoes or bread in just one evening. There’s probably real life experience that would add to that knowledge but that’s not something I would get from this app anyway.

mizzao 4y ago
As the knowledge graph gets bigger, we're definitely going to have to find better ways to present it. The challenge is that most people don't want to see the whole knowledge graph, they want an extremely simple experience. Do you think your perspective represents something that would appeal to the mass market? Here's the technical approach we're taking with the goal of taking a very hairy knowledge graph and turning it into a remarkably simple, even magical, user experience: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope
- blindseer 4y ago
  I think the knowledge graph in this case is mostly derived from first principles, e.g. understand roasting, searing, broiling etc and you can apply that to any vegetable or meat. Ideally one would be able to learn language with the same kind of etymological study, however I put it to you that is FAR more complex and boring and doesn't have more fact / science based rules than cooking does. Also, cooking is a very personal / familial / cultural experience. Recipes can be passed down a single family, whereas language is much more broad. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the knowledge graph for cooking is smaller and more personal, and is better served as a personalized note taking system as opposed to a gamified interface to a public database. For example, if I would prefer recipes with eggs and potatoes as opposed to recipes with spinach and mushrooms, I should be able to cater my knowledge graph to learning more about recipes that use those ingredients (ideally with some balance in nutrients).

mizzao 4y ago

It sounds like you're a pretty experienced chef and we're targeting beginners (that experience question was more to get a sense of who our users are). If you consider that we're trying to start with levels 1, 2, and 3 of cooking before moving on to the far more advanced topics, do you still think it's useless? Or does your perspective change? Thanks for the note about the questions that are potentially culturally insulting. I actually have a wok at home so I'm gonna look into that one personally!

tdeck 4y ago
I'm curious if you've actually interviewed users who can't identify a friend vs scrambled egg and how much of this demographic exists. That example seems like something you'd learn from simply ordering breakfast a couple of times.
- chki 4y ago
  Or by learning the meaning of the word "scrambled".
- tdeck 4y ago
  Apparently my phone chose "friend" rather than "fried" but hopefully that was pretty clear.

EligibleSpatula 4y ago

Apologies if the wok explanation came across as insensitive or racist. The wording used was 'a wok is unwieldy and uncommon in a lot of home kitchens'. As one of the two Asian writers who this got past, we believed that this statement was true enough for North American beginners looking to learn how to make scrambled eggs. I have changed the copy there and endeavour to make sure that we are more culturally sensitive in the future.

blub 4y ago
How did we get to a point where somebody with an English sounding name is teaching lessons on racism against Asians to an Asian? You did nothing wrong. As a European I didn’t even have a clue what a wok might be for most of my life. Buying one would make no sense.
- ziddoap 4y ago
  >English sounding name is teaching lessons on racism They didn't "teach" a "lesson" on racism, they said an entire 15 words in an edit and gave a range of "sheltered" to "at worst, practically racist". A bit hyperbolic? Sure. A lesson? No.
InCityDreams 4y ago
Not a racist comment.
bastardoperator 4y ago
It's not racist, but I would consider it an invalid assumption. You should ask what people have available from a tools and ingredients perspective. Take for instance everyone I know owns a wok, I have two.
powersnail 4y ago
It's not racist. It's just untrue. While the wok is indeed uncommon in NA, as compared with skillets, there's nothing unwieldy about it, in terms of scrambling an egg. You can scramble eggs in a wok in exactly the way as you would a skillet.
4y ago

ac29 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. The picture of quizzes on their blog post was odd too. The idea of washing ground beef to make a hamburger is very weird. Sounds like the result of an algorithm that decided that washing {ingredient} was always the first step in any recipe.

