Comment by exmadscientist
2 years ago
Presentation and structuring is really, really important. The best I've found so far is a multicolumn format: https://i.imgur.com/w0UrJt5.png
Column 1 is the quantity. This doesn't really belong in the first column but it matches traditional ways of writing things and doesn't cause any actual trouble to do it that way, so whatever, we can do it that way. Column 2 is the ingredient. And column 3 is the cooking instructions. The rows are then grouped (shaded) by which ingredients go into which cooking instructions.
You can scan down columns 1 and 2 to get a prep / mise en place list, or just column 2 to get a shopping list (possibly involving deduplication if an ingredient is called for more than once), then execution is just running down column 3. The only real problem with execution is when it gets nonlinear (you want to overlap steps 3 and 4 in that recipe, for example) but that's a problem with any format I know of.
It's not perfect, but it works really, really well, and better than any other format I've ever seen.
...also now I want chili since it's cold and wet here in Seattle. And I should probably revise that recipe to reflect what I really do, but it's just chili, it's pretty tolerant of whatever you have lying around....
Take a look at my website, https://letscooktime.com/ and let me know what you think of the way I render recipes. There is an internal representation like this: 1. A recipe is composed of multiple components 1. A component is composed of ingredient requirements and steps 1. An ingredient requirement is a tuple of an ingredient and a quantity
I found good success using this model for recipes, specially complex baking recipes like breads with multiple repeat ingredients.
For myself, the one thing missing the quantity of items inside of the recipe itself. I am often using my phone to read a recipe while cooking and its annoying to have to scroll back and forth to see how much of something I need to add. I have all the ingredients out and ready, just tell me in the steps how much of a seasoning I need to be adding.
Yes! Phone screens are too small to show both the instructions and the ingredients at the same time. To address that in CookTime, I highlight any instance of an ingredient found in the recipe instructions and show the quantity if you click/tap on it. I could change it to just show it unconditionally if that wasn't apparent when you looked at a recipe (like this one for example https://letscooktime.com/Recipes/Details?id=ed962bb3-64b7-42...)