8 ms·

Show HN: Eattsy – Reimagining the world’s relationship with cooking and food

40 points by nathanfromny 4y ago

1MachineElf 4y ago
Like a flashy version of https://based.cooking https://based.cooking
ibdf 4y ago
Besides the clean layout, I honestly cannot tell what sets this apart from other recipes websites.
nathanfromny 4y ago
We built a system to create your own recipes online, manage others' recipes, form makelists, think playlists for recipes, with recipes from the site...
- pacaro 4y ago
  As others have mentioned, maybe seed it with a few hundred – thousand of your favourite recipes. Apart from then being immediately useful, I suspect that you'll learn a lot about usability in the seeding process
xbar 4y ago
I love the idea of being rescued from 5-page shaggy dog stories and tall tales about why this recipe is ostensibly important to the author....
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  Another improvement would be to strip away the recipe details / steps that have no benefit for the finished product.
Krisjohn 4y ago
I re-write recipies to call things by different names when they change. I got sick of losing track of the current state of something when a recipe is all "take the eggs, scamble the eggs, add the eggs to the mixture, let the mixture sit, cook the mixture, cut the mixture. My recipies are; scramble the eggs to make scrambled eggs, add the scrambled eggs to the mixture to make eggy mixture, let the eggy mixture sit to make sat mixture, cook the sat mixture to make cooked mixture, cut the cooked mixture to serve. And so on.
- mattkrause 4y ago
  This is like an SSA representation of a recipe.
- nathanfromny 4y ago
  So, do you think it would be a good idea to have a "Copy & Edit" functionality where somebody could copy a recipe (even one of their own) and make changes based on it? I never thought about this, and I think it might be a brilliant idea.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    This feature absolutely must be called a fork!
bschwindHN 4y ago
Sorry to link to another project, but when I think of engineers and recipes, I can only think of "Cooking for Engineers". Here's an example of the kind of diagrams they use: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/185/Nestle-Toll-House-Chocolate-Chip-Cookies/trn http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/185/Nestle-Toll-Ho... I would also recommend killing all the social media buttons on your site and replacing them with simple links. Your site loads a ton of garbage from facebook, instagram, pinterest, etsy. The site also feels quite slow, has flickers of unstyled content before the page loads, and overall feels quite "busy" for a recipe site.
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  Okay, I think it's time to throw down about that cookie recipe [0]. Better version: - Use 1 c. white sugar + 1/2 c. brown sugar, rather than 3/4 + 3/4 - Reduce flour to 2-1/4 cups. And make sure it's white, or else you'll need to tweak the recipe further. - Don't actively soften the butter with a microwave, because you'll probably overshoot and end up with flat cookies. Better to just let it come up to room temperature. - Optional: Refrigerate the dough before making the balls. It's easier to work with, and it helps you avoid flattened cookies. - The baking time isn't necessarily 10 minutes. Start checking them at 9 minutes, and use your eyes and nose to judge doneness. (It takes practice to calibrate.) [0] Smacktalk intended for humor purposes only. But I'm 100% confident in my recipe's superiority :)
  - bschwindHN 4y ago
    Hah I'm sure yours is better, I'm just more interested in the format of the recipe itself (I just picked a random recipe on the site for an example). I wonder if your recipe would fit well in that "timeline box" recipe card format, with all the caveats on how to prepare butter or optionally refrigerate the dough.
- pacaro 4y ago
  I use a similar format for recipes, happy to see that others have also reached the same place, it just feels intuitive to me
- 4y ago
Markoff 4y ago
There are no recipes, everything I clicked was just dummy ones.
- a2800276 4y ago
  I thought you're expected to pay to see the recipe.
  - Markoff 4y ago
    there is no content as other users report, this should be flagged as some blogspam
    - nathanfromny 4y ago
      Oh well, we haven't uploaded recipes yet since we're just finishing up the work on the software, so that's why. We're just trying to fix up loose ends and things like the links... Once we get everything sorted, we have a couple hundred recipes we're going to put on the site.
      - Markoff 4y ago
