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

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

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: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.

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.