Show HN: Guided Recipe Creation

http://www.recipelabs.com/add/

by kbrower • 15 years ago

79 48 15 years ago

recipelabs.com

Santas• 15 years ago

Cooking + statistics = ♥

Design is really nice, I'll just make hover menu font little bigger and changed the color of "ask a question" btn.

mattslight• 15 years ago

There's a related but different recipe tool in the UK:

http://www.foodily.com/

archangel_one• 15 years ago

I much prefer Recipe Labs; the front page is actually useful to me since I can immediately fiddle with recipes or browse existing ones without being nagged about "signing up".

Minor niggles: - on the "newest recipes" list: they all say things like "Created on 24 minutes ago". Drop the "on" (presumably this is there for older recipes that might get a date against them?). - after clicking on "coupons" some of the top menu links are no longer correct

I often find myself wondering what to cook of an evening so a good recipe site is definitely of interest. Looks like it's aggregating quite a lot of other content though so I guess the challenge is for it to be better at recipe searches than Google.

kbrower5• 15 years ago

Thanks! I fixed the minor niggles.

brador2• 15 years ago

How do you find out about new UK startups? Is there a list somewhere or site to follow for this?

pedalpete• 15 years ago

what makes you say foodily is a UK company? I thought it was from Silicon Valley.

At the same time, I haven't seen anything remotely similar to this tool on foodily. Foodily is a recipe search site. The labs part here is completely different from what I've seen.

duck• 15 years ago

Very nice job and I although I'm not much of a baker I think I could see myself using this as I have always wanted to tweak some of my favorites. One thing I noticed if you import a recipe is that you get a bunch of 0.666666666667 type units, you probably should just provide the fraction for those.

tptacek8• 15 years ago

It's interesting. Wholesale scraping of thousands of other peoples' recipes is ballsy, clever, but makes me a bit queasy.

But, I'm not sure how useful it is in this packaging.

The service that makes a shopping list for me for a given dish seems valuable. But the service that tries to lay out quantities seems sketchy. All you're providing is an ingredient list, not the technique; to get technique, you have to click through to one of a zillion recipes, and none of the ingredient lists in those recipes corresponds exactly to the ingredient list in your app.

Also, you need to do a better job with proteins. You can't make duck confit with "N pounds of duck"; you need duck legs (also fat, which didn't come up in the list at all). Similarly, chicken paprikash is made with thighs, not "N pounds of chicken". The solution to this is probably just to break animals up into retail cuts in your database.

There's a genuinely valuable "recipe lab" product to be built using a database of flavor profiles (like The Flavor Bible), a database of ratios (like from Ratio), and a database of core techniques ("roast", "braise", "fry", "aromatize", etc).

One thing that'd be neat to do would be to scrape flavor pairings from your database of recipes, do build a bottom-up "Flavor Bible" instead of trying to figure out a way to get the rights to the Flavor Bible itself.

kbrower5• 15 years ago

Thanks for your feedback.

I realize this won't ever work perfectly for every type of dish. But the dishes I have tried using the given ratios have all come out much better then my previous unaided versions of the same dish.

The ingredient database I am working with definitely needs an overhaul. The original focus of this db was matching ingredients broadly, and that is now becoming a major problem.

I think the ingredient database you are looking for is http://www.ingredientpairings.com/. This brings forward more of the broad matching ingredient problems though. When I redo the ingredient database this should be more useful.

tptacek8• 15 years ago

A pretty basic point to make here is that many recipes --- perhaps most --- don't scale linearly with ingredients. There's usually a core ratio you can distill out that can scale arbitrarily, but then tweaks to other parts of the recipe.

The bigger problem I have with every service like this is that the recipes are untrustworthy. For instance, I'll generally avoid recipes from Epicurious. The curation problem here seems hard.

nitrogen• 15 years ago

It's interesting. Wholesale scraping of thousands of other peoples' recipes is ballsy, clever, but makes me a bit queasy.

You probably already know this, but the ingredients lists are not copyrightable according to [http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html]. It seems from reading that site that the list of steps that gets loaded when you import a recipe may be subject to copyright, depending on how closely those steps resemble the original recipe's instructions, and whether the original instructions were copyrightable.

