Cooking for Engineers

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. :)"

Comments

Basic idea

[Humba]

Assuming he's about to exceed his bandwidth quota (a story about his quota was the first
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.

--H

Charts

[keiferb]

Those charts are genious.

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

[TheMysteriousFuture]

Here's the Coral P2P Webcache of the Main page and a example recipe

Note: Cache includes images (vs google link posted above).

PS: somebody wrote a javascript bookmarklet that'll take you to the coral cache of the page you are on. There's also a offical Coralize plugin for Mozilla

Coral Cache

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps this might help him
courtesy of the Coral Distribution Network

http://www.cookingforengineers.com.nyud.net:8090/

save his bandwidth and use that

More sites about cooking and geeks....

[MsGeek]

http://www.kitchengeek.com/

Very good site...very geeky guy...very kewl recipes.

How about Open Source Cookbook

[anandpur]

Open Source Cookbook

Re:Chart Idea Awesome

[rgmoore]

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

[bunnyman]

Already beendone.

chemistry for the cook

[bigenchilada]

Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of Cooking" is 704 pages of microbiology, chemistry, history and how-tos. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684 843285/qid=1094868483/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-447084 1-5835037?v=glance&s=books Great read, lots of science and if you cook, makes some mysteries of the kitchen less mysterious.

Re:Perhaps a better approach

[Eloquence]

And for those who wonder what that looks like, here's a PDF generated from the above style.

Re:Sorry, I don't see what's so special

[pepsee]

It's funny you mention both baking and tomato sauce.

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

[andreyw]

Thats if you are using Intel syntax, bud. If you use AT&T style.. well.. then. That and most processors don't have memory to memory mov ops.

Re:It's a forgery

[GrimReality]

Yeah, but where do I find an oven that's calibrated in degrees Kelvin?

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

[Kaimelar]

While we're on the subject of cooking, Epicurious has a pretty neat section of HOWTO videos (, covering everything from dicing an onion to carving a turkey to working dough properly. They can be seen at http://www.epicurious.com/cooking/how_to/video/. Lots of other great content on that site -- I've learned a lot from them.

The videos are in Real format, just in case you were wondering.

bit by the bites

[loid_void]

Try pair.com, they are very flexible with moving up and down the GB scale; competitive without sacrificing speed and reliability, plus, it will calm down to a more managable scale; I think...

Real recipe engineering

[Animats]

There's such a thing as engineered recipes, but these aren't it. Engineered recipes are for volume production in food plants.

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.. 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) need even finer control.

There are safety issues. See this microorganism lethality calculator. That's a key part of an industrial recipe.

Here are some engineered home recipes. These are intended for use in a programmable home bread-making machine. 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

[connorbd]

The Brits are the best about it -- both Imperial and metric units, because they've used both for a few decades. Their cookbooks usually have both units, and if you're an American trying to use British gallons (for example) you can use the metric quantities for disambiguation.

Re:Poor guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to negate your point, but there is still a small problem with your solution: Any links going off the main page of the submitted site will still not be Coralized.

Any ideas about how to help with this limitation?

Look at the page source; all of the link and image tags explicitly point back to the original site. Coral won't automatically coralize or de-coralize addresses in the source. The site owner would need to remove his domain name from the addresses in his links and in his image tags. That is, instead of

<A HREF = "http://www.cookingforengineers.com/foo/bar.html" >

use

<A HREF = "/foo/bar.html">

The addresses of the images of the page would also be changed.

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 to write his html for him, which complicates matters slightly.

the charts are interesting, but

[wobblie]

They really aren't necessary if you can read, right?

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?

[roman_mir]

I am still buffled by the fact that in North America engineers are automatically considered to be men. What's up with that? BOTH of my GFs parents are engineers and her mother designed vehicles that carry rockets (the ICBMs mostly) towards a launch pad or are the launch pad (yes, they are Russians) Oh, yes, both of her parents were paid equally too.

Wo what is going on here?