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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. :)"
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.
~~~
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...
"Microwave Until Hot"
yep, and I'm an engineer too
Cooking Foreigners
Needs more salt.
1) Point out that IE is not standards compliant.
2) Submit story.
3) Allow web server to bake until golden brown.
4) Enjoy!
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)
To understand the modern recipie you have understand it's history and just what it is it's trying to tell you.
The recipie as we know it comes to us from the French school of cooking. The French follow the practice of preparing all of the ingredients first and then applying process to them.
So the list of ingredients isn't simply a list, it's a list of things to do.
Chop some foo, put it in a bowl. Now take these spices, put them all in another bowl. Dice some bar, put it in a third bowl.
Now apply process 1 to bowl 1, etc.
It's perfectly concise and understandable once you understand the meta instructions.
Frankly I find those diagrams nearly unreadable and representative of what's wrong with most engineering manuals, but then I was raised by women.
KFG
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"
The videos are in Real format, just in case you were wondering.
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
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.
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."Designed for women and their funny way of looking at the world."
What a crock of shite.
OK, first, nearly half of my cookbooks are written by *men*. Highly successful men in their field. I can't find any difference between their books and those written by their female counterparts. I have no trouble at all understanding these instructions, nor do I have any trouble with adjusting them to my own tastes.
This isn't about male/female, it's about whether you ever learned to cook. It certainly isn't rocket-science, though I'll admit that some things require a LOT of skill and patience. Making puff-pastry requires a very skillfull hand, and 1-2 days. But this is no different than experience and learning being the difference between "hello world" and being able to code a polygon shading algorithm.
There are a lot of things around that remind me that women have different viewpoints on things than men, but cookbooks aren't on that list.
"People wonder why we can't get laid?"
1) Turn the box off.
2) Open the blinds, curtains, shades, etc. and check to see if it is day or night.
3) Clean up the old pizza boxes, dirty dishes, and other assorted junk around the box.
4) Clean and bleach the kitchen and bathroom, and change the sheets on the bed.
5) Shower, brush your teeth, slath on some deoderant, and dress in clean street clothes. (Put the the old plaid bathrobe you have been wearing for the past 3 months in a strong plastic bag. Or better yet burn it.)
6) Walk out the door.
This method isn't foolproof, but with the simple act of getting the hell out of the house you will increase your odds of getting laid by 100%.
Oh yes......if you do find yourself in the company of an interesting female you may further increase your odds by asking for what you want. We can't read your minds.
Just a thought from a female...
... 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.
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?