COOKING FOR ENGINEERS!!!
I learned how to cook from this site like 20 years ago! I still use that format on my home recipe cards sometimes, but now I’ve just gotten so used to it all recipes look like this on my head. Great format, taters guna tate.
The real site also includes a paragraph description, this is just a quick reference card that’s assuming you have already cooked the recipe a few times, not great for learning it the first time.
Why is mix included twice?
Mix the sugar, vanilla, and coffee first. Then mix in the eggs.
it’s two different steps, but I don’t find the chart so intuitive,
IMO there shouldn’t be borders between the actions and ingredientsedit: that would make it worseOh. I think then the table would benefit from an additional row up top of subheading columns featuring step numbers (1, 2, 3, etc) to make that clearer.
Annoying that they did not even mention the original site: https://www.cookingforengineers.com/
Which does seem down right now, so archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260729050049/https://www.cookingforengineers.com/
Damn, even that site has a life story before a recipe
Very cool tho
If you put a recipe on your webpage Google will ignore that shit. Butter and eggs? So few words, many numbers. Boring.
So you have to add a narrative if you want search engines to pay any attention, or even count the page as content.
Google could just fix this, but no, we’ve all adjusted to it.
I had no idea it was about too few words. I always thought it was that they add all that fluff to maximize their advertising revenue, making you scroll and scroll through a story before you find the recipe. Seems like either way, it’s thanks to Google….
Maybe originally a couple decades ago, but every food blog template added a “jump to recipe” button pretty shortly after those started to be a thing.
Interestingly, not the whole site is down, but the homepage is
This guy was the foundation of my cooking skills… 20 years ago. Damn.
I found the recipe but apparently the design in the OP wasn’t perfect, they have slightly updated it: https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/327/Espresso-Brownies
The site being down fits with the ‘for engineers’ theme
Just because we can’t code for shit and insist on doing everything ourselves…
Joking aside, it was down because it got Reddit hugged to death, since a post on the frontpage of /r/all mentioned it in the top comment.
Now it’s back online
The guy is pursuing a patent for it, so I’m not sure other people can use it XD
I have never seen that in my life and it’s perfect.
Absolutely love this way of setting it up! but it’s only almost perfect. It has weight in mass instead of volume and temperature converted to celsius. I only need a proper measure of the pan and it would let me make it without any conversions.
This is kind of a normalized process diagram to illustrate functional programming paradigms. I read this as it was posted in a programming community here on Lemmy a couple of months ago:
https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/WhatsFunctionalProgrammingAllAbout.html
Hucking fell. Ima just download it to remember this exists. Thank you
You should probably mix together the dry ingredients before folding them in. So the big blank square in the bottom middle should be “mix” but I guess that ruins the cascading aesthetic and makes it more cluttered, which would’ve also showed the weakness of this design
Also why would you fold in the dry ingredients, maybe this is just some “lorem ipsum” recipe but unless there’s a foam you’re trying to keep inflated you don’t really need to fold stuff in.
So the big blank square in the bottom middle should be “mix”
is see that as an improvement. that square was empty and unbalanced space before
showed the weakness of this design
i guess when you generate such a design per script, then you can replace some of the straight lines with flowing/wavy lines and get a nice design again. (i am thinking like a sankey diagram maybe? but there are probably other more compact variants possible)
What does that mean? What does fold in mean?
Not sure if joking or not.
When you have a fragile mixture, like whipped eggs, if you mix like standard you will squeeze most of the air out
When you fold, you make a vertical circle, from the bottom and flopping on top, in a what that doesn’t so much ‘beat’ but fluffs.
I didn’t know the meme and this genuinely educated me so thank you
It’s a scene from Schitt’s Creek.
Didn’t know that, really needa watch it
It’s the best!
You just fold in the cheese, David.
You fold it in. I don’t think I can be more clear.
Oh good… now I see bubbles.
David! What does burning smell like?
Means lift some of the mixture with your spoon, turn it over and press it in again. It’s a technique for mixing without squeezing the air out, so it will rise in the oven.
But where am I going to put the six paragraph AI generated anecdote about my grandmother?
“And Nanny only used Hershey cocoa powder. Click my Amazon link to buy it from my shop!”
In white text on white background at the bottom of the page where the rest of the SEO goes.
You know, I don’t hate this.
Let’s simplify websites significantly. Everything SEO/AI slop appears below the fold in white text.
The point of the AI slop / random pointless exposition is to maximize the number of ads a user has to scroll past to see the actual recipe. What incentive would a website have to put that at the bottom?
It started as a SEO thing where websites with longer texts got a better indexing on Google, thus more ad revenue.
One remark. Preheating the oven is missing. The first step should be to set it.
It’s right at the top?
I first saw this notation technique on a recipe card pinned to a stove from the 1850s at a preserved historical village display. I have no reason to doubt that it was the original card, or descended from it.
Kind of reminds me of the output of qdirstat.
Always loved these blobs!
wait, is qdirstat like windirstat but for linux? If so, I’m downloading it as soon as I get home
Yes. I don’t know if it’s still maintained, but I got my install through AUR and it works
Filelight is my go-to
Sequoia view developed at my alma mater. This was cutting edge technology when I was there almost 25 years ago lol
Perhaps less relevant for you on Linux, but for any using Windows, WizTree is a hugely faster alternative to WinDirStat in case that’s a pain point.
I believe this design breaks down once you prepare an ingredient that then gets split for use in two or more later steps.
But now I’m thinking which kind of diagram could be used as well. Some adaption of an UML activity diagram maybe?
List it twice?
No.
Can’t an ingredient be there twice?
But you want to do the first phase together
Then two tables? Or rows in the middle to mark the action to split the ingredient in 2?
rows in the middle to mark the action to split sounds the best to me
Create a separate card for that ingredient, and in the main card list “add X% of <other card>”
I like that idea, if only for the fact that it opens the door to recursive recipes.
A pie with itself?
Or if any of the steps requires a more complicated instruction that can’t be expressed in a few words. It wouldn’t break the structure of the diagram, but it wouldn’t be as beautiful.
It is a fun idea though, maybe there is another format that works.
This diagram is classic “engineer developing a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist in a domain they don’t understand”
The diagram does have benefits. For example it shows which steps can be performed in parallel if multiple people are cooking.
And concise! No more frantic scrolling on my phone with batter-covered fingers
I don’t need a diagram to do that but maybe my experience is atypical
Similarly, it also easily identifies which part of the recipe each ingredient goes to. You can do this by splitting up the ingredients list as well, but that doesn’t really go against it being a good idea.
I’m a software “engineer” and also passionate about cooking. Both are arts. You can’t reduce it to an algorithm
I ran into this exact issue when I was making these diagrams for my own recipes: https://git.tilde.town/gamerdonkey/recipes_for_engineers#known-issues . My workaround was just to have instructions to set some aside and use it later.
I find this layout works best for in-the-moment reference while cooking, and the 2-dimensional nature of it is what really makes it useful. So I think of splitting an ingredient as like lifting some of it out into an imaginary third dimension before inserting it later at another step.
