The programmer/engineer in me has been deeply unhappy with recipes (both online and in print). The recipes in this online book are no exception.
Chief complaint: the ambiguity of description means that ten different chefs could follow the recipe and have ten different results.
To explain: consider the simple act of "browning an onion". Variables that might affect the outcome include the fine-ness of the dicing, the heat of the skillet (is my medium heat the same as yours?) and the extent of caramelization. The range of outcomes here can be anywhere from a crunchy, almost raw onion, to a nearly disintegrated brown paste. Take this and multiply with all the other steps involved in a typical recipe and try to tell me that the end result is predictable.
Has anyone found any technique/recipe books that attempt to deal with this ambiguity? The only place I ever see clear instruction on such topics are cooking classes, but that's not convenient and it makes me wonder what the point of recipe books are at all.
> To explain: consider the simple act of "browning an onion". Variables that might affect the outcome include
Hate to break it to you, but it's even worse. Further variables include the moisture content which varies per-onion, the type of onion, the size of onion, the thickness of your pan, and the material it's made out of.
The reality is that cooking is an art, not a science. Even if your equipment stays the same, every chicken breast and every tomato you buy is different.
Now it totally drives me nuts when people say "if you follow the recipe you can't go wrong!" There are usually 100 different ways you can go wrong.
But it's just part of cooking. You learn to cook the same way you learned to walk or throw a ball or speak your language: through trial and error and careful observation and practice.
The great resource now is YouTube videos, which have the huge advantage of letting you see exactly what it's supposed to look like when it's done (how brown is brown? how thick is thickened?), and just by seeing the types of pans they use and the sizes of flames, and the amount of bubbles or sizzling, you get actually get a feel for it pretty quick.
Finally, the point of recipe books is to tell you which ingredients, rough quantities, and the steps. Just because recipes require interpretation (similar to a music score) doesn't mean they're useless.
> The reality is that cooking is an art, not a science.
Cooking is a science. If you fail to evaluate your ingredients beforehand, then you're just not doing the science particularly well. Writing recipes and interpreting recipes are arts.
"Ingredient evaluation" as you call it is the art. While it's technically possible to quantify every tomato, in practical terms it's a waste of time, which is better spent learning how to adapt on the fly.
I remember hearing once that baking is a science and cooking an art. If you mess a step up while baking, your product is generally destroyed. Do the same while cooking, and you're often left with something that just tastes a little different (and may even become an updated twist in the recipe).
> Has anyone found any technique/recipe books that attempt to deal with this ambiguity?
Absolutely! If you are looking for this kind of specificity, Cooks Illustrated is your source. The will discuss multiple variables of basic techniques. Like in your example, dice size vs. browning time vs. just what the hell does "browned" mean anyway?
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The other solution to this: practice. If you cook thoughtfully, you will eventually come to understand how these variables impact your dish. But you need to pay attention while you cook, like a good engineer!
I'll give you a 3 examples, specifically about onions, that took me years of practice to understand.
Indian gravy base (essentially all dark curries and masalas)
A <1cm dice, cooked very slowly until dark brown with no spot of white and not burned. You literally want a uniform brown paste because that gives the gravy a solid base and has a very earthy taste to it. Hard to do without burning.
Mire Poix (a base used in many, many dishes in Europe: 50%carrot, 50%celery, 100%onion by mass):
A <1cm dice, cooked slolwy until translucent. You don't want a toasty flavor at ALL, you want the savory taste of the onion with no zing. (easy, can be done in ~8-10 minutes)
Spanish Caponata:
A <1cm dice, cooked until browned edges (higher heat), but still white center, meaning sweet with some zing but still a toasty part. (tricky to not burn and still get a brown edge)
And all of this skill changes if you buy a new pan or move to a new house with a new range! Or if your yellow onions are dried and cured properly, or overly moist or greenish.
But cooks Illustrated will cover a lot of this, you just need to buy a lot of books though because they spread this out across several volumes. :(
Practice though. Read cookbooks. Literally read them, the intros are usually very thoughtful. Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffry, Alma Lach, OTTOLENGHI... just to name a few of the greats you should check out.
