[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine
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Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine
Author : milomildus
Score : 272 points
Date : 2021-11-09 13:41 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stovetop.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (stovetop.app)
| igaloly wrote:
| Which bs there's when searching for recepies?
| throw89vv wrote:
| What search engine does it use?
| MisterTea wrote:
| I searched for flan and the first two results were for pumpkin
| flan and then almond flan but the rest of the recipes were for
| flank steak.
| named-user wrote:
| You're gonna get C&D imminently like that other site did.
|
| I can't find the name of it, sorry.
|
| I fully support what you're doing. I am not fussed with someone's
| back stories about how their great grandmother's auntie's friend
| had her hair dyed when walking her dog to pick cherries... Blah
| blah... Just want the recipe and method
|
| But unfortunately... Advert revenues are a thing.
| milomildus wrote:
| I hope not -- unlike the other site you still have to go to the
| source to read the recipe, so hopefully this doesn't have an
| impact on their ad revenue.
| lkbm wrote:
| This is linking to the websites in question. It's not too
| different than GWS, except in that it's _not_ linking to any
| sites that include back stories.
| fortydegrees wrote:
| Great job! Love the UI. Did you build this from scratch or is it
| an extended, existing database front-end? The
| search/filters/sorting would be really useful to generalise as
| its own package!
| milomildus wrote:
| Thanks! From scratch -- I think there are quite a few already
| existing React components / component libraries for table views
| like this, but I'll think about if there's anything I can
| generalize.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| no bs, yet NYTIMES has a modal popup that you cant unclick....
| charlieb wrote:
| Is there a way for you to get the nutritional info into this page
| as well? Sticking to a diet is really hard when you have to
| scroll through pages and pages of exposition and adds to get
| macro counts.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| So, ah... is it just me or is "Maangchi" just entirely faking
| their reviews?
|
| Toggle that slider up to 5k and it's just them sitting there at
| ridiculous numbers all pegged at 5 stars.
| brianjlogan wrote:
| Yeah they must have falsified reviews or the parser is broken.
| New York Times doesn't even break the first page of results.
|
| Edit: Also they should add a filter for "paywall" recipe sites.
| I haven't been able to find any of the top recipes as
| browseable.
| the_arun wrote:
| Great job! I wish there was a way sort data by columns.
| dadlangia4 wrote:
| This is awesome, nice work
| anschwa wrote:
| Looks great!
|
| https://based.cooking/ might be another good source of recipes if
| you're not already using it.
| twiclo wrote:
| Based.cooking is great. I have my own instance running on my
| server. Version controlled recipes are the way of the future
| smoldesu wrote:
| For all the borderline-insane things Luke Smith endorses, I'm
| glad he has at least one decent contribution to the internet.
| based.cooking should be a model for everyone else trying to
| take back the internet on their own terms.
| par wrote:
| The search feature is nice, but I was sad when it took me to the
| normal recipe page. What I would really love to have is a very
| concise and succinct view of the recipe itself. Hopefully the
| next step is smart parsing of the recipe!
| ptrhvns wrote:
| Well, maybe this tool, or you personally, could pipe the recipe
| through https://www.justtherecipe.com/.
| snihalani wrote:
| feature request: link to archive.is url of the ny times link to
| break paywall bs
| ffumarola wrote:
| Some thoughts:
|
| 1) Clean up the plural duplicates, e.g. peanut/peanuts,
| leek/leeks, carrot/carrots, etc.
|
| 2) I've never considered the author, is that common?
|
| 3) Mode to toggle pictures on would help scanning, cooking is
| very visual
|
| 4) Not simple to design, but some way to have either/or
| ingredients (e.g. peanuts OR cashews) could be useful
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| spelling variations are also an issue, like fettuccine vs
| fettucine, not sure if there's an easy solution for that
| milomildus wrote:
| I'm currently working on a data structure for ingredients which
| significantly improves on the current flat list. It should be
| able to address plural duplicates / locale duplicates / and
| hierarchy. 4) is a good idea.
|
| The thing I struggle with for pictures is where to put them,
| but I'll play around with some options. Maybe they can be
| behind a toggle.
| Spivak wrote:
| You should start considering the author more, cooks you like
| will probably sell recipes to a variety of publishers and any
| given publisher's quality is likely to vary _wildly_ at any
| kind of scale.
| boise wrote:
| 2) yes. I follow NYT coooking and there are definitely authors
| I avoid.
| m12k wrote:
| Great idea! But please read https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-
| to-sort-by-average-rating...
| huhtenberg wrote:
| It shouldn't be sorted by rating to begin with.
|
| If I search for "doughnuts", it's rather unlikely that I'm
| interested in "Chapssal doughnuts" (top spot), "Pumpkin
| Doughnuts" (second spot) or even "Gluten-Free Baked Chocolate
| Doughnuts Recipe" (third spot).
|
| The list should be ordered (somehow, no idea how) by classic or
| common interpretation of the query first and pushing exotics,
| varieties and fusion stuff down to the very bottom.
|
| Another one is "sourdough" - "Caesar Salad with Sourdough
| Croutons" is the top suggestion, followed by "Hard-Boiled Eggs
| and Parmesan on Toasted Sourdough" and "Radicchio Salad with
| Sourdough Dressing". Not exactly relevant.
| yissp wrote:
| Completely unrelated to your point, but I had to check what
| "sourdough dressing" was. And, yeah, it's a salad dressing
| with bread blended into it. I've heard of doing that, but
| kinda want to try it now.
| RattleyCooper wrote:
| I feel like having 2 separate sections for this would work
| pretty well. Recipes for making ingredients from scratch vs.
| recipe for a meal.
| amflare wrote:
| > Considering only positive and negative ratings (i.e. not a
| 5-star scale)
|
| Is there anywhere that details the changes necessary to use for
| other rating scales (such as the 5-star/10-star system)?
