You are seriously misinterpreting the chart, and I'm really not sure how you arrived at that interpretation to begin with....

Or you could just list them separately to begin with. "3 egg whites" and "3 egg yolks" on separate rows.

Preparing all the ingredients before starting is something you learn in school?

Okay good. For a second, I thought I was going mad. To the previous poster, you only melt the butter. Reading goes left to right, top to bottom.

I kind of suspect the people that don't agree with you don't cook often, at all, or are very amateur. It absolutely starts instructions at the top and LEAVES OUT those ingredients used for prep in the ingredient list. While this isn't a big deal for this recipe (extra flour and butter) this can be annoying when actually making something that requires different ingredients during prep.

Furthermore, I honestly don't see how you could use this format for anything beyond the most basic of baking recipes. I tried to think my way through writing a recipe for potatoes fondant in this format, and my mind started to melt thinking about to convey technique at each step. I also struggle to see how it's less complex to read than a traditional recipe format. Additionally, I fully agree that this recipe is going to result in misreading which ingredients go in each step, especially when you have to separately mix two separate sets of ingredients that are 10 or 11 columns out. It's just making a fairly simple list of steps way more complicated than necessary.

Maybe I'm missing something though. If someone has a more detailed explanation of how this style is supposed to work that would might be helpful. Otherwise it just seems sort of useless beyond cooking a box cake or a basic buttercream.

Yeah, from a computer science perspective, cooking recipes are just algorithms. And I'm pretty sure, they need to be "turing-complete" in that, i.e. you can't really put a general boundary on their complexity.

A particular case that you can't portray with this scheme, is loops. It doesn't happen a lot, but

1. recipes
2. can
3. say
4. "Repeat from step 1".

You could obviously work around it to some degree by writing e.g "Prepare 10 dumplings" and maybe list the steps for that separately below.

But yeah, there's going to be other complexities like conditions, e.g. "if you're doing the vegan version, mix in the agave syrup now".

...But I guess, there's also no law that forces you to use that scheme for all recipes. You can totally write it out in prose when the boxes start getting hacky.

Seems to be back online. ¯\_(⊙_ʖ⊙)_/¯

Here's an open source library for generating these from markdown https://mossblaser.github.io/recipe_grid/tutorial.html

Yes I think the guy on that site invented the format. At least that's where I first saw it many many years ago .

This is pretty much useless unless the recipe is strictly additive. No room for "split a chunk of dough, we'll need it later". Or if you need to prepare two things in parallel before combining some but not all. Or indicating that a step can progress unattended.

Or giving units by weight.

I understand it's more convenient if you have a kitchen scale because you can put everything in the same container, but not all of us has a kitchen scale and converting multiple ingredients from weight to volume is damn near impossible.

I want to know what this is a recipe for. I guess I'll just have to try it and find out...

I love this. And to all the guys arguing whether this is a good way of designing a recipe, please remember you are on Lemmy, most people here are either it or engineers or at least very close to one of those professions so the amount of autism is significantly increased 😂

It refers to the setup required before cooking, and is often used in professional kitchens to refer to organizing and arranging the ingredients

That’s direct from Wikipedia and, yes, mis-en-place is taught in culinary schools.

You can certainly use it at home or even apply the principles outside of cooking.

However, I learned to cook in junior high home economics class and “mis-en-place” was not taught. I didn’t learn the term or its meaning until much later after adopting cooking as a hobby.

Unless a home cook has a strong interest in cooking as a hobby there’s lots of terms and techniques they wouldn’t likely know or apply. Think things like an aebleskiver or tamagotchi tamagoyaki pan.

Edit: autocorrect

Also an issue if you need to add an ingredient at more than one step. Suddenly you've got no good way of indicating the total amount you need for the recipe as well as the amounts for the individual steps. This is great for a specific kind of extremely simple recipe only.

https://mossblaser.github.io/recipe_grid/tutorial.html#splitting-recipe-components-up

someone figured out a way

Kinda breaks the elegance

A workaround for loops is to simply label every box A1, A2, B1, etc. and have it say "repeat steps A1-5" or whatever. You can also just edit the framework of the box entirely or use separate tables for totally independent parts. Anyway, I just dig the visual stacking lol.