You cannot escape environmental factors. As you cook more and more, you will understand your kitchen and environment more, and learn by feel what "medium heat" is, and how it affects food, and why you might use it. These things are always guidelines, and intentionally vague.
The most famous example is how most baking recipes call for 2-5 cups of flour, since the humidity in the air, the season the flour was harvested, etc. all affect how much you might need in the end. So you just learn when you've added "enough". That might make the engineer in you upset, but that's the reality of it.
There are no precise steps to "brown an onion", but you will know when you've done it correctly. And if you did it wrong, that just means it takes more practice and more learning about your skills.
The cookbooks and recipe formats that we have were never designed for someone in your situation. And if you have a background in a field with standardized parts and repeatable results, the kinds of instructions cookbooks give can be maddening. Totally understandable.
One book that helped me was Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone. You may not want to cook vegetarian, but many vegetarians are young people who are also building their own cooking styles from scratch. So VCfE goes through the basics - like what is cubing and what is dicing - with illustrations. While it has complex recipes, it also includes almost absurdly simple ones, like preparing beans with olive oil and salt. But think of them like "kata"; basic exercises, that you can build up to more complex forms.
A recent book which I've recently found extremely useful is Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. It is a wonderfully readable introduction to the elements of cooking and how they combine, and it is great for complete newbies as well as experienced home cooks. It manages to be both accessible, practical and a little bit technical, perfect for the techie who wants to get better at cooking. It taught me things simple dishes like roasted chicken, which I had prepared like a hundred times before I read it, which have changed how I cook forever.
Very well articulated! I’ve thought about this before too. There is an assumption of having a “baseline knowledge and skill set” to be able to use most recipes. If you’re really starting from scratch (like I was a few years ago), the best thing you can do is to start trying and failing. I take meticulous notes on the things I cook to help me learn and improve.
Take your example of heat on a pan. I’ve always wanted a stove where I can control the BTUs with a dial. You could test your own stove for it and calibrate yourself for example.
There is a slightly more scientific blog here, but it won’t satisfy what you’re looking for I don’t think. I’ve never found that depth, but would appreciate it too! https://www.seriouseats.com/
I'd also like to mention cooks illustrated (they are online at https://www.cooksillustrated.com/, but my primary experience is with the printed magazine form).
I don't know if I'd call them 'scientific', but I like the detailed accounting of the authors expectations, along with failed attempts and adjustments.
It's not completely what I'd like to see in a recipe book but I think it's the closest example that I can think of.
I agree that Cook's Illustrated and its two sister publications, America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country, are pretty good examples of what you want. They have a lot of standardized elements that they don't always make clear to casual readers. For example, 1 onion in CI is actually standardized to one cup of chopped onion, they use a standard brand of Kosher salt and provide conversion ratios for brands with different crystal structures, etc. I get recipes from a variety of sources, but I do find that this kind of precision helps with getting repeatable results.
If you want recipes that are a bit more precise, check out baking ones. I've frequently heard people say that cooking is easy, just throwing ingredients together. The same people went on to note that baking, however, is like a precise science: add exactly X grams of that, cook at specifically Y degrees, mix by rotating counter-clockwise for Z seconds. It's all very delicate and precise.
As for regular recipes, I really don't think this type of precise writing is popular because everybody's got different tastes and palates so it would be tough to say precisely how one should 'brown an onion', although I get where you're coming from. Personally, I've gotten in the habit of finding recipes, trying them out, and saving them with personalized tweaks. So when a recipe calls for a 'dash of salt', I replace it with 'exactly 1 tbsp of salt' or 'no salt necessary'.
There's also the difference in the type of ingredients.
My particular pound-sized piece of pork is substantially different than your particular pound-sized piece of pork, and my tomato is not the same as your tomato, so achieving the same result from will require different cooking time, different added moisture, and depending on the differences it might even be impossible at all to get the same result. However, my 100g of sugar is the same as your 100g of sugar, and we can ensure that my 100g of flour is the same as your 100g of flour if we explicitly try control for things like gluten, which bakers definitely do.
You're really not going to be happy with this site then. Even basic things with hard numbers for measuring can be wildly off.