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > Considering only positive and negative ratings (i.e. not a
| 5-star scale)
|
| I hate this. It feels like part of the internet getting
| dumbed down.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Yes, we should dumb up, not down!
| 10000truths wrote:
| You could just convert the 5-star scale to weighted
| upvotes/downvotes, like so: 1 stars = 0.00
| upvote, 1.00 downvote 2 stars = 0.25 upvote, 0.75
| downvote 3 stars = 0.50 upvote, 0.50 downvote 4
| stars = 0.75 upvote, 0.25 downvote 5 stars = 1.00
| upvote, 0.00 downvote
|
| And then calculate as usual, and then re-map the result of
| the formula from the [0, 1] interval to the [1, 5] interval.
| milomildus wrote:
| Ha! Thanks for this. I knew that this must be a solved problem
| but wasn't searching for the right thing. I'll take a look at
| implementing a better default sort order.
| MayeulC wrote:
| For another similar rating system, there's also this one:
| https://steamdb.info/blog/steamdb-rating/
|
| Not exactly sure how the two compare.
| driscoll42 wrote:
| He compares it at the bottom of the article:
|
| Compared to Wilson's formula, it's very short, and it's not
| nearly as difficult to understand the idea behind how it
| works. One could easily get the question "Why would this
| random formula give better results than what a very
| established mathematician came up with?" I can't really
| answer that, but it would seem a lot of you agree that it
| does indeed produce better results when rating Steam's
| games. I can, however, try to give some insight into this.
|
| For one, Wilson's formula isn't really meant to be used
| quite like this. It takes a rating and the sample size (the
| number of reviews), and outputs a confidence interval. And
| a confidence interval basically says that "We are some%
| sure that the score is between x and y". If you increase
| the % of how sure you are, the distance between x and y
| also increases, and vice versa. But to get a single rating,
| it's not quite okay to just take the lower bound of that
| interval.
|
| Secondly, because of what was mentioned in the last
| paragraph, it always gives us a lower rating than the
| original. This is clearly the incorrect behaviour, as
| something that just came out and gets a single negative
| review will be marked as having a score of 0%. Meanwhile,
| an established terrible game can have 10 positive and 500
| negative reviews, and it will rank higher. This is also the
| reason why one of the two rules I listed was that all
| ratings should be biased towards the average.
|
| Finally, while Wilson's formula probably gives us a more
| "precise" rating, so to say, it's not necessarily what we
| want to see. There's a lot of mathematics behind why what
| it does is correct, while the previously mentioned numbers
| of 2 and 10 that I picked for my formula were rather
| arbitrary. Still, I selected them so that the result would
| also account for the high number of reviews when assigning
| a good score. It's why you'll probably notice a lot less
| games with a low review count among the top games than
| before.
|
| I think that's important because a game that is very
| popular and very highly rated should be ranked higher than
| a game that isn't as popular and is also very highly rated.
| Not because we can be more certain that this rating is
| indeed correct, but because you, as a random person who has
| yet to try that game, will more probably like it if a lot
| of other people have liked it as well -- if it's not a
| niche game. And I think this aspect is definitely important
| and should be accounted for when trying to represent an
| entire game with just a single number.
| hinkley wrote:
| You need multiple rating systems for recipes and the lack of
| that model is why recipe sites are bullshit, and will
| continue to be bullshit.
|
| A recipe that tastes bad should never be shown to anyone. But
| if there are two flavorful recipes and one of them has better
| instructions, then that's the one that should be sorted to
| the top. My go-to analogy for people being bad at
| documentation is to compare them to the variation in quality
| in cooking recipes. That's both a commentary on developer
| docs and on chef's docs.
|
| I have been reworking a highly rated pie recipe. They have
| not covered browning the crust. They have made no mention of
| order and grouping of ingredients. If you follow the recipe
| literally, you're going to end up with a fluffy mix that
| won't fit in the pie tin. You're also going to get lumpy
| spices. That has a rustic appeal, but as the picture does not
| have lumps, the author is just bad at documentation. In my
| version, I split the spices so that you get a little texture
| but most are homogenized. I'm still experimenting with number
| of eggs. I've had 2 eggs (as in the recipe) taste eggy, and 3
| eggs (minus a little egg white for the crust) taste fine,
| depending on how good the emulsion is, and that depends on
| order.
|
| Most recipes still seem to be built on a model of fear and
| social barter. Fear that if Aunt Susie figures out Grandma
| Beth's brownie recipe, then nobody will 'have' to invite
| Grandma Beth to holidays or at least be excited to see her.
| If you want brownies then you need Grandma Beth.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| You are so correct on the order and timing of items.
| Everyone in my family was trying to make my grandmothers
| cookies. I was the only one who went over and documented
| _exactly_ how she made them. Now that she is gone. I have
| been designated as the only one who 'knows how to make
| them'. Even though I proclaim loud and clearly and have
| documented 'you must make them exactly like this or they
| will not taste the same'. They all seem to want to take
| short cuts. There are no shortcuts with this one and it
| _will_ take 2 days. I even gladly show them exactly how to
| do it. Yet they still fail, because they want to skip
| steps. If you do not follow along exactly you are doomed.
| Now I want cookies...
| bluGill wrote:
| And now I want the recipe.
|
| Two days ago please, I want the cookies now.
| lighttower wrote:
| How does Amazon, a trillion dollar company, not make this
| solution default!