You Americans just can't get away from the corporate brainwashing no matter how hard you try.
"Hershey's cocoa powder", what the fuck? Not only is naming a specific brand for a recipe bad enough, naming the worst shit imaginable is so fucking weird.

It works for very simple recipes where the work can be summed up in a word or two. Complex recipes need far more instructional information not just the order to put ingredients together.

Why is "mix" duplicated?

My guess is to not overwork the eggs?

Why cups, tbsp, and tsp though. Use ml and mg

https://www.cookingforengineers.com/

Mixing eggs in with fresh coffee and melted butter is a somewhat time sensitive action. If you don't get it mixed in in time, it can essentially cook, so it's best to do it deliberately.

You, and exactly as I remembered it - this is totally the same guy! 🤣

Perhaps the recipe calls for vomit flavored chocolate that other brands cant match.

Nah, it's the delectible combination of wax and vegetable oil.

Typically that just means there was some kind of endorsement deal with the company that made the recipes. I doubt this is an exclusively American phenomenon.

That makes sense if you like numbers that are easy to multiply and divide, but it depends on region. Some people aren't familiar with metric, and the recipes they write probably don't use it. In all likelihood, recipes you find in imperial units were likely written by an american.

The volume vs. weight thing though, that transcends region or systems of measurement. It assumes everyone has a kitchen scale, when most non-professionals have volumetric measuring supplies which are typically way cheaper

My guess is that it has to do with the variations from brand to brand and clarifying that this particular recipe used that brand to get the expected taste. Assuming they didn't enshitify their version with cheaper ingredients.

Though I hate recipes that say something like "one can" or "one package". Even without shrinkflation, different brands sometimes use different sizes (if no brand is specified).

Though if it's a published recipe, I agree with the other comment saying that money probably exchanged hands, and that deal might even be the only reason that recipe is featured at all, because it was probably a "publish recipes that sell more of our shit" rather than "fit our shit into your recipes where possible". Guessing the whole thing might have started with "inventory of our cocoa powder is piling up, sales team gets a bonus if they can get it sold (and we'll lay off the people producing it for a bit)".

But how are they supposed to fit irrelevant descriptions of their family's history with the dish in that format??

pity us.

i wish all recipes were presented this way. every single one of them.

We deserve no pity

Exactly what I was hoping existed already. I think I'm going to try and convert some recipes to this format and see how it goes. I like that it has the ingredients in a simple list, makes shopping so much easier.

I feel you could specify the amount in the step if it's not all of that particular ingredients.

Nah sorry doesn’t appeal to me at all.

Sometimea it is important like when a recipe wants American jiff or skippy peanut butter etc, because it contains icing sugar besides just peanuts; which changes sugar ratios for cookies.

Ai will help you ;)

This chart works well as both the requirements and process reference.

The fine details can be asterisk line items afterward.

Then the family story goes at the bottom, with perforations so you can tear it off and toss it out

Cheap kitchen scales are $10-20 and are accurate enough for cookies. I'm not suggesting that volumetric measurements should go away, but you will find that cooking or baking by weight is much more reproducible than by volume.

Yea, this format sucks.

Then the family story goes at the bottom, with perforations so you can tear it off and toss it out

Stop you gorgeous creature, I don't want to fall in love with you, I don't even know you.

But what is the recipe for? There's no title.

I get it, some kinda cookie right? But still

Yeah, this is actually beautiful!

Autism didn't exist 50 years ago! Autism 50 years ago:

Then you lose the format of the steps on the right. Try to picture what it would look like if it had you add half the vanilla where it currently is and another half at the "fold in" stage. There's not a good way to do it.

This design is built around a very simple kind of utilitarian cooking that's common for institutional kitchens. It's great for that! But there are a ton of recipes that would be complete trainwrecks if you tried to fit them to this kind of diagram.

because those are common physical units people have at home, especially tablespoons and teaspoons are basically universal and have clearly defined ml conversions anyways.