Here's an easy example https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Apple_Pie_I
This recipe calls for 2.5 cups of sugar for 1 pie. If you add that much sugar to a single 8" pie, it's going to be nearly inedible. You can easily find other recipes that only use 0.75 cups per pie(a little low in my opinion).
With such a huge margin of error for just one ingredient it immediately makes me wonder if anyone actually cooked this before they wrote an article about it.
I am an avid cook. I agree with much of your assessment.
Have you tried Julia Child’s first books “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”? Her books are very in depth and start with clearly written descriptions of techniques and what to look for. This does mean that recipes can be many times longer than most other books.
Julia Child’s reputation is well earned. She may be one of the first celebrity chefs, but her status came directly from the quality of her research and writing.
You may like Cooking for Geeks, by Jeff Potter.I've read the original book and loved it. It includes the how and the why for classic and modern cuisine, each recipe has well measured ingredients (imperial AND metric) and also suggestions like "you could also try adding x, or replacing y, or doing z technique at the beginning".
There's a second edition with some more techniques added.
I imagine it also depends on the onion itself, which is why you can’t be more specific. My wife does an amazing job browning onions, but sometimes it goes wrong, and she can’t explain why. Also, when I try copying her precisely, mine never seem to turn out as good so even if I did have precise instructions I might still struggle.
You should get into baking if you want to see where precision matters and how it can be expressed in cooking.
Generally, things you cook on the stovetop don't need strict quantitative controls. Exercise your own judgement and experience- you can understand how the onion will taste based on how it looks. Mix it, heat it, season it, eat it.
So, my wife bakes a lot and I'm witness to the crazy precision that it involves. Perhaps that's what partially inspired my comment: I felt that the lack of verbosity in instruction was impacting my ability to get a recipe to taste the way I want it to. (It's the result that I'm pursuing, not necessarily the precision).
Case in point: I love Malai Kofta when I get it from the restaurant. I have never been able to reproduce the taste at home, and I don't have the expertise/judgement to figure out why :|
I don't see how this could ever truly compete with traditional cookbooks.
It can easily have the same recipes, and it doesn't need to compete, in the same way Wikipedia doesn't with traditional encyclopedias: when you take away commercial incentive, something can just exist.
I don't want to eat the exact same macaroni and cheese dish served on one side of the country that I can on the other.
Great! Looks like there are a few dozen options, and there are alternative recipes in some of these pages:
I think what I am trying to say is that cooking can never be standardized, nor should it.
Wikis are descriptive, not prescriptive. This book seems to be so, as well, making no attempt at standardization. If you have thousands of Reuben recipes you want to input, why not?
You cannot standardize the world's recipes into a monolithic volume like Wikimedia has done with facts.
Wikipedia doesn't standardize anything. You totally can collect them; there are a bunch of cooking sites and applications on the internet, just as there are a bunch of sites that collect facts.
I mean you could, but the 7,000 variations on every chef's take on a Reuben sandwich would be a chore to sift through.
That's what curation is for, and there are plenty of people who search through Wikipedia, find interesting articles, and share them.
Facts rarely change, tastes often do.
This makes a wiki the best possible place for recipes, then. Not only is there no hard-limit on the amount of content (storage is very nearly free, especially given Wikimedia's fundraising numbers), there's also version control history, and HTML has subheadings for variations on the same recipe that might occur over time.
Cookbooks as written by a single chef are generally suggestions and collections of similar tastes, not static lists of every single recipe under the sun.
I regularly seek out cookbooks written by a handful of trusted chefs, and devour the information contained within them with great trust and pleasure.
I don't just go to the library and take out all the cookbooks I can carry home.
Partly because I don't have the time to read through and test every single recipe inside of them, make a decision about what's good for dinner, and then make that quickly for my family.
Traditional cookbooks exist because most of us are not chefs and we don't know what goes good with what.
If we did, we could easily make use of a cook's flavor bible which is essentially what this monolithic wiki-cookbook will become imho.
There are two points of relevance here, I think. The first is that yours is one way of consuming recipes, but another is to simply look for news recipe in different cookbooks or, increasingly often, find one at a random food blog. The second is that even collections are very much possible on a wiki, or even outside it, by just compiling links to the wiki articles. For example, I enjoy cookbooks written about a single cuisine (e.g. listing all kinds of Middle Eastern recipes together), because they will then often go well together. One could easily imagine a Wikibooks page compiling related recipes into a recommendation list.