| leobg wrote:
| Well, how don't they filter spam reviews? My guess: They earn
| whenever you buy. And they are a monopoly when it comes to
| online shopping. So even if you buy crap, you'll buy from
| them again. If anyone gets blamed, it's going to be the
| seller. The house always wins.
| lukashrb wrote:
| Thank you.
| artursapek wrote:
| I have wanted to build something like this, but the real pain
| point to solve is recipe blogs are a pain to navigate. They're
| covered in ads, popups, and the first 50% of the page is some
| story that nobody wants to read.
|
| What we need is wikipedia for cooking.
| OJFord wrote:
| The problem with that is that recipes are inherently more like
| blog than Wikipedia articles - they're so personal. Who are you
| to edit the number of chillies in OJFord's palak paneer, for
| example?
|
| Wikipedia has a 'first come first stays' policy for
| British/American spelling - applying that to recipes would be
| disastrous, giving me the final say on how to make the de facto
| custard, just because I created the page before anyone else?
| artursapek wrote:
| Fair points, I'm not saying all of Wiki's policies need to
| apply. I'm just saying the format and ease of consuming
| content is good, and there's nothing popular for cooking with
| those qualities.
| OJFord wrote:
| Yes, sorry if I seemed too dismissive, I agree and like the
| idea on the surface, it's just to me what makes the format
| and ease of consuming Wikipedia good is that there's one
| page for everything, not a bunch of conflicting entries for
| the same thing. (Well, any encyclopaedia!)
|
| But you can't achieve that with recipes, because they're
| not encyclopaedic entries, they're one person's opinion
| piece on how to make a nice <whatever>, like a blog post.
|
| I suppose the slight flaw in my argument is that you can
| have competing encyclopaedia publishers - choose your
| namespace, your single source of truth, within which
| there's the one entry...
| artursapek wrote:
| There's probably ways to handle that. Grouping variations
| together and letting the community rank them for example.
| It's not a new problem
| dharmab wrote:
| It's an expensive paid subscription, but the America's Test
| Kitchen website is basically a professionally maintained
| cooking information index. The standards of information are
| much higher than a wiki (they do scientific method testing of
| every tool, technique and recipe). Unfortunately there is one
| thing that annoys me, which is that there are full page ads for
| their other products, even if you are already a subscriber.
| LordAtlas wrote:
| As an Indian, I've found some of their Indian food recipes on
| Youtube to be downright terrible.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| next level: mining the sites for the content and getting rid of
| the recipe's life story.
|
| to me, no-bs means ingredients and instructions. Maybe a few
| pictures of the target meal. thats it.
| radihuq wrote:
| Interestingly, someone built a recipe app with this narrative
| and received a ton of backlash online:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56241653
| cacois wrote:
| I love how they say the content that users dislike is
| "relevant to the recipe", rather than admitting its SEO
| fodder.
| madamelic wrote:
| It's actually not SEO fodder (necessarily).
|
| Recipes are not copyrightable but if you pair a recipe with
| a story, the entire deliverable is copyrightable [0]
| because the recipe becomes a work of expression rather than
| a rote list.
|
| > In other words, a bare recipe, without literary
| expression, is not copyrightable
|
| [0]: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=3741a5c
| 0-f146....
| cacois wrote:
| Interesting point, I hadn't considered this.
| boringg wrote:
| I don't think its SEO fodder I think its to space out the
| page so you have to scroll through multiple advertisements
| so they get their revenue.
|
| Either way its total garbage.
| davestephens wrote:
| Yeah. Screw those guys trying to make a living!
| lelandbatey wrote:
| I mean, yeah trying to make a living by annoying the snot
| out of people is a thing that people don't like. It's the
| "business-model-belle of the ball" at the moment, but
| that doesn't mean we folks subjected to it have to like
| it, nor is it somehow "morally wrong" to object to being
| inconvenienced.
|
| You can try to diminish the real-world confusion and
| inconvenience of said business model by saying "cmon,
| it's not that bad, what's the big deal, why not let them
| make some money, why you gotta be such a stick in the
| mud?" That does nothing to reduce my or other peoples
| annoyance and lost time caused by said business model
| though. It's real, it does waste my time, and your time,
| and everyone else's time, it does inconvenience us, and
| it does make it harder to get the information we want.
|
| Because of that, I'm glad to see these other websites
| arrive to replace blogspam recipe mills. I plan to use
| websites like http://www.cookingforengineers.com and
| https://stovetop.app/ search for most all my recipes
| going forward. Thanks OP for stovetop and thanks to other
| commenters here for posting more resources for us to use.
| KeithBrink wrote:
| In addition to the other suggestions, a Firefox extension that
| does this:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recipe-filter
| Spivak wrote:
| You don't have to mine the site at all. There's a schema for
| the data that basically all cooking sites support if they want
| SEO
| https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...
| chaxor wrote:
| Perhaps I'm dim, but I don't understand how that means you
| don't have to mine the site. Doesn't that simply mean you
| could perform the process all of the URLs in the database
| here by making the http request, grabbing
| those`recipeIngredient` sections, converting units and such,
| and then populating your simpler database from that?
|
| That seems like pretty textbook (albeit very simplistic)
| mining to me.
| lkbm wrote:
| A lot of sites have a "Jump to Recipe" link. If this linked
| directly to that section, it'd be okay.
| mfashby wrote:
| https://plainoldrecipe.com/ does this!
| VRay wrote:
| Man, what a disappointing thread.. the BBC site is great
| except it's all weird British ingredients and units (how do I
| convert grams of British flour into cups of American flour
| without a scale?)
|
| The OP's site is a really nice search engine, but it dumps
| you into the recipes' unreadable SEO trash pit websites
| instead of parsing out the data
|
| PlainOldRecipe isn't working to strip recipes down for me
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Volume measurement for flour is inconsistent and annoying.