I'll agree that common flavor pairings, frequently associated spices, and best techniques for a given ingredient are the more interesting data. It'd be great to ask the database what spices are frequently used in Thai food, for example. Combine it with a list of local suppliers of hard-to-find or imported ingredients and you have a winner.

noduerme3• 15 years ago

It's a long, long tail before they call it "stealing". -Josh Strike

tptacek8• 15 years ago

So, what you really want is _The Flavor Bible_ (you can get it on your Kindle), which is an intensely well curated, expert-driven dictionary of flavor pairings. For instance, Thai: Thai basil, bell peppers, CHILE PEPPERS, cilantro, coconut, coriander, cumin, curries, fish, fish sauce, garlic, ginger, herbs (fresh), lemongrass, lime, mint, noodles, peanuts, rice, shirmp paste, sugar, turmeric, vegetables.

The basic database you're looking for already exists (and, if you cook regularly, at a very reasonable price). You should just buy the book. Yes, it does beg to be a web app, but you need the expertise behind the book more than you need the convenient interface. I'm wary of convenient- but- bad- answers to important questions.

rhizome• 15 years ago

to get technique, you have to click through to one of a zillion recipes

Sounds like the Cooks.com approach that was one of the first sites I blocked when Google instituted their site blocking functionality.

jmilloy4• 15 years ago

I typed in duck confit, and was quickly able to remove duck, and add duck legs and duck fat, to the recipe.

tptacek8• 15 years ago

That is a feat that makes this app almost as impressive as Notepad.exe. "Almost", because Notepad didn't start out by lying about the ingredients.

(Sorry to be so snarky about it).

bishnu• 15 years ago

Wow this thing is awesome. Wish it was a little faster.

kbrower5• 15 years ago

The server is under more load than I expected. I wish I could fix this is the near term, but if you try again later it should be much faster.

brador2• 15 years ago

How did you get that labs page looking like stackoverflow? Have they finally open sourced their code?

kbrower5• 15 years ago

I am using OSQA for the Question and Answer section

konstruktor• 15 years ago

Interesting concept. I suppose this is based on statistics/ml, which is nice for finding positive matches. It doesn't work with diets avoiding certain ingredients like vegetarian, vegan or gluten-free. Typing gluten free, the first ingredient I get is flour. Vegan curry gives me some butter curries. Edit: order of words

thirdstation• 15 years ago

It looks nice. I like the simple and functional design.

I don't know how I'd use this though. If I want to make pancakes and type that in it gives me six of the seven ingredients required for basic American pancakes.

What would be useful is if I can input the ingredients I have and the app will tell me what I can make -- and create a shopping list for items I don't have (including coupons).

kbrower5• 15 years ago

http://www.recipepuppy.com/ is what I made to search for recipes that use ingredients you already have. It lacks the shopping list functionality though.

aaronjg• 15 years ago

One cool feature would be how to handle substitutions. For example, if I am trying to make a pie crust. And I don't have butter, it would be good to be able to cross out butter, and see crisco or vegetable oil added to the list. Or by adding Crisco, see that the butter is removed from the menu. Because a Pie crust recipe without shortening does not a pie crust make.

However general baking is more difficult than cooking, since the ratios are so much more important. But it also means the app would have so much more value added in this context.

Zolomon• 15 years ago

You should definitely show temperatures and measurements in SI units as well for us Scandinavians (and other non-crazy folks)!

Robin_Message• 15 years ago

Hmmm, lamb rogan josh requires 54 onions? And 406 (and a half) lambs?

As other's have said, probably better not to focus too much on quantities and more on necessary/optional ingredients and how to source them.

CaveTech• 15 years ago

There's a small bug where if you try to add another ingredient after you've typed something in the box, it deletes the current row and adds a new one.

noduerme3• 15 years ago

Yum, except you might have to tweak whatever function you're using to add or multiply ingredients... I typed in "popcorn" and it suggested using 9 1/2 cups of popcorn =) I think you might need to average that out??? https://strikesapphire.com/popcorn_ludicrous.png

Also, btw. Corn syrup? Not a common household ingredient (nice rip off the packaging list, I guess?) 3/8ths cup of sugar on TOP of the corn syrup? Dude, you're crazy!

noduerme3• 15 years ago

Oh wait, I'm seeing it says "Popped popcorn". Well, if you're not going to tell me how to make it I'm not sure why I'm going to your site =\

mark_l_watson• 15 years ago

Pretty cool - I like it. Sort of like the Chef expert system written years ago by the Conceptual Dependency people except I bet you are matching recipe title names and recipes on the web to the text entered for "What is the dish?"

