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Recursive Recipes
- jcpst 3y agoLooks a bit half-baked. The concept seems interesting. It seems like it’s missing too much information/behavior to explore in an interesting way.
- deaddodo 3y ago<comment was incorrect, redacting misinformation>
- elliotshep 3y agoYou have to click the ingredient to expand the instructions.
- deaddodo 3y agoGotcha, thanks for the clarification.
- dang 3y agoRelated: Show HN: Recursive Recipes – directions to make food from scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17180686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17180686 - May 2018 (75 comments)
- dogsgobork 3y agoFun recursive food fact: the filling between the wafers of a kit-kat bar is ground up kit-kat bars.
- noman-land 3y ago[flagged]
- stygiansonic 3y agoThis would transform the dependency graph from a DAG to one with cycles and thus the recipe could not be resolved
- jdblair 3y agoSo... Kit-Kats are impossible! Yet they exist, a miracle!
- Nevermark 3y agoThey are not impossible. It takes a fraction of a Kit-Kat to make a Kit-Kat. But nobody can build them from scratch. If at any time they are all eaten, that's it!
- thethimble 3y agoIt’s like a self compiling compiler that can’t be bootstrapped!
- totetsu 3y agoHow was the first KitKat built then?
- corbezzoli 3y agoThe first KitKat wasn't as good as the latest KitKat, as it wasn't KitKat enough
- bentcorner 3y agoSo then as every KitKat is produced, we are approaching the ideal KitKat?
- corbezzoli 3y agoI think KitKat already peaked when Melon KitKat was released.
- latchkey 3y agoWhich came first, the filling or the kit-kat bar?
- lucb1e 3y agoSurely Wikipedia would mention such a unique property if it were true, but I can't find a mention of that an ingredient for kit kats is a (fractional) kit kat on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_Kat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_Kat I really want to believe this :(
- extraduder_ire 3y agoWas a little disappointed that the apple pie page doesn't let you drag the time limit long enough to "first create the universe".
- neilv 3y agoNeat idea. Small HTML oops: the semantic link was trying, but missed, so not middle-clickable: <div class="box ingredient-box clickable nounderline" onclick="location.href='/recipe/refried-beans';"> <h3> <span class="display-block"> <a href='/recipe/refried-beans'></a> Refried Beans </span> </h3> </div> A more structural HTML, plus modern CSS styling, would work a little better in modern browsers, and degrade better in lightweight and older browsers.
- jamesbvaughan 3y agoI'd like to better understand the intent with that code. What is it trying to achieve that this does not? <a class="box ingredient-box clickable nounderline" href="/recipe/refried-beans"> <h3> <span class="display-block"> Refried Beans </span> </h3> </div>
- nine_k 3y agoA link that's only clickable by JS looks like an anti-scraping measure :(
- jamiehall 3y agoThis is neat! On this topic, an interesting and pretty comprehensive guide to money / time / effort / quality tradeoffs in food is "Make the Bread, Buy the Butter" by Jennifer Reese.
- chii 3y agoWhy is land considered $0, when it's actually really expensive to obtain?
- its-summertime 3y agoSome of the recipes take in account bulk creation, some don't: Egg poaching can be done in batch, it does not take 9 hours to do 12 serves of Egg Benedict (+ sauce + poaching)! Some of the recipes are wrong: for Eggs Benedict: should be: 1 whole muffin : 2 whole egg : 2 whole slice bacon
- pacaro 3y agoAlso the muffin step has a two hour rest, which isn't included in the total time
- taberiand 3y agoI think it'd be cool to see a Gantt chart of the process as well, to get an alternative visual idea of the dependencies and timings
- pacaro 3y agoI write recipes out as somewhere between a Gantt chart and a left to right dag, it can be a very compressed representation
- gdprrrr 3y agoI've written recipes as BPMN, but it reminded me too much of works.
- poorlyknit 3y agoI love using PlantUML for this stuff :D https://plantuml.pbrinkmeier.de/svg/VP8zJyCm48Rt-nMtCV8b44E5Ag08YS9I9YA6Qt8aLlnHsMT4W_hFO84_XXkgDaegDfyVtUFtR8-3a9UIh0YCWYmrNq9RtIWgFHdy04HHXhMot1Q8qxIyTjfv54ysBCYpbPRSEYjxo0fMC3hSsA5I1UEhSp9txv2TdX-L-C2LVa5DGG9UO47BaC1aYiynhzdtoV7J5AyehnTHlmtfzrV2ZoJUsNsDCz9DRn-of34gv1KFMhgalQg09DX9VH2GRG6RGQwYoBf3vrNVjCDzSe8JDTY5h8w-mNI-__ci_33P0FVZTRDiKpOna35izuwBP8kkfZFyHc2TCCwTY3DGwsWMRDU6m1OInZK6aDI0cO_L5lQoTordE9DeYoHG1k_JB3eTc3vFFH1Mx2c6UNhuVuKbUsLBnZib3UyauxJw--Q_ https://plantuml.pbrinkmeier.de/svg/VP8zJyCm48Rt-nMtCV8b44E5...