|
| Metric and by weight is by far the best format for recipes
| and best way to measure ingredients.
|
| In professional kitchens it's all we ever used (I used to
| work in some top restaurants, talking world's 50 best back
| in the day).
| VRay wrote:
| Oh, that's good to know. Maybe it's time to invest in a
| kitchen scale. (And I'll buy an actual cookbook while I'm
| at it, so I won't have to deal with this SEO disaster any
| more..)
|
| EDIT: Hey, wait, I actually found a good website with
| recipes: http://online-
| cookbook.com/goto/cook/rpage/000DDF
|
| and a good search engine: https://search.marginalia.nu/se
| arch?query=pancake+recipe&pro...
| jonathankoren wrote:
| The reason why volume measurements developed in the US
| rather mass measurements can be traced back to Frankie
| Farmer's The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896. The
| first cookbook with accurate and repeatable recipes.
| Volume measurements were a practical matter. Every
| kitchen had measuring cups. No one had a scale.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boston_Cooking-
| School_Cook...
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| And now you can buy a digital scale for like $20. It's
| the 21st century, weight measurements are way more
| accurate, easier too for small quantities.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| It's almost as if legacy recipes don't exist, nor are
| very important to people, nor have working knowledge
| built around these units.
| kokekolo wrote:
| As someone who lived in the US for 8 years... How much is a
| cup?
| dmje wrote:
| A cup is exactly three tenths of a half of a metre
| wide/long divided by the inverse square of a millilitre,
| provided the initial measurement was in cubic zlotys at
| half a pint over Pi.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > As someone who lived in the US for 8 years... How much
| is a cup?
|
| While its not quite right (its a little smaller), at the
| level of doing a recipe, 250ml [0] (but for flour in
| baking, you should use weight, not volume, anyway.)
|
| [0] 4 cups = 2 pints = 1qt [?] 1l
| grogenaut wrote:
| Let me know then next time you pay for a kilogram of
| petrol at the pump. Some things make more sense to
| measure by volume, others by weight. This is disjoint
| from imperial vs metric.
| jerkstate wrote:
| Fuel would make more sense to measure by mass, because
| the volume and energy density changes with temperature.
| It just happens to be easier to measure by volume. I
| believe many locales mandate pumps which correct for
| temperature and dispense slightly more volume on a hot
| day.
| jmac01 wrote:
| The rest of the world uses litres instead of gallons.
| Much easier to then convert to weight by using molar mass
| of petrol and volume.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Yes, it makes more sense to measure something fluid by
| volume when it doesn't fit on a scale.
|
| Also, the fact that gasoline pumps are pressurised and
| standardise the volume based on a certain temperature
| should be a clue to one pitfall of volume-based
| measurements.
| karolist wrote:
| Precise recipes, i.e. anything related to baking, where
| ambient temperatures matter - everything is measured in
| grams, even water. I'm so used to this by now that
| measuring anything by volume sounds disappointing, let
| alone dark age units like cups and spoons. I get it, not
| everyone is serious about cooking enough to own
| ingredient scales but are these users still the majority
| of recipe consumers?
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| Yes. I cook based on recipes a lot and anecdotally so do
| a lot of people I know and we still use cups,
| table/teaspoons and so forth.
| mfashby wrote:
| haha,
|
| if somehow you could combine the search of OPs site, plus
| the garbage stripping convenience of plainoldrecipe, plug
| in some really good unit conversion system, & save my
| preferences while you're at it, you might have the ultimate
| recipe tool.
| usui wrote:
| "it's all weird British ingredients and units (how do I
| convert grams of British flour into cups of American flour
| without a scale?)"
|
| dear God please let this be satire, and make it satire if
| it isn't
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > how do I convert grams of British flour into cups of
| American flour without a scale?
|
| A web search will turn up dozens of helpful sites that will
| do the conversion for you. Or the US could try joining the
| rest of the world.
| dazc wrote:
| To be fair, the UK went metric many decades ago yet we
| still use MPH on the roads; and most people would
| struggle to tell you how tall they are or how much they
| weigh using only metric measurements.
| VRay wrote:
| Haha, yeah. I wanted to turn my flour, milk, and baking
| powder into pancakes, but it's surprisingly nightmarish
| to get the two floating point numbers I need in order to
| get the ratios right
|
| "Why not simply..."
| johnday wrote:
| I assure you that the optimal way to turn flour, milk and
| baking powder [no eggs? -Ed.] into pancakes is to keep
| trying different ratios until it works properly.
|
| There's a LOT of variance in flour, milk and baking
| powder that make attempts at measurement based recipes a
| fool's errand.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Not sure if calling the metric system weird is actually
| serious or not but the solution is to get a scale. Modern
| cooking highly utilizes the scale and probe thermometers.
| They seem unimportant to the new cook but I end up using
| one or both for nearly all my meals now. Dry ingredients
| especially should be done by weight.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| If you're baking, sure measure by weight for best
| results. If you're cooking basic, non-technical meals
| it's more about proportions than anything else.
| xtracto wrote:
| It didn't work with this link:
| https://www.bakerita.com/oatmeal-fig-bars-gluten-free-vegan/
|
| I've personally found mysaffronapp.com to be way better at
| this: It has been able to process recipes from every website
| I've shot at it. I think the developer contributes here to
| HN, as i learned about the site from a post she/he made.
| s1mon wrote:
| This is already mentioned upstream, but the Paprika app does
| exactly this. It makes online recipes useful and understandable
| again.