I dunno, a page that lists a bunch of variations on a recipe, curated with some kind of objective ratings system sounds pretty awesome to me.
>Partly because I don't have the time to read through and test every single recipe inside of them, make a decision about what's good for dinner
The thing is, after enough experience cooking, you don't need to do this. If you know what the ingredients taste like and you know generally the ratios of each ingredient, you can make a rough estimate of the expected flavour of the final dish in your head. A curated system would help you learn this as you'll start to notice certain ingredients regularly being used in certain situations.
I personally use recipes as a starting point, for most things, some recipes do need to be exact, especially baking recipes, or a general guide. Once i've got a good idea of the main ingredients for a dish I figure out what flavours would add to it.
Cooking doesn't need to be exact, hence why one dish can have 100 different recipes. The secret to cooking is learning the characteristics of different ingredients and how to apply them to your food. Everything in a recipe has a purpose, once you figure out the purpose of different ingredients you can use them sort of without really thinking about them. You start thinking more about the situation of the current dish and what ingredients would go well, rather than what exact recipe you should follow.
I generally agree that this will never be as popular as Wikipedia. But when cooking, I rarely follow the recipe exactly. The existence of a standardized recipe does not imply a standardized dish.
There are already social recipe sites, such as Allrecipes, where people share their own recipes and their own variations of well-known recipes. The Wikimedia Cookbook is just a freely licensed social recipe site.
If you look up a particular recipe online, you end up finding those 7,000 variations scattered across numerous blogs and websites. I don't see any requirement on the number of variations of a recipe that can be added to the Wikimedia Cookbook, and it's no worse to have some of them hosted here.
Add to that the complete lack of prolix life stories for SEO and manual page scanning needed to get to the actual important part - how to cook the dish.
Also MediaWiki's format is fairly minimal in comparison to AllRecipes which has gained an ugly oversized SPO feeling and tries to sell you the ingredients.
If this wiki gains enough popular use such that it appears high up in the search results for recipes like Wikipedia already does for general knowledge it would be extremely convenient.
I agree. Recipes and food are about culture which obviously varies. What it would be good for is seeing a general look at what a recipe is. How do I make this sauce? What are the basic ingredients for chocolate cake? It probably won't ever capture the rich detail of using one technique/ingredient from a particular part of the world, but it's a starting point which someone can then look further into.
This wiki cookbook will do swimmingly with answering questions like "What is a roux?" or "How to deglaze a pan?" but it's going to have a hell of a time being used like a traditional cookbook filled with recipes as we all know and love them today.
You can standardize things, if you are respectful of the concept that foods take on geographical characteristics and definitions. For example, the recipe for paella in Valencia, Spain is very specific. However, most of the world says “I want to make it however I like, I will call it Paella Valenciana anyways”. It’s right to customize and make your own versions, but it’s wrong to not acknowledge the fact that true specific definitions do exist in certain cultures and geographies.
Simple example, ever seen a Chicago style pizza? It would be impossible to create a standard “pizza” recipe that covers all pizzas ... but you can have a specific style with a name. Culturally, there are places in the world (for example France) that do treat food recipes this way. The US is too individualistic for this to be found “acceptable” culturally.
It does have facts too, as there are reference pages for ingredients and practices.
As for recipes, I think a neutral recipe can be a good starting point for your learning journey. It would probably be better if they had more references to variations though, similar to Wikipedia's further reading.
> I think what I am trying to say is that cooking can never be standardized, nor should it.
Not that this is what is being attempted here, but rather than one or more recipes that each represents a particular set of curated choices, you could instead create a "recipe as multidimensional model" that captures the entirety of the configuration-space for "the food that is called X", where you can both adjust inputs and see how output parameters (e.g. saltiness, acidity, viscosity) will change, or constrain output parameters to find optimal input parameters.
Would be interesting to see something ala https://www.completefoods.co/diy/recipes in regards to the variations on recipes on standard recipe “tropes” like Mac and cheese.