        nobody cares what you PLAN to do in future, don't advertise your website unless it's NOW providing something interesting
  - motbus3 4y ago
    I think this is a startup project to check if it attracts people. I myself use cookpad. I even pay the fricking premium because it works for me... and it is shameful cheap. like 1 or 2 usd/month
samuel246 4y ago
There is an open source cooking guide for programmer. Unfortunately, its for chinese reader only. https://github.com/Anduin2017/HowToCook https://github.com/Anduin2017/HowToCook https://cook.aiurs.co/ https://cook.aiurs.co/
green-eclipse 4y ago
I think you presented this too early. There's barely any content on it. You need to seed it with recipes first so us users can actually fully appreciate what the product is. There's "Featured makelists" named "Test" and "Untitled Makelist." This site isn't ready for an audience yet.
- mkarlsch 4y ago
  I can only second this. The placeholder in the search bar is “ex: tacos, breakfast, …” so I searched for tacos - zero results. Having a bit more content would likely leave a better first impression.
  - nathanfromny 4y ago
    So, we were trying to display the recipe creation software but I realized now that we should upload some of the couple hundred recipes we have. I have just been mainly sharing this with engineering friends to get input on the software, not the recipes. But, I'm going to begin uploading them all over the next few days. I am also getting involved with people who have more recipes to upload some of their own.
    - honkdaddy 4y ago
      Why would I want to take the time to upload to your service a recipe I already know?
- nathanfromny 4y ago
  Got it. We're doing this and I'll upload more about our progress once we have a decent docket of recipes and makelists, and sort through several other details of the website. Thanks for the input!
kukkeliskuu 4y ago
So much text on the landing page, but actual content is missing. As an engineer, I am interested in trying things out. If "makelist" is the thing that separates this site from others, it is strange that I could not find a single makelist to see what that is. I still don't know what it is.
- nathanfromny 4y ago
  You're totally right on †his. I realized that we need to put on recipes and give a better view. Also, apologies for the slow responses. I'm not spam, I just was asleep. I think we're going to start uploading our recipes and improve some of the link functionality, plus change our search based on tags, so that we can make it all better. This is a new product and we made a stupid assumption to show the functionality without recipes uploaded yet. But we realize now that the recipes are the thing that makes the functionality make sense.
Stratoscope 4y ago
I like the recipe for Mom's Paella: https://www.eattsy.com/recipe?rcpe=22 https://www.eattsy.com/recipe?rcpe=22 What, you may ask? There's no recipe there! That's the whole point. It's Mom's Paella. Mom makes the paella so you don't have to. (But seriously, when mom shares her recipe I am eager to try making it. I love paella!)
defanor 4y ago
Sorry for being grumpy, but over time it becomes rather frustrating to see projects like that. The problem I encounter with recipes is that sometimes it's hard to find properly written (and preferably overall nice) ones: not just that units of measurements tend to be odd, but they often use volumes where you'd expect weights (particularly for baking), or don't mention important parameters (like vinegar solution for pickling, where it's commonly recommended to follow recipes exactly, precisely to get the acidity right), or would sometimes include odd/unexpected steps/proportions without an explanation. Yet the "solutions" I keep seeing are just some overengineered languages/formats/databases/websites, and I'm unsure what they are even supposed to achieve (except maybe for some monetization for its authors, or being a fun or educational project, which is good, but still not useful for potential users). This one just lists regular startup buzzwords, and the website seems to be quite broken in FF even after allowing JS. If we had one properly written Wikimedia Cookbook recipe instead of each one of those custom cooking/recipe projects, I guess there would be a rather comprehensive cookbook by now.
- motbus3 4y ago
  I use a service for recipes. they have free service which works just fine, but the paid one always works for me. it is called cookpad I learned baking bread and pizzas dough with it and the price is almost free... from time to time they offer it for 1usd/month but usually it is 2/usd
- bowsamic 4y ago
