Cooking for Engineers 432
gbjbaanb writes "It's not often I post about a website, but this one is different. It is Cooking For Engineers. No big deal, you'd think - a web site about recipes and cooking. But go look at how he's presented it. Most recipes are designed for women, and their funny way of looking at the world. These are very different and instantly understandable for tech geeks like us. Oh yes, although he's been affected by firefox, he blames Microsoft. :)"
Basic idea (Score:2, Informative)
post on the blog), the basic idea here is a the ingredients shown in an html table with the
directions to whisk/boil/mash/etc in merged columns to the right of the ingredient column.
Google cache shows the idea for his BBQ sauce recipe. [64.233.167.104]
--H
Charts (Score:5, Informative)
I can't count the number of times I've gotten lost following a recipe in a real cook book, but these things take a lot less time to read, and look like they'd be a lot easier to follow throughout the process.
Plus, they're a lot more compact than a written-out recipe. That means I can fit more of them in my recipe bo...
aw, who am I kidding?
Coral P2P distributed Mirror (Score:4, Informative)
Note: Cache includes images (vs google link posted above).
PS: somebody [slashdot.org] wrote a javascript bookmarklet [gotdoof.com] that'll take you to the coral cache of the page you are on. There's also a offical Coralize plugin for Mozilla [nyu.edu]
Coral Cache (Score:5, Informative)
perhaps this might help him
courtesy of the Coral Distribution Network [nyu.edu]
http://www.cookingforengineers.com.nyud.net:8090/ [nyud.net]
save his bandwidth and use that
More sites about cooking and geeks.... (Score:3, Informative)
Very good site...very geeky guy...very kewl recipes.
How about Open Source Cookbook (Score:2, Informative)
Open Source Cookbook [ibiblio.org]
Re:Chart Idea Awesome (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps you should learn a lesson from this: read everything before you do anything. It isn't necessarily just a question how long the recipie takes, either. Sometimes a recipie will call for a tool or pan that you don't have and can't improvise easily. Sometimes you'll have to time things so that two subcomponents of a recipie come are finished at the same time. Just remember that you should know the whole recipie before starting and you'll save yourself a world of grief.
Re:XML (Score:5, Informative)
chemistry for the cook (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Perhaps a better approach (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sorry, I don't see what's so special (Score:2, Informative)
Baking usually requires two mixtures, one of "wet" ingredients and one of "dry" ingredients. Hierarchical instructions would be very useful in this case. Also, some people might not realize that sugar is a "wet" ingredients, so it's nice to have these borders clearly delineated.
Tomato sauce is plenty chemistry. Try cooking some in an iron pot and see what happens.
Re:Cooking v1.0 for nerds (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's a forgery (Score:5, Informative)
If you are an engineer, you could probably get one, albeit, really expensive and probably not built to easily accommodate standard kitchen stuff. :-)
By the way, there is no 'degrees Kelvin'. It is an absolute unit, and it is just 'kelvin'. Yeah, there is no 'Kelvin' only 'kelvin', unless you are saying 'Lord Kelvin' :-)
So much pedantry for the day :-) LoL
Cooking HOWTO videos (Score:5, Informative)
The videos are in Real format, just in case you were wondering.
bit by the bites (Score:2, Informative)
Real recipe engineering (Score:5, Informative)
Serious recipes have tolerances. What temperatures are needed, and how tightly do times and temperature have to be controlled? What's the effect of ambient humidity? Here's a oven for a commercial bakery. [nicholsonequipment.com]. 6 heat zones, digital temperature control, and a conveyor belt. The bakery with a unit like that has recipes that tell how to set it up for each product they make. There's no market for a few thousand slightly burnt rolls. Some jobs need a fancy oven like that. Others are less critical. Some jobs (especially pastries) [hornoslago.com] need even finer control.
There are safety issues. See this microorganism lethality calculator. [rpaulsingh.com] That's a key part of an industrial recipe.
Here are some engineered home recipes [qis.net]. These are intended for use in a programmable home bread-making machine. [walmart.com] Note the comments:
- Measure all ingredients exactly -- close is not "good enough".
- Water temperature must be between 70 and 80 degrees Farenheit.
- Use flour specifically designed for bread machines; it rises better than all-purpose flour.
- Load ingredients in the pan in the order listed.
- Keep yeast away from liquids.
Now that's what real engineered recipes look like, tolerances, computer control, and all.Re:It's a forgery (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Poor guy... (Score:1, Informative)
Then, were anyone to coralize a page on his site, the links and images would automagically use coral's bandwidth instead of his.
However, the site creator is using Blogger [blogger.com] to write his html for him, which complicates matters slightly.
the charts are interesting, but (Score:3, Informative)
When looking at recipes, I am more concerned with ingredients and talk about technique, not the presentation. Perhaps a bit of history.
For example, his lasagna is very much the "American way", made with ricotta and tomato sauce - Italians don't use ricotta in lasagna - they use a bechamel sauce. The bolognese meat sauce frequently used in Italian lasagne is very unlike the kind you eat in American kitchens.
In others words, I don't see the point in a cookbook made by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Informative)
Wo what is going on here?