7 ms·

Just finished my own overthinking of recipe structures. I figure that a recipe is more or less an upside-down tree! Where you start with a list of all the no

• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• pickledish 2y ago
  Ha, your example makes intuitive sense right when you see it. Really clever thanks for sharing it!
  • chuckl 2y ago
    thanks for checking it out!
• 4b11b4 2y ago
  ofc, trees
• nicbou 2y ago
  What if the same ingredient is used twice in a recipe, for example for cooking and finishing?
  • chuckl 2y ago
    I think of them as 2 different nodes, 2 instances of the same type of ingredient. Practically I just have it listed twice if it's important like butter. https://cookbook.cstebbins.com/recipe/the-best-swedish-meatballs https://cookbook.cstebbins.com/recipe/the-best-swedish-meatb... otherwise if it's a staple like salt I just say something like "stir in and season with additional salt and pepper to taste" like in https://cookbook.cstebbins.com/recipe/sloppy-sophisto-joes https://cookbook.cstebbins.com/recipe/sloppy-sophisto-joes
    • Swizec 2y ago
      > I think of them as 2 different nodes, 2 instances of the same type of ingredient. But this is inconvenient during the shopping step of the process. There you want all uses of an ingredient (possibly across multiple recipes) collapsed into 1 node.
      • chuckl 2y ago
        for sure! The use case I'm solving for myself is easy lookup while I'm cooking which is different than the use case of me going shopping Maybe someday I'll add a feature to grab a shopping list. Could organise it into sections of the store and do a quick traveling salesman problem :D also due to the conciseness of the grid, it's also not great if you're making it for the first time
        • account42 2y ago
          Duplicating the nodes is also far from ideal when the reused node is not a raw ingredient but an intermediate with possibly complex dependencies itself. Duplicating the whole subtree would not be helpful.
        • neutronicus 2y ago
          > The use case I'm solving for myself is easy lookup while I'm cooking This is a constant source of stress for me cooking from cookbooks I otherwise like. I prefer to measure on-demand, and wish the steps would just duplicate the quantities of the ingredients "whisk in the olive oil (1/4 cup)" instead of "whisk in the olive oil" so I don't have to scan the list of ingredients and figure it out
      • ClaraForm 2y ago
        What if there was one further section in the left column that runs across the y axis and tallies ingredients? That way there are three "segments" of the spreadsheet: shopping; prep; cooking.
  • irrational 2y ago
    Here is an example from Cooking for Engineers - Lemon Bars. If you scroll down to the recipe you can see it uses all-purpose flour twice and lists it two times on the left side of the table. https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/33/Lemon-Bars https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/33/Lemon-Bars
    • beAbU 2y ago
      This makes it real hard to determine the total amount of flour needed. Maybe add another column to the left, that sums up all the ingredients, in the format you might get it at the store. Then the second column becomes the mise en plas step, where the base ingredients are divided and prepared/chopped/grated etc. Problem is column 1 and 2 wont necesarily have ingredients on the same row...
      • renewiltord 2y ago
        Left columns is raw ingredients no? LLM did perfect job with summing it. This is like instruction plate not shopping list. Can transform trivially.
• adt2bt 2y ago
  Interesting. Also allows for some fun ‘expansion’ in recipes. A leaf node may be ‘chicken stock’ but you could link to a recipe that boils down to that one ‘chicken stock’ node if you want to DIY it.
  • jackweirdy 2y ago
    In a previous job I worked for a site doing natural language parsing on recipes. We noticed one of our partner websites had an unusual number of unique ingredients. It turned out every ingredient was a link to another recipe to make that ingredient, along the lines of your idea. However for some reason (presumably SEO) they took this to the extreme and everything was a recipe. Including apples. The recipe for “apple” is 1. Take 1 Apple 2. Eat and enjoy But since Apple is a prerequisite for this recipe, infinite looping is a risk in the kitchen now
• __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Wow, all recipes should look like that, nice work!