Because it is really important for my health to track my vitamin K intake, five years ago I built a recipe web site (cookingspace.com) that gives a breakdown of nutrients in recipes that I use. Simple to do, except figuring out the USDA nutrition database.

vitorbal• 15 years ago

Really nice, although if I type for example "omellete" (notice the typo) instead of "omelette" it gives me an HTTP500..

sray• 15 years ago

I think this is really cool from a technical perspective, but I don't understand the purpose of the guided recipe tool.

Why would I want to create a recipe with the tool in the first place? If I'm just submitting an existing recipe of mine to an online database, then the ingredient/quantity predictions aren't that helpful. If I'm trying to create a new recipe, then why would I want to submit it? I've never cooked it before - it might be terrible!

Even a short blurb on the recipe tool page explaining what I should use it for and why it's useful would be helpful. As it stands, this dumb user doesn't get it.

BTW, I love the design of the main page and the "create a recipe page". Very clean and easy to use. However, while viewing a recipe, I found it a little odd that the ingredients were listed in the right column. I found myself looking at the picture and reading the instructions before ever seeing the ingredients.

jwblackwell• 15 years ago

Design is cool and I love the concept. You seem to have fallen into the (lack of) contrast trap with the text though.

mrjbq7• 15 years ago

Great idea - I particularly like the "just add basil" option when I was making lasagna.

Btw, you spelled "cholesterol" wrong in the nutrition information section.

zeratul• 15 years ago

I see the biggest value in the auto-generated Nutritional Information. Obesity is one of the major factors behind high healthcare costs in the U.S.

If you can incentives image upload along the recipes, you could build a nice database with image and calories as a label. Then you are one step towards building algorithm where you shoot a photo of your food and get approximate calories. This gives you millions of dollars of healthcare venture capital from obesity prevention programs for household environments.

P.S. Plum Vodka is called Slivovitz.

ryanwaggoner• 15 years ago

You need units; I typed in lasagna and got suggestions for "200 cheese" and "1 beef".

EDIT: just realized that I actually typed in "lasanga", hence the weird ingredients.

sycren• 15 years ago

Is there any way of changing how the ingredients are measured ie pounds to grams?

Also.. perhaps cups is not the best way to measure onions ;)

Nice work though, design looks slick

jmilloy4• 15 years ago

A lot of comments here are about what you can't do with this site (with the usual conclusion that therefore the site is useless). Sure, there are some things it doesn't do. It doesn't teach you how to cook, or do your shopping, or do your homework...

But for what it is, I love it. A recipe is two parts - the ingredients (in what proportions), and how to use them. This completely separates the "how" from the "what" and that's great. Sometimes, I know how to make something, but I need suggestions on what the proportions should be. I like that I can add my own ingredients and find out proportions, or that new ingredients are suggested below. In fact, coupled with the recipes on the side, I can find out how to make it, and immediately vary to my taste. A normal recipe doesn't do that, and unless I've made something many times, I might not have the proportions down pat.

Complaining that this product isn't a different product doesn't make sense to me. If you are completely uncreative when cooking and require exact recipes then don't use this. Or if you already know how to cook something, then why do you care, for example, that "duck" is listed instead of "fat" and "duck legs"? For anyone in between, I think you can use this to easily and successfully adjust a recipe you already sort of know. And that's cool.

Sol2Sol• 15 years ago

Did you do the OSQA implementation yourself? I want to deploy OSQA for an idea in a niche area I'm testing. I want to do Q&A but I also want to add a news section sort of like the setup here on Hacker News. I'm not sure how easy it is to customize OSQA though. I am not a developer so I would be willing to part with a few dollars to get this done.

Show HN: Guided Recipe Creation

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