Not sure the mediawiki format is great for this however.
I agree that attempting to have one canonical recipe for something like "Macaroni and Cheese" is futile and counter-productive, but I don't think this project has to end up like that.
For example, if the Macaroni and Cheese Cookbook page turned into an index for dozens of M+C recipes, named for the cultural influence or ingredient influence, that could certainly be useful.
With the current state of recipes on the internet (most are extremely low quality click-bait designed around ad word integration for profit, for example, searching "instant pot recipes" returns just loads and loads of terrible monetized results) a source like this doesn't have to try terribly hard to be a high quality resource
Even so it feels like it would be more useful as an encyclopedia of flavor than it would be for help making dinner tonight. Learning about the evolution of a dish would be very interesting, but I wouldn't trust an anonymous wiki editor very much in terms of actual cooking
I think the biggest problem to me is that recipes are very much driven by personality. People learn a few chefs/sources that have produced good results for them, and they stick to those sources. They go buy the cookbooks from those people and stay in a safe walled garden where they can trust each recipe
I think another big problem is the low quality of the recipe source. Traditionally listing ingredients with some steps along the way is sufficient for the experienced cook, but good modern recipes (to me) do so much more than list ingredients and steps.
I follow a chef J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and when he breaks down a recipe (for Serious Eats or his books like The Food Lab) he goes so much more into WHY each decision was made, which empowers you to not just understand the decision but also change it.
Or Fuschia Dunlop's translation of Sichuan cooking for a western audience, (e.g. https://andrewzimmern.com/2013/03/28/fuchsia-dunlops-fish-fr...) she helps distill Chinese culture and the cooking of this region with a lot more than an ingredient list and a step. That information, delivered by a trusted expert, is vital to understanding and mastering a dish from a culture very different than my own.
Why would I want some anonymously written/edited list of ingredients and steps when I can have a professionally produced, multi-media (huge useful step by step images AND video), "scientifically-inspired" discussion of the recipe and why it does what it does?
That's the kicker for me, I'll always go back to Kenji or Alton or Fuschia or someone I trust because I know they have delivered good results and researched the recipe deeply enough to help me succeed not just at their version but at my own version too
>For example, if the Macaroni and Cheese Cookbook page turned into an index for dozens of M+C recipes, named for the cultural influence or ingredient influence, that could certainly be useful.
How could it possibly, though?
I have cue cards I found in my old house when I bought it that have what's probably a local rendition of macaroni and cheese from the 1960s in Hamilton, Ontario...
Can I somehow cite that and insert it into the mac and cheese section of the wiki cookbook?
Or will this just become an digital amalgamation of every printed cookbook in the world? Using actual books as points of reference and citation?
This is an example of people trying to use technology to fix a social problem.
I don't know who is editing or curating these recipes. Taste is subjective. At least with Wikipedia, I can point X sources and back my claims up. On here, I could just add random family ad-hoc recipes and no one can really debate them. Which leads to: Mac n' Cheese 1. Mac n' Cheese 2.
Traditional cookbooks solve a problem: people may not know any recipes (or want to learn new ones) and want a curated collection from a chef that knows what they're talking about. Not random people online. Sure, books aren't guaranteed to be quality, but they're far less likely to be junk than random websites. They're even better if you only go by word of mouth- ask your parents/grandparents what they used!
This wikicookbook idea doesn't solve any problems because it's no better than randomly searching "how to make tres leches cake" and picking some web page that had good enough SEO to get to the first page of duckduckgo.
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Things people actually want and/or need:
* a website that matches (curated) recipes based on your ingredients. i.e. I can input "chicken bouillon, kale", and have it show me various recipes.
* a standardized schema for recipes, i.e. in json. This way we can programmatically build apps, share recipes with friends, and maybe have browser/site integration.
* a digital, open source collection of recipes only from chefs/etc with credentials. aka a curated collection.
* a website that parses said recipes and can display multiple types of units depending on your preferences.
* a website/app that lets you bookmark recipes and automatically parses them with said schema. and lets you categorize/tag recipes so you can filter by "favorites" or "want to try", etc.
