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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. :)"
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
Also read: The Science of Cooking by Peter Barham
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?
I thought there was already a Patron Saint chef of geeks... Alton Brown!
How about creating an XML namespace for this format...
That could be fun....
Ted Tschopp
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
That's a great way of presenting all the steps in the process. Whenever I cook, I always assume that the long step is always the last one (Bake for 90 minutes, simmer for 30 minutes, etc). I've had to order out for chineese many times when trying new receipies because step 4 of 12 is something like "Marinate for 29 hours", and you know, I didn't really bother to read past the list of ingredients. I just figure that if I don't have to shop for it, I can cook it that day.
1. Find a woman who can tolerate you.
2. Enter the kitchen with her.
3. Do whatever she says.
Actually, if you leave out step 2 the other steps nearly always apply.
~~~
In a standard recipe, ingredients are listed in the order in which you use them. I don't see what's so peculiar about that that makes it "womanly"
If you look at the whole recipes on his site, there's still your normail, detailed instructions. I guess it's nice having a quick synopsis at-a-glance, but I'm going to carefully read the entire recipe if it's new to me before I even begin mis en place
This is especially true with baking which is much more akin to chemistry than, say, tomato sauce.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
At least it is in my home: How to Brew.
Come on ... "cooking for engineers" ... use Metric for chrissakes.
... no kidding.
...
I once read a recipe : "1 cup banana"
Americans
As am amateur cook and professional engineer I was very impressed with the layout. I can not tell you how many times I have misread a recipe because I skimmed the English looking for the next step. Last week I skipped 3 hours of a second rise on a bread I already spent 18 hours on, if only I had not missed that step! This layout is simply brilliant, ingredients on the Y, steps/time on the X. It couldn't be more strait forward. Now we just need to get EVERYONE doing this!
this is my sig.
1. Goto store
2. Insert 12, eggs, cart
3. Insert 1lb, butter, cart
4. Mov $5.00, wallet, store_clerk
5. Goto home
6. Mov pan, grill
7. heating = 05
8. Mov 1oz, butter, pan
9. Mov 2, eggs, pan
10. sleep (1000)
11. Mov product, oral_cavity
12. end
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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
.sig
perhaps this might help him
courtesy of the Coral Distribution Network
http://www.cookingforengineers.com.nyud.net:8090/
save his bandwidth and use that
I found the layout of the recipe very nice, but it just doesn't scale if the steps are particularly complex -- look at how creme brulee was described if you don't believe me. However, something very similar that does scale is the latex style cooking by Axel Reichert (CTAN link: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contr ib/cooking/)
The essential difference is that instead of nesting columns, Axel's style uses only two columns which enables the second column to be very large if necessary. Though I've got to admit that for simple recipies, the cooking for engineer's site looks very good.
PS: Cooking is a great way to unwind after spending all day coding, especially if you don't mind the meal taking a few hours (and glasses of wine) to prepare...
Very good site...very geeky guy...very kewl recipes.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Open Source Cookbook
"Microwave Until Hot"
yep, and I'm an engineer too
Cooking Foreigners
Needs more salt.
"Designed for women and their funny way of looking at the world." I, honestly, can not even think of something remotely humorous to respond to this post. People wonder why we can't get laid? This statement effectively sets us back to the Stone Ages. Cro-Magna Phi Epsilon, represent!
It ain't so funny when you consider the thing you want the most, their uterus, falls under the "funny way of looking at the things" category.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
What's a woman?
1) Point out that IE is not standards compliant.
2) Submit story.
3) Allow web server to bake until golden brown.
4) Enjoy!
Also try Wikimedia Cookbook. Try the Lembas Bread recipe.
The linked site actually gives a pretty cool way of doing recipes. This comment, however:
Most recipes are designed for women, and their funny way of looking at the world
Is completely uncalled for. What part of
Name of Food
Ingredients
Instructions
is in any way some sort of "funny way of looking at the world"? It's not like there aren't plenty of male cooks, either. Way to be sexist, Slashdot.
Visit the
Engineers should be weighing their ingredients.
Not measuring by volume.
Especialy with dry good(flour, etc)
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.
My frustration is how he expresses the problem with CSS:
I find that interpretation frustrating.
What is unfortunate is not that a standards compliant browser would properly display IE's mangled HTML/CSS- it's that we have to mangle it for IE in the first place.