Ekaros 4y ago
Washing ground meat? Just no.. There are few cases when it might make sense like when the skin has impurities like feathers or hair, but generally it is not recommended. I would throw instructions right out if they even suggest something going against modern basic foot safety.
- dymk 4y ago
  It’s why it’s important to wear close toed shoes in the kitchen
- mandarax8 4y ago
  It is a thing though, look up 'keema matar' for example. But it has nothing to do with cleaning the meat afaik, just a texture thing. Definitely not for making hamburgers though.
mizzao 4y ago
I'm 99% percent that washing ground beef is a wrong answer -- what we teach NOT to do is just as important as teaching what to do. Same way how it's more important to know the ways a startup fails than to see what the successful ones did. But if it isn't, mea culpa and I'll get that fixed.
- ac29 4y ago
  It wasnt a multiple choice question, it was a put the steps in order question. link: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fee05fa3e-0cfd-40c0-9415-134965a41738_2175x941.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

whateveracct 4y ago

Cooking has become a very weird thing - people both overrate its difficulty and complexity to the point of phobia..and also consume content of people cooking without ever doing it themselves. So many cooking tik tok etcs are so obviously not good food to make compared to normal stuff. Scrambled eggs are a good thing to learn for a beginner, and maybe the app does try to teach you the real "hard" part of them: Heat control. If you understand the heat of your stove and your pan, you can make scrambled eggs. You can learn it by getting a carton of eggs, a stick of butter, and a frying pan. You'll learn how butter burns and gets too hot, and you'll learn when you jump the gun and put the egg in too cold of a pan. People want steps and skills and tricks. But the real way to learn how to cook is to look at & listen to your pan, taste your food, and then repeat and learn from your mistakes.

TheDarkestSoul 4y ago
> Cooking has become a very weird thing - people both overrate its difficulty and complexity to the point of phobia This is very astute and I think things like this app are probably actually counterproductive for this reason--if we imply learning to cook is comparable to learning a _language_ in its complexity you're only going to make people more wary. Really all you need to do is buy ingredients and follow a recipe; now you're cooking! It isn't that hard. As you say, the real learning process of cooking involves making things, getting a sense for what works, what you like, and iterating, and you can't really get this from an app, or videos, or whatever.
- blakesley 4y ago
  I think the language analogy is apt. Your statement that "cooking isn't that hard!" is similar to someone who speaks English fluently saying English isn't that hard. I fully defend OP's problem statement with the iceberg analogy. Let's take your other comment: "just buy ingredients and follow a recipe". This makes no sense to me. Sure, I could just make the 10-20 guesses required to buy ingredients & get to the end of the recipe, it would probably result in something edible but bad. At that point, I'll have learned how to make it better next time, but not necessarily how to make it half-decent. So, as OP describes elsewhere, whenever I'm trying to follow a new recipe, I end up looking up an average of 5 vids on prep or technique that I'm unsure about. It gets me something half-decent in the end, but it's a lot of work, and I never feel like I really "get it". Also, your overall tone is so weird to me. You're talking about cooking like it has no fundamentals and it's just loosey-goosey & based on people's preferences, but there are DEFINITELY wrong ways to cook things, and lots of them. I learn more about those wrong ways every time I try cooking.

throwaway675309 4y ago

"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. FALSE. Even the most irrationally minded human being who deliberately tries to intepret things in the worst possible manner would have gotten racism out of a declarative sentence like "most people don't have woks at home", which is likely an accurate assessment given the North American demographic they seem to be targeting. Unbelievable

bogota 4y ago

100% agree about this not working unless it’s culture and country specific. It’s also not very interesting to me if i can’t go in and say i want to learn how to cook Venezuelan cuisine today. Basic cooking skills are easy enough to find on youtube.

quasarj 4y ago

lol, I read your comment and was like "pfft look at this smug UK-er thinking his best-eggs-in-the-world mean the app sucks" and then the first question I got was ridiculous and suggested I should always buy the cheapest eggs haha. You were absolutely right.

EdgyMann 4y ago
It's not that our eggs are better. It's that there are a lot of food standards here, and eggs have markings and logos printed on them to tell you which standards they follow. And the egg boxes have even more markings and logos printed on them. Things like a red lion or a red tractor being printed on an egg. They mean a lot in the UK, but don't mean anything to anybody in any other country.

bearmode 4y ago

>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. I didn't do the eggs one, but that's hilarious. Also from the UK, also own a wok, and also agree that scrambled eggs are best in a wok.