  Frankly I think the real problem is that most home cooks or even pro recipe writers are actually pretty clueless about these things. They don't have any formal education and they just fluked into something that works for them but they don't know why. So you end up with a majority of recipes online being overly specific in places that don't matter and really unspecific in those that do. Then you follow these recipes and some work and some don't and you develop your own intuition, which is very specific to your own setup and your ingredients. I have been watching Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, the UK one, which is not very dramatic like the US one, and instead actually really focussed on the restaurant and the kitchen. One thing that amazes me is the clear, laser focussed simplicity of the dishes that he suggests. He and the other chefs (at least those ones who have been to catering school) simply have an education that allows them to cook a basic pasta dish that will blow away any intricate home cooking recipe. Not only are home cooking recipes generally worse in outcome, they are actually more complicated, more difficult, and more expensive to make. Uneducated cooks don't seem to trust the basic flavours and textures of what they are cooking.
atoav 4y ago
Without reading the article: what I think many recipes are lacking is the fact that cooking is typically a complex process involving heat (and heat-transfer), humidity managment, etc. If you put the same vegetable in a pot with an lid compared to one without a lid the outcome will be quite different.
manmal 4y ago
Please fix the flashes of white/whatever content when navigating. This is one of the busiest pages I have ever seen when it comes to initial rendering - there’s even a text overlay that fades out on every route change (?). When swiping back on mobile Safari, the whole page sometimes turns white for a few seconds.
jamil7 4y ago
I don't really understand, the search doesn't return anything, even if I use a term from the input's placeholder.
dwg 4y ago
Congratulations on pursuing an idea, and for getting it to this point! My honest feedback: * It's not clear to me why I should use this. * I don't enjoy the design. Anyway, hope you keep improving!
arran-nz 4y ago
IMO, What we need is a website that is a combination of something like Cooklang[0] and a git forge - This way you can "fork" ;) recipes to modify and maintain attributions and have a machine readable format to convert weights, calculate dynamic portions etc. Does anything like this exist? [0]: https://cooklang.org/ https://cooklang.org/
- ibdf 4y ago
  This is a great idea!
- nathanfromny 4y ago
  So, I just saw a comment from another person and I think it could be pretty powerful. Are you agreeing that there should be some sort of "Copy & Edit" functionality for pre-existing recipes that you could then enhance/change? I think that could bring about better enhancement procedures. As for scaling portions/weights/etc. I know that we are working on something for this, but we wanted to start building a large recipe-based before building the tools for this. (We need more data for that)
dmitriid 4y ago
When Engineers Think Cooking/Recipes Could Be More Enjoyable, we get a website with useless fade-ins/fade-outs that are choppy even on a MacBook Pro M1 Max with links that are not links, pages that jump around when you as much as click on something, and a cursor:hand overlay over 90% of the page.
saalaa 4y ago
The real problem that needs solving and that is worth addressing is finding good recipes that you enjoy. They have to hit your taste buds right and provide the perfect level of instructions for your cooking skills and confidence. The best way to achieve this right now is to find one good cook and hand pick the material they have and that you enjoy. Going through other cooks they shoutout to is also worth. Right now, I read undejeunerdesoleil.com (fr/it) weekly and copy what I like to Trello. I also infrequently read other blogs and do the same. Ingredients are checklists, instructions in the description, one column is used for shopping, one for what I can cook with what I bought and one for holding recipes. A little automation to reset checklists. I have hundreds of recipes. It’s still hard or time consuming finding good recipes.
suprjami 4y ago
Flagging for self-promotion. Should be a Show HN.
nathanfromny 4y ago
So, you guys think that for continuing, my team should: - upload the recipes we have before showing more people (several hundred in our docket) - fix the links situation to contain the actual hrefs - change the loading screen - be more distinct on makelists - Content-heavy and searching better enhanced for recipe tags Anything else?