• irrational 2y ago
  This is just like the Cooking for Engineers recipe format. If you haven't seen it, click on any recipe and scroll down to the bottom. https://www.cookingforengineers.com/ https://www.cookingforengineers.com/
  • chuckl 2y ago
    that's interesting! Same concept. I initially got the idea from the book Cooking for Geeks https://www.cookingforgeeks.com/ https://www.cookingforgeeks.com/ I wonder if they got it from Cooking for Engineers
• stevage 2y ago
  Some recipes end up with more than one dish, like when you prepare a thing and its accompanying sauce together. I guess superficially you can join them together with a final node that is like "serve all the dishes".
  • beAbU 2y ago
    Some dishes require more overlap, which will be tricky to write in this format. E.g. taking the pan juices and turning that into a sauce. It's a separate process/dish, yet wholly dependant on the other process completing a critical step.
  • account42 2y ago
    You also often have ingredients or intermediate products that are used in more than one step so a tree is not ideal. You could duplicate those ingredients/intermediates but that would not be helpful. And for more complex meals, time planning becomes more important so that everything is ready to serve together.
    • stevage 2y ago
      To be honest, I kind of prefer when a recipe treats duplicate ingredients as completely separate. Rather than that "use 300g of the butter here, use the rest here" approach which is harder to follow.
      • yencabulator 2y ago
        That works well for a basic off-the-shelf ingredient, but what if you needed a complex dressing/sauce/broth/marinade/spice mix that was later used in multiple combinations. You'd want to make that all in one batch.
• eru 2y ago
  Well, it would be more like a directed acyclic graph, not a tree, because you can re-use nodes. (And it's not even necessarily acyclic, because eg sourdough or master stock is perhaps best modelled as a cycle.) In any case, looking at a recipe as a tree or a graph is a very limited view: A great recipe isn't a list of steps to produce 'something'. A great recipe has a dish in mind with a specific taste (or a specific family of tastes with knobs you can turn), and the author has worked out what parts of the recipe you need to adapt in what ways to compensate or take advantage of current local conditions. Eg some days it's warmer than others, so you need to adjust your fermentation times. Or some parts of the world have harder water than others. Or your available veggies might have different amounts of moisture etc.
  • account42 2y ago
    > (And it's not even necessarily acyclic, because eg sourdough or master stock is perhaps best modelled as a cycle.) So what you are saying is that cooking instructions need phi nodes?
  • xnorswap 2y ago
    From a slightly pedantic point of view that misses the point of cooking or baking, I disagree about the ability to re-use nodes. If you have a recipe that uses 150g flour in step 1, then later uses 350g flour in step 4, then you actually have two separate ingredients: 1. 150g plain flour 2. 350g plain flour It may useful to present an ingredient summary for the purposes of shopping which collects that to 500g flour, but from when trying to represent the recipe, it's actually two different ingredients, and it'd be a false re-use to try to re-use the node or try to treat those ingredients as a single ingredient of greater quantity. Just because two things appear otherwise identical, doesn't mean they are. I sometimes see a similar issue in software development and re-use of classes or functions. Two different cases happen to need identical handling, so get put through the same code paths. Then later it turns out one case needs to be treated slightly differently, so that path ends up with special casing, and you get a mess of special handling with case statements or "bool treatDifferently" parameters. If things are conceptually different, then treat them differently, don't assume false commonality.
• mr_mitm 2y ago
  Of course, when thinking of actual trees, it would resemble a right-side up tree.
• Xelbair 2y ago
  I would say that it gets a bit more complex than that. some recipes can produce multiple related dishes, and some ingredients can have multi-step substitutions. So Graph would be a better representation. you could join multiple dishes into final 'abstract' dish to force it into tree-esque shape with some shuffling hopefully, but i think that's unnecessary limitation - especially if you consider that some recipes give you some compound ingredients(stocks for example) as side-output that you might want to use in future! This is a great case for using that information for planning future dishes you could cook for free.
  • chuckl 2y ago
    100% under the hood I have it more like a graph with levels. The traversal is from all of the "leaves" to a single node rather than from the head node towards the leaves as in a traditional tree. The upside-down tree is more for a visual for the reader. At the moment I don't have a recipe that outputs 2 end states but entirely possible since it's more of a graph under the hood.
• TeMPOraL 2y ago
  I'd start with a DAG. In fact, going through a project management basics training at work recently reminded me that cooking recipes are isomorphic to project plans. Which makes DAGs an obvious natural representation for a recipe, and incidentally, makes the Gantt chart one of the best ways of looking at it.