- mike_d 3y agoSomewhat related (to the cookie recipe) is the purest cookie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crjxpZHv7Hk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crjxpZHv7Hk
- em-bee 3y agointeresting. i was a bit disappointed that he used finished chocolate instead of making that from scratch too. but then i noticed that he has a video on making chocolate, so at least in principle he got that covered. as for the taste, i would like to see a series of experiments where each pure ingredient is replaced with a consumer grade one, one at a time, to see which ones are responsible for the taste.
- jdblair 3y agoFunny seeing the "atomic" recipe for refried beans. I've recently learned to make my own refried beans from scratch, and it is a super easy recipe. My recipe is recursive, though! I use dried beans that I've already cooked and frozen ahead of time. (Canned beans are fine in a pinch)
- pjot 3y agoThat's why I wanna try fried beans, because maybe they're just as good.
- irrational 3y agoWhat about rerefried beans? If twice is good, three times must be better?
- jdblair 3y agoFun fact, the English name is a translation error from 'frijoles refritos,' which is closer to "well fried" in meaning.
- denton-scratch 3y agoI thought it was odd to stipulate the use of a frying pan; I thought the "refritos" bit was a misnomer. My method involves simmering the beans with garlic until soft, mixing in butter, and then whizzing/mashing. There is no "frying" step, unless you like to scour frying pans.
- dweinus 3y agoI was disappointed I couldn't actually create recursion by tracing my egg to a chicken to an egg to a...
- cdrini 3y agoHahaha! Right I expected the same for yogurt! I was thinking about this actually; are these actually recursive or just like self referential? But it's a recursive data type! type Ingredient { ingredients: Ingredient[] }
- runarberg 3y agoIn the recipe the third step of making yogurt calls for yogurt. > 3. Stir in some yogurt (from the store or from a friend) and cover with a clean damp towel overnight. It is kind of a missed opportunity to not include yogurt as the ingredients list for yogurt, and in the flow chart, to have a loop arrow from yogurt, pointing back into it self. “To make yogurt, you need milk and yogurt” EDIT: Looks like somebody already filed a feature request. https://github.com/schollz/recursive-recipes/issues/19 https://github.com/schollz/recursive-recipes/issues/19
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- citruscomputing 3y agoAh, this is neat! From the title, I thought it would be about perpetual stew, where the stew is an ingredient to itself.
- corbezzoli 3y agoI'd like to report a bug, or two: - there's no recipe for the cow - 1/8 of a cow is reported as $0.00 https://recursiverecipes.schollz.com/recipe/refried-beans?amount=1.5&timelimit=1&ingredientsToBuild=cow,butter,cow%20milk https://recursiverecipes.schollz.com/recipe/refried-beans?am...
- mb5 3y agoYes - and the 1/8 of a cow is needed to make milk to make butter. This might be possible if you were very selective about which eighth of a cow you procured, but you’d need some additional kit which the recipe doesn’t account for.
- civilitty 3y agoI buy half a cow every year and I can tell you for a fact that it doesn't come with the milk making parts still intact.
- Amorymeltzer 3y agoSome of the $0 items are the base "from scratch" items. You can click on an item to make it from scratch; doing so for eggs gives an egg-laying chicken (with an associated price), but doing that again gives the base level of "baby chicken." Not everything goes down that far (e.g. baking powder) but things like soil and seawater are of that ilk. See also: vanilla
- drusepth 3y agoReally interesting concept, but I think something is very wrong with whatever it is doing to (intentionally?) highjack browser histories/navigation on every page. For example, if I just click "Refried beans" on the homepage, then click the recipe for "Refried beans" from the ingredients list on that page... it takes pressing Back on the browser FIVE times before I'm finally back at the homepage. And, interestingly, at no point during this process do I actually go back to the actually-previous page (where you land after clicking "refried beans" on the homepage) -- I just stay on the current page as the URL changes every time and then eventually make it all the way back to the homepage with nothing in-between.
- Maxion 3y ago> For example, if I just click "Refried beans" on the homepage, then click the recipe for "Refried beans" from the ingredients list on that page... it takes pressing Back on the browser FIVE times before I'm finally back at the homepage. I must be getting old. There's no hijacking going on here, the page uses URL params, and probably JS to decode them.
- worewood 3y agoSo I'd say that the page must hijack the history to not pollute it with navigations that from the user perspective, aren't navigations.
- explaininjs 3y agoURL params have (almost) nothing to do with history hijacking. That’s all the history.pushStare and replaceState API’s.