40 points by nathanfromny 4y ago

1MachineElf 4y ago

Like a flashy version of https://based.cooking https://based.cooking

ibdf 4y ago

Besides the clean layout, I honestly cannot tell what sets this apart from other recipes websites.

nathanfromny 4y ago

We built a system to create your own recipes online, manage others' recipes, form makelists, think playlists for recipes, with recipes from the site...

pacaro 4y ago
As others have mentioned, maybe seed it with a few hundred – thousand of your favourite recipes. Apart from then being immediately useful, I suspect that you'll learn a lot about usability in the seeding process

xbar 4y ago

I love the idea of being rescued from 5-page shaggy dog stories and tall tales about why this recipe is ostensibly important to the author....

CoastalCoder 4y ago
Another improvement would be to strip away the recipe details / steps that have no benefit for the finished product.

Krisjohn 4y ago

I re-write recipies to call things by different names when they change. I got sick of losing track of the current state of something when a recipe is all "take the eggs, scamble the eggs, add the eggs to the mixture, let the mixture sit, cook the mixture, cut the mixture. My recipies are; scramble the eggs to make scrambled eggs, add the scrambled eggs to the mixture to make eggy mixture, let the eggy mixture sit to make sat mixture, cook the sat mixture to make cooked mixture, cut the cooked mixture to serve. And so on.

mattkrause 4y ago
This is like an SSA representation of a recipe.
nathanfromny 4y ago
So, do you think it would be a good idea to have a "Copy & Edit" functionality where somebody could copy a recipe (even one of their own) and make changes based on it? I never thought about this, and I think it might be a brilliant idea.
- mattkrause 4y ago
  This feature absolutely must be called a fork!

bschwindHN 4y ago

Sorry to link to another project, but when I think of engineers and recipes, I can only think of "Cooking for Engineers". Here's an example of the kind of diagrams they use: http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/185/Nestle-Toll-House-Chocolate-Chip-Cookies/trn http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/185/Nestle-Toll-Ho... I would also recommend killing all the social media buttons on your site and replacing them with simple links. Your site loads a ton of garbage from facebook, instagram, pinterest, etsy. The site also feels quite slow, has flickers of unstyled content before the page loads, and overall feels quite "busy" for a recipe site.

CoastalCoder 4y ago
Okay, I think it's time to throw down about that cookie recipe [0]. Better version: - Use 1 c. white sugar + 1/2 c. brown sugar, rather than 3/4 + 3/4 - Reduce flour to 2-1/4 cups. And make sure it's white, or else you'll need to tweak the recipe further. - Don't actively soften the butter with a microwave, because you'll probably overshoot and end up with flat cookies. Better to just let it come up to room temperature. - Optional: Refrigerate the dough before making the balls. It's easier to work with, and it helps you avoid flattened cookies. - The baking time isn't necessarily 10 minutes. Start checking them at 9 minutes, and use your eyes and nose to judge doneness. (It takes practice to calibrate.) [0] Smacktalk intended for humor purposes only. But I'm 100% confident in my recipe's superiority :)
- bschwindHN 4y ago
  Hah I'm sure yours is better, I'm just more interested in the format of the recipe itself (I just picked a random recipe on the site for an example). I wonder if your recipe would fit well in that "timeline box" recipe card format, with all the caveats on how to prepare butter or optionally refrigerate the dough.
pacaro 4y ago
I use a similar format for recipes, happy to see that others have also reached the same place, it just feels intuitive to me
4y ago

Markoff 4y ago

There are no recipes, everything I clicked was just dummy ones.