I wish more designers would design for the standards-compliant browsers first. Add a ie-kludge.css import every time you detect IE if necessary.
Anyhow... I hope the guy does well. You can't be too upset at a guy's CSS if he has a nice recipe explanation for making Tiramisu on his front page.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
I always thought that cooking involved various types of physical/chemical reactions taking place within organic substances that, when combined properly, stimulated human tastebuds in a pleasurable manner (with some deviation among test subjects -- I don't like mustard, myself).
Why can't cooking be a combination of art and science?
The videos are in Real format, just in case you were wondering.
Oddly enough, I use a very similar approach to diagramming the steps when I copy a recipe down. Ingedients grouped by when they are combined with each other, with the groupings indicated by brackets that are labeled with how they're combined. I usually write down notes at the bottom expounding any necessary details.
Started doing it that way when I was working on a recipe for vindaloo. The combination of spices is quite extensive, and not all of them are combined at the same time, so I ended up going with the above approach so I could easily figure things out the next time I made it.
Those charts are genious.
They look kinda like Nassi-Schneiderman charts...
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
He is pretty interesting to watch. He gets into the science a bit, and he's nutty enough to keep you coming back for more. O
And yes, I see your point where most recipes are designed for the average female and her strange viewpoints.... but I'm definently not your average female.I can totally see the logical set up here and I love it! This website is Awesome. If only all cook books would publish this format, maybe more men would cook :)
My name is a variety of floral rose, and no, it's not blue
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...
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
Well, I don't get this nonsense about recipes being made for women and their "funny way of looking at the world". It sounds a lot like a comment from somebody who doesn't know much about recipes or women. I've been reading, and successfully following, recipes for much of my adult life. As long as you read all the instructions *before* starting to do anything else, most any well-written recipe is perfectly clear, as long as you have a little bit of domain knowledge (understanding of the basic symbols and terminology, mostly) and the requisite equipment. Pretty much like any other geek task.
I will say that the table layout is a pretty neat idea. I don't personally care for it as much as the traditional format, but that's mainly because I'm used to the "normal" way. The table makes it really clear what steps depend on what other steps. However, there's something to be said for having a linear set of steps - mainly, that you don't get as easily lost in the subtasks and lose track of where you are in the process. I think that might just be me, though.
So what is it about traditional recipes that confuses people?
OT: The "IE-specific tables" look fine in Opera, by the way.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
Sorry... but the first recipie I saw has the first ingredient of "about 20 lady's fingers" for those bi-atches that really pi$$ you off. :D
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
Then I look up a recipe - hmmmm. don't have that. don't have that. don't have that... cook for 3 minutes, per side - or until done.
Gee - I can do that (cook 3 minutes per side).
Add my own butter, garlic, and other stuff I would add anyhow, since I have it
Cook it up. Add some butter, grated cheese de jour, half-n-half... call it alfredo. Pour it over rice or pasta!
viola! (that's french for "ta da") The wife loves it! Get laid.
Oh, damn, I'm I rambling again?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.You know, I hope so. But a lot of people parrot this kind of stuff on here. I think the truth is -- and I'm being entirely serious here -- that with a lot of geeks, socializing doesn't come naturally, even with people of their own sex. And most geeks are very smart, capable people, and they're prideful, too, especially with regards to their intelligence. After all, when we were in HS, most of us weren't good at sports, weren't popular, but what we did have was intelligence. We turned the geek monicker around, reclaimed it for ourselves. It was meant to insult us but we wear the label with pride.
Because we're so prideful, we spend a lot of time rationalizing away our shortcomings. We're not good at socializing with people, but we're smart -- it must be that our intellect intimidates them. Or, we belittle social mores as being cultural cruft, saying (in all earnestness) that all that small talk jibber jabber is useless, and that we're choosing not to do it because there's no point. We'd rather not admit that we have a very hard time doing it, and it makes us uncomfortable. We hide behind our intelligence.
Back in HS, jocks taped our buns together and shoved us in lockers and generally tortured us, girls shunned us, and we were generally social outcasts. We are scarred, emotionally, by this treatment. It was cruel, there's no doubt about it. But when I was in college, I had a run in with a bully that tortured me in middle school -- he came up to me, having recognized me, and started making small talk. I didn't know what to do. But it turned out that he was a really nice guy, and it occured to me then that judging a person on actions taken at age 13 wasn't very fair of me; he'd grown a lot since then. He appologized for the way he'd acted. Turns out his home life hadn't been so great.