  • addaon 2y ago
    A Gantt chart for a single recipe may make some sense, but doesn’t really add value. A Gantt chart for a whole dinner — I’m making these six dishes, figure out what I have to do when — is much more interesting. But for this to be passive, the edges on your DAG need to carry metadata about how long the action can/must/should be delayed (no active work), and the nodes (tasks) must carry metadata on how long the task takes. For example, after a whipping my egg whites, they can’t just sit there for two hours; and boiling my pasta water may take at least 12 minutes, but I’d rather not leave it on the boil for another 30.
    • TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > the edges on your DAG need to carry metadata about how long the action can/must/should be delayed (no active work), and the nodes (tasks) must carry metadata on how long the task takes. Yes, those are all constraints that need to be stored there. Some of them are fixed, others can be computed when optimizing the plan. It's also information you should have specified on the recipe. Most of it usually isn't, as it's either obvious[0] or the recipe author doesn't even realize it's a parameter. -- [0] - Some obvious to anyone, some obvious to someone very experienced at cooking. Confusing them makes things really difficult for beginners.
• d--b 2y ago
  overthinking some more: your idea is great but it removes the one feature that classic recipes have: sequencing. You can have the best of both world, though, if the branches in your tree had some kind of timing associated. Like when you make lasagnas, the bolognese takes 1 hour to cook, while the bechamel takes less than 10 minutes. You need to have a way to say: "while the bolognese is reducing, make the bechamel"
  • yoz-y 2y ago
    I’ve been cooking with recipes quite a bit lately (before it was just random stuff) and I must say that sequencing is always wrong. Unfortunately they all seem to assume that chopping, cleaning and moving stuff around is all done in 0 time. I wish the recipes would take this into account more. Because of this I actually would prefer the plain tree organisation more.
    • retzkek 2y ago
      mise in place is the art of reducing all that other stuff to as close as zero time as possible during the cooking, and many recipes expect the cook to read through first and identify what can be prepared/placed in advance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place
      • yoz-y 2y ago
        That is fine for professional recipes, when you cook for dozens of people. But for home cooking, if they say 25-35 minutes prep time 40-60 minutes cooking time, I’d expect them to count the cutting in there.
• turboponyy 2y ago
  Except the completion of the preparation of various nodes may have to be synchronized to that of other nodes - i.e. the steps can not be parallelized in the general case. Some nodes expire, experience changes in temperature or moisture distribution and so on. In that sense, there is additional context that your model doesn't account for that may preclude certain nodes from being combined.
  • alganet 2y ago
    How often do you see that knowledge expressed in the recipes themselves? Microdata doesn't need to _fully_ describe something. It's not describing to a machine how to perform the recipe, it's just annotating the text with useful metadata. It's metadata, doesn't need to be full data.
    • WorldMaker 2y ago
      Doesn't mean that there aren't users that would desire a GANTT chart for a recipe (or set of them) if given the opportunity from enough data. Getting an entire meal out on time is one of the oldest schools of project management, after all.
      • alganet 2y ago
        I don't think this knowledge even exists. Can you point me to a recipe website that has any structured information about paralellized steps? To me, it sounds like you want to annotate data that doesn't even exist.
        • 9dev 2y ago
          Well, it’s often in the steps; stuff like, while the sauce is simmering, prepare the vegetables… just before the sauce has reduced, add the red wine. And some is just implicit knowledge that comes with experience, true. I also haven’t seen a site that actually turns that into a neat visualisation, but as an amateur chef, properly timing steps of a recipe is definitely important. I’m inclined to agree with GP though that a good model should be able to capture that.
• dubadub 2y ago
  I experimented a bit with that format and ChatGPT can generate pretty decent results. I described it in a blog https://cooklang.org/blog/03-ai-and-the-evolution-of-recipe-formats/ https://cooklang.org/blog/03-ai-and-the-evolution-of-recipe-.... Here's a full graph it generated https://cooklang.org/blog/full-recipe-graph.png https://cooklang.org/blog/full-recipe-graph.png. I like how it was able to name intermediate nodes.