a2800276 4y ago
I thought you're expected to pay to see the recipe.
- Markoff 4y ago
  there is no content as other users report, this should be flagged as some blogspam
  - nathanfromny 4y ago
    Oh well, we haven't uploaded recipes yet since we're just finishing up the work on the software, so that's why. We're just trying to fix up loose ends and things like the links... Once we get everything sorted, we have a couple hundred recipes we're going to put on the site.
    - Markoff 4y ago
      nobody cares what you PLAN to do in future, don't advertise your website unless it's NOW providing something interesting
- motbus3 4y ago
  I think this is a startup project to check if it attracts people. I myself use cookpad. I even pay the fricking premium because it works for me... and it is shameful cheap. like 1 or 2 usd/month

samuel246 4y ago

There is an open source cooking guide for programmer. Unfortunately, its for chinese reader only. https://github.com/Anduin2017/HowToCook https://github.com/Anduin2017/HowToCook https://cook.aiurs.co/ https://cook.aiurs.co/

green-eclipse 4y ago

I think you presented this too early. There's barely any content on it. You need to seed it with recipes first so us users can actually fully appreciate what the product is. There's "Featured makelists" named "Test" and "Untitled Makelist." This site isn't ready for an audience yet.

mkarlsch 4y ago
I can only second this. The placeholder in the search bar is “ex: tacos, breakfast, …” so I searched for tacos - zero results. Having a bit more content would likely leave a better first impression.
- nathanfromny 4y ago
  So, we were trying to display the recipe creation software but I realized now that we should upload some of the couple hundred recipes we have. I have just been mainly sharing this with engineering friends to get input on the software, not the recipes. But, I'm going to begin uploading them all over the next few days. I am also getting involved with people who have more recipes to upload some of their own.
  - honkdaddy 4y ago
    Why would I want to take the time to upload to your service a recipe I already know?
nathanfromny 4y ago
Got it. We're doing this and I'll upload more about our progress once we have a decent docket of recipes and makelists, and sort through several other details of the website. Thanks for the input!

kukkeliskuu 4y ago

So much text on the landing page, but actual content is missing. As an engineer, I am interested in trying things out. If "makelist" is the thing that separates this site from others, it is strange that I could not find a single makelist to see what that is. I still don't know what it is.

nathanfromny 4y ago
You're totally right on †his. I realized that we need to put on recipes and give a better view. Also, apologies for the slow responses. I'm not spam, I just was asleep. I think we're going to start uploading our recipes and improve some of the link functionality, plus change our search based on tags, so that we can make it all better. This is a new product and we made a stupid assumption to show the functionality without recipes uploaded yet. But we realize now that the recipes are the thing that makes the functionality make sense.

Stratoscope 4y ago

I like the recipe for Mom's Paella: https://www.eattsy.com/recipe?rcpe=22 https://www.eattsy.com/recipe?rcpe=22 What, you may ask? There's no recipe there! That's the whole point. It's Mom's Paella. Mom makes the paella so you don't have to. (But seriously, when mom shares her recipe I am eager to try making it. I love paella!)

defanor 4y ago

Sorry for being grumpy, but over time it becomes rather frustrating to see projects like that. The problem I encounter with recipes is that sometimes it's hard to find properly written (and preferably overall nice) ones: not just that units of measurements tend to be odd, but they often use volumes where you'd expect weights (particularly for baking), or don't mention important parameters (like vinegar solution for pickling, where it's commonly recommended to follow recipes exactly, precisely to get the acidity right), or would sometimes include odd/unexpected steps/proportions without an explanation. Yet the "solutions" I keep seeing are just some overengineered languages/formats/databases/websites, and I'm unsure what they are even supposed to achieve (except maybe for some monetization for its authors, or being a fun or educational project, which is good, but still not useful for potential users). This one just lists regular startup buzzwords, and the website seems to be quite broken in FF even after allowing JS. If we had one properly written Wikimedia Cookbook recipe instead of each one of those custom cooking/recipe projects, I guess there would be a rather comprehensive cookbook by now.

