I just wanted to shout out Cooking For Engineers even though it’s only moderately related. Its format for recipes is so quick to read. I would love to see CookLang integrate this style of recipe viewing.
It's the best I've seen for being able to easily follow along. I also really appreciate their diligence with scaling factors since that tends to be a huge pain point for me with other recipes.
Every home cook should have a digital scale. They cost like $20. And yes, for subgrams, you can always estimate 'a pinch', 1/4 tsp, etc...
By weight is more accurate, almost never exceeds the max of a home scale and simply throwing everything into one bowl, taring the scale each time is quicker too.
Honestly, I haven't found many ingredients where you do it to the gram. A few like spices, salt or baking powder you just do it to taste or assume a tsp is enough, for that one item.
Are these scaling factors baker's percentages? What is the purpose? I.e. what do you use them for? And if these are specified for all recipes, what do you use as the 100% for recipes that aren't based around flour?
They are baker's percentages! The reference ingredient is always set to 100% in the recipe. In the case of the one I linked it would be Chicken, drumsticks.
I followed the recipe to the letter.
I've flipped the steak a few times already and I'm still waiting for it to brown.
The butter is not melted either.
Not really surprising considering the pan is cold :(
Even with a hot pan, I would have put the butter first, not after the steak.
You want to wait until the skillet is ripping hot before you drop the steak in. I usually wait until I'm ready to finish cooking before dropping the butter in. Butter burns quickly so you do not want the butter in there for a long period of time.
Yep.
It also boils out the 15-20% water content of butter to make it closer to 100% fat.
Once you remove these (water + proteins and other impurities) the smoke point is much higher and it is much healthier for hot cooking.
It is called "ghee" when done at medium high temp, which gives it a slightly darker colour and nuttier taste (Indian way I think), and just called "clarified butter" when done at low temp.
Other advantage when done properly -> it does not go "off" anymore and does not need to be kept in the fridge, so you have this much easier/softer substance that you can spoon out of a jar.
You can even use it for deep frying - honestly the best fat for it.
This is my first time encountering Cooklang and the concept is really neat, but wow the language syntax is...interesting.
My first thought was how this would be useful for easily including recipe scaling up/down on a website, and it appears that Cooklang has support for that...(or it's still a WIP: https://cooklang.org/docs/roadmap/)
Shameless plug for my recipes side project I re-released a few days ago https://www.recilution.com on fly.io. Still lots to do.
I actually looked at this along with git backed recipes as repositories. I can see it useful for personal sites or exchanging with people if there is client involved as it's quite portable. You could do versions, diffs, timelines all sorts.
However it's rather esoteric (I guess everything on Hacker News is!?) and don't think it applies to the masses.
Despite recipes being very simple as a list of ingredients and things to do there is actually lot things you can slice things to try to make things easier whether thats viewing the recipe or editing.
For me the challenge I find is finding recipes and then refining them in such a way they are turn out the way I want them without having to read pages of introductory text you find in most recipe blog sites
I looked into making a recipe site for my girlfriend from scratch a few years ago (I'm well aware I could've used an off-the-shelf Wordpress plugin or similar, but I wanted to learn) and I was surprised to find that there's no real consensus on recipe formats. I dream of a universal format that would allow you to take any recipe and convert between unit systems, and change the portion sizes at will. I suspect one of the reasons for the lack of adoption of such a standard is that copyright law (at least in Australia), makes this impractical. Cooklang looks interesting, but it has the same problem as a physical lined cookbook - I have to rewrite the recipes myself instead of being able to simply copy and convert.
Sorry if this comes off as a noob question, I'm not a technical person but came from a marketing background.
Generally what is the monetisation model for founders developing languages like Cooklang? Would they sell support for the language, or create an ecosystem around it?
Some people have hobby projects they really don't want anything other than donations for. Sometimes they don't even want donations.
Money brings responsibility, and responsibility kills the fun. Donations will begin to feel like you owe the donators your time, even though you do not. But it's hard to break out of that mindset. Especially once you start getting negative remarks for not implementing enough features, despite the donations.
This feels like a non sequitur. Their project being open source or not doesn't protect their mental health spiralling. This could have happened to a paid lib, and you'd be out of luck due to vendor lock rather than just picking a fork.
The % in this syntax is not to indicate information about scaling, it is just a meaningless separator: "3%tsp". I'd say both "3tsp" or "3 tsp" look better.
That is highly unconvincing! Isn't the quantity a number? Have the syntax be @<ingredient>{<number> <units>}, where the units may contain spaces but not braces. You can even make the space between quantity and units optional.
Seems to me that it's about Cooklang, not about git. Nevertheless it looks neat!
For bread and baking in general, it might be useful to have it support Baker Percentage[1], either explicitly or by using specific tags for scaling dry and wet ingredients.
> Recipe sites have gotten so bloated that you need to read someone's entire life story to get the ingredients and steps.
This is a hellish IP “hack”. They can’t copyright the recipe, but adding a story about how your cat always meuws when your cooking pasta turns it into a copyrightable story. That’s why they do it.
I started working on a website to store cooklang recipes, what I miss is the possibility to link other recipes as ingredients, I wonder if it would be possible
I was having similar idea just couple of days ago! this is awesome, hopefully have a good community based apps in the future built around this like Anki
http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/108/Banana-Nut-Bre...