- p4bl0 3y agoI was expecting recipes to make something that's an ingredient of themselves, so that the recipe is truly recursive. Now I'm trying to find out such examples of actually recursive recipe and I only find examples based on fermentation, which have a way to be bootstrapped but are then actually recursive: kombucha, kefir, vinegar, levain. Is there anything else?
- sand500 3y agoMy first thought was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew
- jks 3y agoI heard this from a Russian friend years ago (so I might get the details wrong): to make the Cocktail Recursive, mix - 1 unit of vodka - 2 units of water - 3 units of Cocktail Recursive
- thriftwy 3y agoAlso well known is Russian recursive salad: tomato, cucumber, salad. (Where the salad the consituent is an alias for lettuce) I can't imagine Russians mixing vodka with water, though.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoThere's also the Fibonacci's salad: mix leftovers from yesterday's salad with leftovers from the salad you had two days ago.
- emoII 3y agoMaking yoghurt contains the instruction: "Stir in some yogurt (from the store or from a friend) and cover with a clean damp towel overnight." This recursive dependency is not visualized sadly. Fun website nonetheless!
- p4bl0 3y ago
- ggambetta 3y agoIt's an interesting idea, but it could be... better? I started expanding pancakes, and at some point I got butter and buttermilk. The instructions to make them are essentially duplicated, despite buttermilk being a byproduct of making butter. The total prep time is also duplicated. Even if they were independent recipes, they could be done in parallel (most of the 24+ hours recipes for buttermilk and butter are 12-hour stages of waiting).
- ranting-moth 3y agoAccording to this I can replace wheat with an acre of soil, in a recipe of pancakes for 8. I don't think my guests will be returning. Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs might also pay me a visit if I attempt this.
- thallukrish 3y agothis is like minecraft.
- brickers 3y agoThis reminds me of something that always made me smile - when at uni I lived with an Israeli guy who made yogurt in a pan in the kitchen. When I asked how you make yogurt, the answer was “put some milk in a pan with some yogurt and leave it for a few days”. Not sure whether they’re in on the joke here, but the recipe for yogurt is to buy some
- matsemann 3y agoThis is actually something I feel lack in lot of recipes. They are often "too simple", as in they assume a lot of knowledge. Let's say you're making cinnamon buns. The recipe will basically just say mix these ingredients, knead, let it raise, roll, add stuff, bake. But it lacks all the details. Like how do you work the best with different kind of yeast? How do you know if you got the right texture / amount of liquid? What about all the tricks and tips when working with this kind of baking stuff? Old school cooking books are often better at this. There the cinnamon bun recipe would be "use the base bun dough from page X, but use only Y amount of ingredient Z". And then on the base recipe, all you need to know about doughs are covered. Similarly, a recipe with meat will just say "cook until done", and then you need to know yourself how to best sear it, the temperature at which it is done etc. Perhaps this is a place where LLMs can shine. It can fill in the perfect amount of knowledge for me if I'd ask it.
- omnibrain 3y agoThere has always been a distinction between (basic) cooking books that teach basic recipes and the accompanying cooking techniques on one hand and recipe books. But there also was always the assumption, that people pick up very basic techniques starting as a child by helping in the kitchen, beeing shown by it and doing it themselves.
- poorlyknit 3y agoYou might like Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" which is basically a popular science food chemistry "textbook" (it doesn't really go in the chemistry details but it usually gives you some pointers). It's got a chapter on dough iirc :) It's an excellent bathroom book because you can just open any page to find some quirky facts about foods.
- meta-level 3y agoCan someone now create a Factorio mod from this, please?
- jll29 3y agoI am disappointed that the recipe for "tortilla" is "go and buy it"; regardless of wheat flour or corn flour based tortillas, it is easy enough to make your own, and the different in taste is paramount.
- svat 3y agoI think you may have missed the point of the site: "Go and buy it" is merely the starting state for all recipes, see "Click on an ingredient to make it from scratch."
- explaininjs 3y agoYou have to click on the step to expand it.
- stratom 3y agoIt would be great to have an option to not only increase and decrease the time limit, but simply increase/decrease the complexity by one step. Edit: OK, this seems to kinda work by clicking on the ingredient.
- em-bee 3y agomy favorite joke when the food is late at a restaurant, is to explain that they are still busy gathering the ingredients, like slaughtering the cow for that beef steak we ordered an hour ago. now i can point to this website where the process is actually documented.
- wackget 3y agoSite doesn't work without websockets. Why does a pure text website need websocket functionality?
- salawat 3y agoBoring answer: Backend Less boring answer: Obfuscated malware payload (a.k.a JS)
- siddbudd 3y agoRecipe for cheese: "Go and buy it." I get this website is a joke, but it is a pretty bad one.
- justusthane 3y agoNo, change the “Time limit” slider and you’ll get it. It’s actually very clever.