|
| https://www.paprikaapp.com
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Cooking sites were pretty good with micro formats a few years
| ago, so it wasn't that hard to scrape them
| swalsh wrote:
| I've automated my meal planning using a command line app I
| wrote in python (https://github.com/steven-p-
| walsh/menuplannercmd) The app tries to estimate the best menu
| based on what I like, what I have, what i've made in the past,
| and something I call slots, which let me give myself more or
| less time to cook. I also add some randomness to keep things
| fresh.
|
| As i've built the app, I realized I almost never care about
| anything more than a rough estimate of the ingredients needed.
| Even then, I really only care about a few key ingredients. Here
| is an example (https://github.com/steven-p-
| walsh/menuplannercmd/blob/master...)
| goshx wrote:
| I love the idea, but the first recipe I clicked happened to be
| from the New York times and they have this BS that I need to
| create an account to read the recipe. Still, your tool helped me
| find it, so it is a win.
| LordAtlas wrote:
| Disable Javascript for the site. Fixes the problem. Or run it
| through Outline.com
| uhtred wrote:
| Where is the data coming from? Are you manually entering each
| recipe, ingredients, rating etc into a database or do you have an
| automated service pulling it all in from various apis/scraping?
| schleck8 wrote:
| Cool! Sorting by number of ratings, the first 30 or more results
| are all by "Maangchi". I think there is something wrong with
| their ratings.
| RandyRanderson wrote:
| The search here is great - you can filter by min number of
| reviews and sort by star rating, which should be the default on
| amzn, newegg, etc.
|
| Ok, I know this filter is not on ecommerce sites b/c money but
| one day there will be enough competition and then ...
|
| Ok, I know there will never be real competition b/c capitalism.
| Why can't you just let me have this little fiction?
|
| Ok, I know b/c reality.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I'll take this opportunity to mention one of my favorite apps:
| Paprika [0].
|
| It's a recipe app that can import from just about every recipe
| site/blog/etc and if it can't auto-import it then you can use the
| really easy tools to grab all the pertinent information. Once
| imported you can edit/scale/rate/tag/categorize/etc the recipe.
| Furthermore it has meal planning tools and a grocery list built
| in. I love the grocery list feature because you can easily click
| "Add to Grocery List" (of which you can have multiple if you
| want) and then just uncheck all the things you already have. It
| has a "Pantry" feature but I've never used it, I assume it will
| auto-uncheck items you already have when you go to add them to
| the grocery list but I'm not sure about that.
|
| It's great to import a recipe and then tweak it after making it
| and see what works/doesn't so you don't have to find the recipe
| again later and/or remember the changes you made to it.
|
| It's cross platform (Mac/iOS/Windows/Android) and running it on
| an older tablet in my kitchen is an awesome experience (timers
| built in, switch between multiple recipes easily, cross out
| ingredients after adding them, etc).
|
| I have no connection to the company, I just love the app. If I
| had 1 request it would be a way to share recipes with friends
| through some "social"/"friend-ing" concept in the app (not using
| a social network). You can share a ".paprikarecipe" file that
| includes everything about the recipe but passing around a file
| isn't always easy and Discord just cuts off extensions longer
| than like 12 characters which makes it harder.
|
| [0] https://www.paprikaapp.com/
| namrog84 wrote:
| Ive heard great things about it. And while it is cross platform
| but you do have to buy it per platform. Which is a bummer.
|
| 5 for ios. Free on android. And 30 for windows.
|
| And seemingly no browser version? :(
| joshstrange wrote:
| No, no browser version but it's not been an issue for me
| since they have apps everywhere I need. Also, their
| (undocumented) API is simple enough if you want access.
|
| As far as having to purchase per-platform, it's a steal for
| the utility I get from it and there is no subscription fee,
| it's 1-time.
| AaronNewcomer wrote:
| I think that for the ingredients you need to treat the entire
| phrase as a single unit. For instance, when i put in apple as an
| ingredient you return results that need apple cider vinegar or
| pineapple.
| blowski wrote:
| My normal challenge with recipes is that I have no idea how
| authoritative the reviews are. On some sites, there are a lot of
| recipes that make no sense whatsoever, and yet have 5 stars.
| hinkley wrote:
| As I mentioned elsewhere, quality of a recipe can't be plotted
| on a line. It's at least a 2D space. The wrong mix of
| ingredients can be bad, but the instructions can also not be
| repeatable. And repeatability might even have dimensions of its
| own. Some ingredients age better than others, for instance, and
| some measuring systems are more consistent. Baking powder and
| spices are examples of the former, and brown sugar for the
| latter, or possibly both.
| davestephens wrote:
| There are Facebook groups that offer reviews in exchange for
| reviews. You will see very new recipes, that have had zero
| chance to rank and be cooked, with comments like:
|
| "Ooh I can't wait to make this!"
|
| Or:
|
| "I LOVE making chicken like this!"
|
| ...and a five star review.
| grogenaut wrote:
| I'm confused by what you mean by authoritative. Cooking isn't
| really like math, there's no canonical pineapple pizza recipe
| unless you go too vague like: dough, sauce, ham, pineapple,
| delicious. Or do you mean real reviews where the stars mean
| something?
|
| For recipes, stars often let me down as they seem to be more
| related to how the recipe worked and could be followed, not how
| good it tasted. And the flavors seem to be pretty bland.
| blowski wrote:
| I've seen five star recipes say things like "Hawaiian pizza -
| add pineapple, tuna fish, and lasagna". So, yeah, the star
| ratings are meaningless - but then there are too many recipes
| to sort the wheat from the chaff.
