[HN Gopher] Show HN: I built a no-BS recipe search engine ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-11-09 23:00 UTC)