NIH syndrome strikes again.

("Not Invented Here" for those unfamiliar.)

how do you actually read it though

You melt the butter, then add the next 3 ingredients and mix everything, etc...

Top down and left to right.

I'm not sure an excel chart is that much better than just saying "melt x, mix y, fold z and then bake" and the list of ingredients xyz.

Yeah, what if you want to do something like: "Seperate the yolks from the whites, beat the whites until they're fluffy and then add sugar and mix with the rest." And then a later step doing something with the yolks. I don't see how you would do that here without it turning into an unreadable mess.

But how do you fold in the cheese?

Much worse. And it won't work for most recipes.

This isn't a recipe? Recipes have 40 paragraph long stories about how your grandmother fell in love in Rome .

I once came across a cooking blog that used this sort of instructions over a decade ago; was apparently run by an engineer - haven’t found it again since, but the methodology stuck with me.

I like it as the shorthand at the end. Special instructions could still be included before it as usual.

I believe www.cookingforengineers.com , but it’s either down or doesn’t like my VPN, so I can’t verify.

I feel like this is less useful for a recipe you're making for the first time or make once in a while, but probably pretty handy as a quick reference for something you make regularly.

Definitely not a VPN issue; I’m raw dogging the internet on my phone and also getting a Server 500 error.

Will bookmark to try and remember to revisit it at some point in the future. 😅

You could just list egg yolks separately from egg whites in the first place. But yeah I get your point, for certain more complicated recipes it will break down. At the cost of some readability I guess you could list products of earlier ingredients on the side, but then it's no longer a list of what you need to start.

I think my ideal solution would just be regular recipes but have them actually list the measurements of things in the text. It's very annoying to have to go back to the list especially when it's on the other side of a page.

Or you could go the other direction and have a full graphical flow chart with some text in it, although I can't imagine that being particularly space efficient

I've never seen anyone else do that, but that's how I began hand-writing recipe cards around a decade ago. Not as neat a table, but groups with arrows that combine down to a final step (so I guess more pyramidal in most cases).

This one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi–Shneiderman_diagram

and inconsistently labeled units

Last working

Yeah agreed, recipes could use something among the lines of "... And then add the sugar (250g)"

But lots of recipes needs instructions to clarify why or how you should use certain techniques or ingredients and the like.

If it is not for everyone then it is not really an improvement.

What does "not invented here" mean in this context?

I came here to ask, "where is the 20 page long family history that makes you get a RSI from scrolling down to see the ingredients" but this will do too

I don't understand what this adds that the "traditional" recipe style is missing. I even see some things it's lacking. For example, the last 4 ingredients should be mixed together independently before folding in to the base.

I don't dislike this format, but I just don't see why it's so revolutionary.

Or everything is in cups.

And if I’m using my phone every other line has 50 ads

It's either that or I have to make little piles of dry ingredients on my table and it makes a huge mess.

For example, the last 4 ingredients should be mixed together independently before folding in to the base.

Isn't that indicated by the combination of rows?

I like this chart. It even allows for multithreaded multi-person baking, because the combination of rows indicates where processes are merged (and need to be done).

Edit: I may be dumb. A mix step is missing below the mix block of the other ingredients, but it could easily be included.

This is terrible - forces me to scan across and then forget what I'm looking at.

It's contrary to mis-en-place: ingredients listed first, then instructions.

My technical brain does like the visual, this just doesnt work in reality, especially as recipe complexity increases.

[ * ]Ublock origin master race[ * ]

Because it fits on a little card. Which everyone used to keep recipes on for a long time. Little boxes full of recipe cards.

I guess it's just a revolutionary idea for those that didn't grow up in a time when we already did this. This is pretty much what all my recipes (inherited from my grandmother) look like today, just without the bracketing.

Right, I was about to say that the big near-square in the middle bottom could easily be used to indicate this as a separate process. I really like this format!

Its not as universal as you are suggesting here. I've seen it before but there are certainly no cards like this in the boxes I've inherited.

Huh, well, I think it's awesome. The ingredients are listed first if you just consult the first column. In your defense, I would absolutely be interested in seeing this format applied to far more complex recipes. The blank boxes could easily be used to fill independent simultaneous preparation, though. One could simply fill the cells as one works from left to right. This is awesome!

Every time my wife or I look up a recipe we start singing "when I was a young warthog..."

Mis-en-place format makes sense if you’re a professional or have adopted professional methods.

However, a lot of home cooks/bakers don’t prep everything first and instead grab as they go or “chunk” the recipe steps like in the image.

It is totally possible. This is basically a dependency graph. Separating the yolks simply goes closer to the left, and it produces new ingredients (or data, if you want): yolks and whites. They move right to their own sequential processes.

If the last 4 ingredients need mixing together first, then you simply have a mix column with just those ingredient rows under the mix column from above to show that those get mixed independently in parallel. This recipe implies that is unnecessary for this food though.

My wife said "But how will we learn their life story!?"

It clearly shows the sequential and parallel threads of execution:

• up/down: parallel.
• left to right: sequential

It clearly shows the sequence of produced intermediate results, split and merging points:

• a row that splits into two rows is one step producing more than one result. Like spliting yolk and whites.
• many rows becoming one: merging node. Like baking many ingredients.

Recycling an idea of another domine and claiming it is original?

Maybe it depends on the recipe. I'm all for rethinking them and going for a cleaner design. I'm also looking forward to the day that we migrate away from hillbilly units, so I don't have to search "xxx recipe metric".

Ok I don’t know where this is from but I want to start singing it out of context just to keep the mystery going.

I'm a sensitive soul, though I seem thick-skinned,
And it hurt that my friends never stood downwind!

How do I melt everything after the butter? Do eggs even melt? 🤔

Luckily most recipes won't go super wide

Maybe based.cooking should try it out

It's the circle of memes...