| hinkley wrote:
| The target audience for this recipe is a Venn Diagram of
| "people who love lasagna but nobody else in their life
| does" and "people who can't eat ham for religious or
| dietary reasons" and "people who have no reverence
| whatsoever for pizza" (which also, according to some, is a
| superset of Hawaiian pizza eaters to begin with).
|
| That's not a tiny number but it's not large either.
| netman21 wrote:
| Tried it out. Searched for lamb curry. First listed is a
| paywalled NYT recipe. Was hoping for no BS as in no paywall, no
| extraneous narrative. Oh well.
| wzy wrote:
| Be careful not to point your scraper at those mommy recipe
| bloggers that have a story about their grandma before the recipe.
| Most of the well know ones are making 6 figures a year from their
| blog and will fight, tooth and nail, to make sure their content
| is not reproduced anywhere on the internet (not even the title),
| except for a SERP.
| jakamau wrote:
| Does anyone know of a site that connects recipes by correlated
| ingredients?
|
| Example: If you made recipe X, you should try recipe Y which uses
| 75% of those same ingredients, or recipe Z which has 80% of the
| ingredients in common. That way you can buy those core
| ingredients in bulk but still have something new and fresh for
| dinner.
|
| The meal-prep dream for me is 10-15 recipes that taste good, are
| as distinct as possible, but have the majority of their
| ingredients in common.
|
| To butcher a phrase, spice needs to be the variety of life in
| this scenario.
| james_in_the_uk wrote:
| Looks good once the 404 issue is fixed. Perhaps for a future
| release you could tag / filter sources by country? A big problem
| for me in recipe search is avoiding localisation issues (e.g.
| Having to do all the conversions from cups; remembering that
| 'heavy cream' is somewhere in between single and double cream
| etc.)
| milomildus wrote:
| 404 issue should be fixed.
|
| Tagging by country / locale is a good idea. Another thing I'm
| currently working on is using a data structure of ingredients
| instead of a flat list. This structure will handle things like
| different names for ingredients and hierarchy (ie. no dairy
| will exclude milk and butter as well.)
| james_in_the_uk wrote:
| Here are some good UK sites to consider including:
|
| The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/tone/recipes BBC
| Good Food: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com Jamie Oliver:
| https://www.jamieoliver.com Delicious Magazine:
| https://www.deliciousmagazine.co.uk/recipes/ Great British
| Chefs: https://www.greatbritishchefs.com
|
| I should add that there are legal restrictions on scraping
| and re-use of content from third party websites; I haven't
| checked if the above permit this.
| OJFord wrote:
| I gave in and bought a set of US (not the old British, nor the
| metric..) cups in the end.
|
| I don't like it, but it beats using something else for a
| volumetric measurement.
| PeterisP wrote:
| IMHO it's better not doing volumetric measurement and doing
| everything by weight, having your mixing container on a scale
| the whole time and "resetting the weight" when adding new
| ingredients.
| OJFord wrote:
| Yes, I agree, but when confronted with a bunch of 'cups' in
| a US recipe you want to follow, IMO using cups is better
| than a metric jug and a calculator, and also better than
| scales, calculator, and looking up densities.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| rglover wrote:
| This is great, thank you. Do you have any plans to do an
| Instapaper-style scrape that just reduces the recipe down to the
| ingredients/instructions?
| pachico wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, I think yours is definitely a no-bs
| application, however I think the entire recipe search engines is
| not working, or at least, not in the way I expect it to work. I
| wish it was more a holistic solution, mixing calendar, already
| available ingredients, non available, shopping list, where to get
| what you're missing, different profiles (I'm vegan, for instance,
| but I grew up in Italy so I wish I could mix both profiles),
| search by available time, by difficulty, requirements, and much
| more. Let's say that how to get the recipe is something that
| isn't the problem I have.
| milomildus wrote:
| I already support time and includes / excludes ingredients, but
| saved profiles and the other filters are good ideas!
| pachico wrote:
| Ideally, I would use it this way (as a narrative):
|
| Calendar: dinner with Anna and John next Friday. I know Anna
| is vegan and John hates hot spicy food. Go through a possible
| list of menus (not recipes) for the night, based on food that
| takes X time to be prepared. Get me a complete list of what I
| need for y amount of guests (and a cost estimation).
|
| Add what I need to an online grocery store list making sure
| it arrives the day before at the latest (but not too soon
| since I want it fresh).
|
| Another use case. I have a profile where I set I'm
| vegetarian, I don't like soups, blah and blah. I am hungry. I
| go to the fridge and I make a list of what I have and how
| much I have.
|
| I now search for recipes with those ingredients that can be
| done in less than 40 mins.
|
| Or, I'm preparing something that requires different timers:
| go and set them for me! Tell me that it's now time to put
| that thing in water if I want to prepare it tomorrow morning,
| or that I can now don't pay attention to this process during
| 45 minutes and alert me after that.
|
| As I was saying, the recipe is really the easy part for me :)
| tonymet wrote:
| Great tool to improve the dismal experience of searching recipes
| online.
|
| To intrepid cooks I encourage getting a good cookbook, e.g. from
| Julia Child or Mark Bittman - where you can learn cooking
| fundamentals and techniques aimed to teach you how to cook self-
| sufficiently.
|
| Break away from recipes and you'll be dancing around your kitchen
| to your own culinary tune instead of recreating mediocre click
| bait.
| klondike_klive wrote:
| I highly recommend Ratio by Michael Ruhlmann. So far I've only
| used it for basic doughs, cakes, biscuits. Learn the ratios,
| and why they're like that. Very liberating.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| This is basically all professional baking/pastry, also
| cooking in ultra-high end restaurants.
|
| And yes, it's a much better way of doing things, plus helps
| you to think about the effect of each ingredient on the
| outcome.