Bonus points if your app can interface with Apple's Homepod / Alexa, etc, so I can confirm a recipe while I'm cooking or washing dishes. This is the biggest let-down by far for the homepod.
You can solve a lot of social problems with software though. For example, simply extending an existing interface to one that assists users in matching their subjective taste to others' subjective taste. Goodreads was well known for this. (Edit: I see the cookbook already has at least one subjective-qualitative enhancement in the form of the Featured Recipes list)
Also we can be pretty critical here on HN but I see no reason why Wikibooks must be judged without reference to its potential--not only is it already helpful to some, for various reasons all along the long tail, but perhaps it's just a few tweaks away from even greater functionality. Critiques too often impart the idea that the current experience is lacking _and therefore_ needs complete replacement by e.g. "a website that..." when the existing efforts at least show potential in terms of humans being willing to work together productively toward building a generous resource. That's really something.
In this particular case, the resource has been around since 2004, and is part of the wikimedia network. So I highly doubt any of the wants I mentioned will get implemented if it hasn't already.
A new website/app doesn't have to deal with old stuff so it's free to innovate its UX, ideas, etc. I also don't like the idea of not using existing work, but sometimes that's better than trying to adapt a system to do something completely opposite to its original goals.
I don't intend to be quite critical, but as an amateur cook I just don't see the need for this. Traditional cookbooks + reading a book like Ratio by Michael Ruhlman will serve your time far better in my opinion.
"It was advertised as a machine for storing recipes and helping housewives in their daily domestic tasks. However, reading and introducing a recipe was a difficult if not impossible task as the computer had no display and no keyboard. It required a two-week course in order to learn how to use the machine."
I usually solve this problem by averaging several recipes that look plausible. It's unlikely to give you the best version, but it will be good enough to let you decide if it's worth trying again. The 2nd attempt can be improved using general cooking knowledge.
Good point. In fact, with the risk of vandalism, this could be a recipe for disaster. On Wikipedia, vandalism may lead me to believe that the president of Russia is Taylor Swift, something usually harmless. Here, someone may vandalize a recipe to add 1 cup of arsenic. Okay, more seriously, I wonder if there are subtle ways to mix normal ingredients into poison. I suppose this is already a risk on WikiHow, where someone could tell you to clean your house by mixing bleach and ammonia.
What about a web of trust for some wikis? Instead of letting everyone edit a page, begin with the wiki's founder, who can delegate editor rights to people he knows, then they can grant the right to their friends, and so on. I have always loved the wiki format and prefer them at work over more draconian tools with complicated workflows. So I am surprised to hear myself saying this. But recently at work I have also been dealing with server certificates. So a web of trust is on my mind.
I need a decent json schema for a recipe.
There are some out there but they have problems.
Can we all agree on a recipe json schema so we can put our recipes in json and share them and make apps on top of them? I'm talking a schema that has quantity that can be plugged into IoT devices.
> Roasted foods get drier and browned on the outside by initially exposing it to a high temperature. This keeps most of the moisture from being cooked out of the food.
This is scientifically wrong I believe.
This is a common problem with attempts at axioms of cooking online like cooking.stackexchange.com it just can't be crowd source using known methods. It's mostly incorrect information.
Solve this and you will allow a lot of great wikis happen, but most topics are stuck here.
Roughly Maths->Physics->Chemistry are ok, then it starts to fail Biology ->
I use Bing Recipes for all my recipe needs and I think it does a great job. It's a little rough around the edges, but you can tell its a dedicated investment on their side.
Chief complaint: the ambiguity of description means that ten different chefs could follow the recipe and have ten different results.
To explain: consider the simple act of "browning an onion". Variables that might affect the outcome include the fine-ness of the dicing, the heat of the skillet (is my medium heat the same as yours?) and the extent of caramelization. The range of outcomes here can be anywhere from a crunchy, almost raw onion, to a nearly disintegrated brown paste. Take this and multiply with all the other steps involved in a typical recipe and try to tell me that the end result is predictable.
Has anyone found any technique/recipe books that attempt to deal with this ambiguity? The only place I ever see clear instruction on such topics are cooking classes, but that's not convenient and it makes me wonder what the point of recipe books are at all.