motbus3 4y ago
I use a service for recipes. they have free service which works just fine, but the paid one always works for me. it is called cookpad I learned baking bread and pizzas dough with it and the price is almost free... from time to time they offer it for 1usd/month but usually it is 2/usd
bowsamic 4y ago
Frankly I think the real problem is that most home cooks or even pro recipe writers are actually pretty clueless about these things. They don't have any formal education and they just fluked into something that works for them but they don't know why. So you end up with a majority of recipes online being overly specific in places that don't matter and really unspecific in those that do. Then you follow these recipes and some work and some don't and you develop your own intuition, which is very specific to your own setup and your ingredients. I have been watching Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, the UK one, which is not very dramatic like the US one, and instead actually really focussed on the restaurant and the kitchen. One thing that amazes me is the clear, laser focussed simplicity of the dishes that he suggests. He and the other chefs (at least those ones who have been to catering school) simply have an education that allows them to cook a basic pasta dish that will blow away any intricate home cooking recipe. Not only are home cooking recipes generally worse in outcome, they are actually more complicated, more difficult, and more expensive to make. Uneducated cooks don't seem to trust the basic flavours and textures of what they are cooking.

atoav 4y ago

Without reading the article: what I think many recipes are lacking is the fact that cooking is typically a complex process involving heat (and heat-transfer), humidity managment, etc. If you put the same vegetable in a pot with an lid compared to one without a lid the outcome will be quite different.

manmal 4y ago

Please fix the flashes of white/whatever content when navigating. This is one of the busiest pages I have ever seen when it comes to initial rendering - there’s even a text overlay that fades out on every route change (?). When swiping back on mobile Safari, the whole page sometimes turns white for a few seconds.

jamil7 4y ago

I don't really understand, the search doesn't return anything, even if I use a term from the input's placeholder.

dwg 4y ago

Congratulations on pursuing an idea, and for getting it to this point! My honest feedback: * It's not clear to me why I should use this. * I don't enjoy the design. Anyway, hope you keep improving!

arran-nz 4y ago

IMO, What we need is a website that is a combination of something like Cooklang[0] and a git forge - This way you can "fork" ;) recipes to modify and maintain attributions and have a machine readable format to convert weights, calculate dynamic portions etc. Does anything like this exist? [0]: https://cooklang.org/ https://cooklang.org/

ibdf 4y ago
This is a great idea!
nathanfromny 4y ago
So, I just saw a comment from another person and I think it could be pretty powerful. Are you agreeing that there should be some sort of "Copy & Edit" functionality for pre-existing recipes that you could then enhance/change? I think that could bring about better enhancement procedures. As for scaling portions/weights/etc. I know that we are working on something for this, but we wanted to start building a large recipe-based before building the tools for this. (We need more data for that)

dmitriid 4y ago

When Engineers Think Cooking/Recipes Could Be More Enjoyable, we get a website with useless fade-ins/fade-outs that are choppy even on a MacBook Pro M1 Max with links that are not links, pages that jump around when you as much as click on something, and a cursor:hand overlay over 90% of the page.

saalaa 4y ago

The real problem that needs solving and that is worth addressing is finding good recipes that you enjoy. They have to hit your taste buds right and provide the perfect level of instructions for your cooking skills and confidence. The best way to achieve this right now is to find one good cook and hand pick the material they have and that you enjoy. Going through other cooks they shoutout to is also worth. Right now, I read undejeunerdesoleil.com (fr/it) weekly and copy what I like to Trello. I also infrequently read other blogs and do the same. Ingredients are checklists, instructions in the description, one column is used for shopping, one for what I can cook with what I bought and one for holding recipes. A little automation to reset checklists. I have hundreds of recipes. It’s still hard or time consuming finding good recipes.

suprjami 4y ago

Flagging for self-promotion. Should be a Show HN.

nathanfromny 4y ago

So, you guys think that for continuing, my team should: - upload the recipes we have before showing more people (several hundred in our docket) - fix the links situation to contain the actual hrefs - change the loading screen - be more distinct on makelists - Content-heavy and searching better enhanced for recipe tags Anything else?