| tonymet wrote:
| A corollary to this is to purchase an affordable ($20) food
| scale. Despite appearances, a scale advances your skills by
| making it easier to measure ratios correctly, memorize them
| and reduce the # of utensils needed. All your ingredients are
| measured in a single bowl instead of using multiple measuring
| cups & spoons which each need washing
| cushychicken wrote:
| My latest favorite is _Cook it in Cast Iron_ from Cook 's
| Country.
|
| No recipe in it has been bad. One or two have been "too much
| work to be worth it", but on average, the food has been good to
| excellent.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00X2E308K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
| tonymet wrote:
| America's Test Kitchen, which Produces Cooks Illustrated and
| Cooks Country - is my single favorite publishing resource.
|
| A perfect balance of technical information & pragmatic
| recipes for the amateur cook to be very productive in the
| kitchen with minimal tools & ingredients.
| john-tells-all wrote:
| This!
|
| Cookbooks have editors, and the recipes are tested so they can
| be made with common ingredients. They _want_ cooks to be
| successful!
|
| Oddly I've found cookbook recipes to ALWAYS be better than
| online recipes. Book recipes tend to be shorter, clearer, and
| more successful. Online recipes are okay but sometimes don't
| come out the way I'd expect, they're more fiddly.
|
| It's great to have options!
| hinkley wrote:
| There is something to be said for cooking shows as well.
| Certain activities take time, and they end up editorializing
| things that they wouldn't think of with just the written
| word. What order to mix things. Common substitutions. How to
| avoid pitfalls (use this tool for this step, not this other
| one) and fix problems.
|
| Example: too much salt in your soup? Add a little potato
| starch.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| The barrier to publishing online is lower, so recipes are
| always hit or miss. Really depends on the author.
| tonymet wrote:
| Online content is optimized for (a) SEO and (b) immediate
| visual appeal. Most ranking signals are not coming from
| actual cooks testing the recipe.
|
| Your'e right, I've found some good content online. e.g.
| Chef John / Food Wishes has great recipes and videos. He
| also conveys some good tips & technique.
| hinkley wrote:
| The ecosystem of publishing also has people who have to
| exhibit their value to the process or get eliminated.
| Online publishing removes both technical and social
| friction for putting half-baked ideas out there. We haven't
| invented a good way to have one but not the other yet.
| admn2 wrote:
| Some actual pagination would be great (instead of just next /
| previous having page numbers)
| milomildus wrote:
| Hi HN
|
| I wanted to be able to search recipes from sources I knew I could
| trust. I also wanted a way to sort recipes by rating and include
| and exclude ingredients I already had.
|
| Going forward, I aim to add more sources, better ingredient
| filtering (hierarchical) and more dimensions (cuisine, meal time,
| etc.)
|
| Let me know what you think! One thing I struggled with was
| whether to includes mode with pictures or not. I can't decide if
| the loss in info density is worth the benefit.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| Well done. I like the instantaneous results as I type. I wish
| more search engines worked like that.
| redman25 wrote:
| Love the fast interface. It would be awesome if you could add
| functionality to filter by diet (vegetarian, vegan, paleo,
| etc.) For many people, diet determines which recipes are useful
| more often than any other factor.
| atestu wrote:
| I love the speed! I agree with other comments about the
| pictures. They help to skim so I think they add to information
| density in a way.
|
| I would remove the author column personally, and maybe you
| could remove " reviews" in the reviews column (just show the
| number) and show the time as a number in minutes? If no time
| provided just show nothing.
|
| If you add pictures you could have the option to show as a
| grid, similar to a file explorer. In the list view you could
| have a small picture with a bigger one when you hover?
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| I applaud your effort.
|
| Building is the first step, sustaining is the second.
|
| A picture is worth a thousand words. Figure out how to sustain
| the site and info density will become less of an issue.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your project.
|
| I like the minimal design.
|
| Please take this as constructive criticism, because I like your
| project overall, and want to only encourage you:
|
| Please consider testing your project in older browsers, and
| including no-JS configurations in your testing suite.
|
| It is easy, as a developer with a beefy machine with the latest
| and greatest installed, to overlook these possibilities, and it
| severely limits the accessibility of your site by older
| devices, slower connections, security-conscious users, and
| other edge cases.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Nice work!
|
| I'm curious how you're parsing ingredients. I built a keto
| recipe search tool a few years ago[0], and I got so into the
| ingredient parsing problem that I spun that off into a separate
| service.[1] I still maintain the open source version, if you're
| interested in using that for stovetop.[2]
|
| [0] https://ketohub.io/
|
| [1] https://zestfuldata.com/
|
| [2] https://github.com/mtlynch/ingredient-phrase-tagger
| theGeatZhopa wrote:
| I found it kinda cool to read the names, but with most, I
| couldn't even imagine what it is. May be showing images is a
| good idea. For mobile, I would leave it like now, but add a
| possibility to scroll within each result by tap & drag to see
| the images
|
| (A few links showed 404 btw)
| [deleted]
| bko wrote:
| Very well done. I love the design and simplicity.
|
| I would be cool if you could search by ingredients or food
| allergies. Somewhere you can basically state the ingredients you
| have and then it'll suggest recipes, but I understand if you
| don't have all the recipes indexed by ingredients
|
| Sorting the table too!
| [deleted]
| smallerfish wrote:
| You've got some ingredients that don't map to any recipes, e.g.
| "tofu scramble".
|
| Also please add a facets like feature to avoid the user selecting
| combinations of ingredients that don't match any recipes.
| roofwellhams wrote:
| All recipes are 404 not found
| [deleted]
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| Not all, but a lot of them.
