this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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I'm not sure an excel chart is that much better than just saying "melt x, mix y, fold z and then bake" and the list of ingredients xyz.
Yeah, what if you want to do something like "seperate the yolks from the whites, beat the whites until they're fluffy and then add sugar and mix with the rest." And then a later step doing something with the yolks. I don't see how you would do that here without it turning into an unreadable mess.
I like it as the shorthand at the end. Special instructions could still be included before it as usual.
You could just list egg yolks separately from egg whites in the first place. But yeah I get your point, for certain more complicated recipes it will break down. At the cost of some readability I guess you could list products of earlier ingredients on the side, but then it's no longer a list of what you need to start.
I think my ideal solution would just be regular recipes but have them actually list the measurements of things in the text. It's very annoying to have to go back to the list especially when it's on the other side of a page.
Or you could go the other direction and have a full graphical flow chart with some text in it, although I can't imagine that being particularly space efficient
Yeah agreed, recipes could use something among the lines of "... And then add the sugar (250g)"
It is totally possible. This is basically a dependency graph. Separating the yolks simply goes closer to the left, and it produces new ingredients (or data, if you want): yolks and whites. They move right to their own sequential processes.
I feel like this is less useful for a recipe you're making for the first time or make once in a while, but probably pretty handy as a quick reference for something you make regularly.
But this way you dont have to”instructions”
You just list ingredients and whats done with them
Its not for the just-moved-out teenager who is cooking for the first time
But lots of recipes needs instructions to clarify why or how you should use certain techniques or ingredients and the like.
If it is not for everyone then it is not really an improvement.
Maybe it depends on the recipe. I'm all for rethinking them and going for a cleaner design. I'm also looking forward to the day that we migrate away from hillbilly units, so I don't have to search "xxx recipe metric".
Much worse. And it won't work for most recipes.