Anyway, I'm getting off on a tangent here, but my point is, because girls and jocks and the like scare us, we pigeonhole them. We make them out to be 2 dimensional, steryotypical people. We don't bother getting to know them, now that we're out of school and everyone (believe it or not) is a lot more mature. We continue to hide behind our intelligence. We say things like, all those jocks are bagging groceries now, girls just can't think the way we do, etc, etc. And it's silly. It's trite. What it essentially is, is lack of self confidence.
But learning to interact with people is like learning anything, including Linux, Math and Science -- it requires practice and you will be ridiculed for not knowing how to perform basic tasks, just like people on #debian will yell at you for not rtfming and making you feel like a dork for not knowing how to inline assembly into your shell scripts (ha ha), as if everyone can do it.
Learning is tough. Girls, people, social stuff, well, it's scary, and I can appreciate that. But you have to face it, not hide behind silly generalizations and coy superiority. People may not be as smart as you are, when it comes to computers or math, but that's not all there is to intelligence. It's really an extremely worthwhile lesson. And sensitivity, which is hard for us too, and so we belittle it as something "unnecessary and stupid", will get you a long way.
The "girl" thing is especially difficult because unlike with jocks, for the most part, we can't just ignore them -- homosexuals exempted, of course, but I'm sure they get just as nervous talking to a cute guy as we do a cute girl -- because there's the sexual attraction and the need for love and attention from the opposite sex. Anyway, you get where I'm going with this, I'll stop talking now.
I could've sworn I had several cookery books in the same style (list of ingredients, list of instructions). Strangely, they weren't marketed as "cooking for engineers", rather they tend to be basic cookery books. An example: ISBN: 0140460179. Original edition: 1952 (predates slashdot, and most (99.99%?) of the computer industry).
... It must be open sauce ...
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
If this was truly for engineers, it would use metric units and wouldn't mix volume and weight units unnecessarily. Using cups for recipes is ridiculous considering the possible variations in texture and grain size.
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
That reminds me of the fabulous Chef programming language, where programs look like recipes.
Here is the "Hello World Souffle" as an example:
Hello World Souffle.
This recipe prints the immortal words "Hello world!", in a basically brute force way. It also makes a lot of food for one person.
Ingredients.
72 g haricot beans
101 eggs
108 g lard
111 cups oil
32 zucchinis
119 ml water
114 g red salmon
100 g dijon mustard
33 potatoes
Method.
Put potatoes into the mixing bowl. Put dijon mustard into the mixing bowl. Put lard into the mixing bowl. Put red salmon into the mixing bowl. Put oil into the mixing bowl. Put water into the mixing bowl. Put zucchinis into the mixing bowl. Put oil into the mixing bowl. Put lard into the mixing bowl. Put lard into the mixing bowl. Put eggs into the mixing bowl. Put haricot beans into the mixing bowl. Liquefy contents of the mixing bowl. Pour contents of the mixing bowl into the baking dish.
Serves 1.
Nobody said that this guy's recipes aren't different or that the idea isn't cool. What I dispute is the idea that a list of materials followed by a list of instructions is in any way tied to women, or that there was any justification for that comment. For comparison, go here and read any of the instructions on assembling desks. Surprise! They follow the same format! Maybe you should stop being anti-"PC" long enough to read what's actually being said.
On a side note, the original site's recipe format would work very well for furniture, too.
Visit the
Thank you, slashdot, for posting those kinds of comments on the front page. As a female engineer I really don't need this first thing in the morning. I am rewriting my hosts file right now.
I wouldn't consider this site to be more than a cooking-enthusiast's blog with an interesting recipe format. There doesn't seem to be any "engineer"-included aspects or approach to the content IMO.
As a software designer that goofs off with cooking, I think I take a more tech approach. For example, I've started smoking various meats and making my own beef jerky, but I've also been trying dozens of different kinds of woods, some plain, some soaked in different types of liquids and alcohol and researching the ways in which the smoking process with different wood imparts flavor to the food. I've also been working on designing a way to interface an electric smoker to a dehydrator to automate the process of making beef jerky with a true smoky flavor.
I have friends who have designed their own cooking grills and monitoring systems. Those things seem more like an engineers approach to cooking. This site, while interesting, isn't anything special.
Then again, maybe this guy is using an overclocked Pentium as his heating element?