| authed wrote:
| If you search for, "asparagus leg", no quotes, the result appear
| to point to an incorrect URL
| HunchedOver wrote:
| Excellent stuff and a nice break from the "rewrite it all in in
| my tasty-flavour-lang" approaches to doing this that crop up
| often on HN (not that those aren't impressive on a technical
| level!). This ties in nicely with the recent discussions here
| over the need for more specialised search engines.
|
| Are you able to give any insight into how this works behind the
| scenes, is it all manually input?
|
| Bookmarked for future use.
| milomildus wrote:
| I'm currently crawling the sources which publish schema.org
| definitions of their recipes, or the actual html itself.
| Basically doing whatever google does to create their recipe
| cards.
|
| Everything gets thrown into a Postgres database with a vanilla
| FTS implementation.
| liminal wrote:
| Are the filters working properly? I tried filtering for "almond
| flour" which comes up as an ingredient option, but got no results
| milomildus wrote:
| hm, I'll take a look at this. Thanks for reporting.
| anonu wrote:
| awesome - bookmarked!
|
| small bug: go to page 2 of some search results and enter a
| different search term. You'll stay on page 2 and if there are not
| enough results to fill page 2, it will just be blank.
| leobg wrote:
| I love the tabulated recipes shown on cookingforengineers.com
| [1].
|
| Ever since I first saw this, whenever I get a recipe, from
| anywhere, I convert it by hand to this format.
|
| Perhaps you can automate that process? That would be rad!
|
| [1] http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/108/Banana-Nut-
| Bre...
| savingGrace wrote:
| Please excuse my ignorance, can you explain how I'm supposed to
| read those? Top-to bottom first? I studied the pizza one and
| onion rings and while I could create the items from the format,
| I feel as though I don't fully understand it.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| I'd say those tabulated views at the bottom of each recipe
| page should be read like this:
|
| 1. Read and do all the "full-width" items at the top first as
| preparation
|
| 2. The remaining items in the tabulated recipe should be read
| as a combination dependency graph and Gantt chart. E.g.
| mashing ripe bananas can be done in parallel with melting the
| butter and beating the eggs, but all three must be completed
| in order to move onto the step of "mashing until smooth" all
| those ingredients together with the vanilla extract
| ingredient. This way of reading is more of a "left to right"
| approach.
| high_priest wrote:
| Read it in whatever order, just make sure to do all the
| things inside one enclosure, before moving onto a bigger one.
| dom_hutton wrote:
| Recipes are basically flame graphs, but for food.
| kirse wrote:
| Interesting, I always translate recipes into a mental GANTT
| chart and use multiple timers because I like everything to be
| finished at the same time.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| This site still holds up better than most today. Imagine if we
| had how-tos and tutorials like this instead of a youtube video
| for everything.
| WhyCause wrote:
| I get so frustrated nowadays looking for origami
| instructions; everything seems to be a video when all I want
| are the diagrams that used to get posted.
| bbkane wrote:
| I buy origami books. It's a great way to leave the computer
| for a bit and of course they're readable outside, don't
| have ads...
|
| I recommend John Montroll's origami books.
| ubercore wrote:
| Wow that's really interesting, thanks for sharing. I find it
| wildly unintuitive but it's nice to be pushed into a different
| way of thinking about recipes!
| chrisgat wrote:
| Oh wow, thank you for sharing this! That tabulated view is
| almost exactly what I've been looking for when baking. I had an
| idea along the same lines, but a slightly more visual approach
| where portions are represented by illustration that quickly
| give you a sense of the size of the portion as well.
| gowld wrote:
| Do we need another hundred recipe search engines?
|
| Or do we need a recipe search engine search engine?
|
| Are their open source projects making progress instead of
| everyone independently reinventing the same wheel?
| nickstinemates wrote:
| Feels good. Will use it more.
|
| I searched for 2 recipes which are not particularly common -
| watermelon juice and scallion pancakes and there was an abundance
| of results, including ones I have used before.
| OJFord wrote:
| Hey, another fan of vegrecipesofindia/Dassana's Veg Recipes I
| see! The site has some quirks (best not to try to use the
| quantity adjustment (which doesn't change everything) or
| metric/US customary toggle (which is often wrong on at least one
| side)) but in terms of actual recipes, range of stuff to enjoy
| making and eating - and quality of photos/general SNR actually -
| it's really nice, highly recommend it.
| milomildus wrote:
| yeah I'm a big fan -- what other sources / sites do you
| generally use? I'm trying to aggregate an 'authoritative' list
| of high quality sources.
| pjsg wrote:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/food
| OJFord wrote:
| Archana's Kitchen (archanaskitchen.com) sometimes, and I'm
| currently working through Delia Smith's cookery course book,
| many (all?) recipes of which are available at deliaonline.com
| actually. I'm also working through Dishoom's (restaurant)
| book, which I think is not available online.
|
| Aside from those I don't really have go-to places, I tend to
| prefer to read through a few (i.e. just whatever top few
| results searching for the thing I'm thinking of making) for a
| general idea and inspiration of particular flavours, then
| 'wing it'. In future I'll try using Stovetop for that search
| :).
|
| Edit: Oh yes and BBC Goodfood as sibling commenter pointed
| out. That's often where I search actually (because it's
| multiple author) rather than a general search engine, so if
| it were a Stovetop source I could definitely use it for that
| purpose.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Aside from everything going to 404, the front page table design
| is a bit crowded. Maybe there's some way you can even that out a
| bit. Otherwise, very nice.
| [deleted]
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| Can't type an apostrophe.
|
| ' breaks it.
| roshansingh wrote:
| Great idea. Can you add a filter for food and drinks. I want to
| look for lunch/dinner recipes.
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