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No way. The professionals I've seen use way, way simpler formats, often just simple lists of ingredients with very minimal instructions.

If anything, these formats capture way too much information. For example, you can't really measure cooking times reliably unless you do sous-vide, if you want to be precise, measure temperature.



I actually agree with this. There's a ton that's between the lines in professional recipes and often much that you can't really put on paper you just have to learn at the foot of the master or try enough times you rediscover the same insights.

My critique should be amended to emphasize that it's about naively constructing a model that picks and chooses elements to include based on availability, convenience, etc rather than one built by studying actual chefs and cooks and learning how they think about recipes.

I can say for myself at least that for many classes of dish I barely pay any attention to the specific details in the recipe. I've made thousands of braises, I just need to know the key elements and the rest just sort of fills in (perhaps there's a comparison to musical proficiency here). I'm less concerned with "brown the meat for X minutes on each side" than "brown to mahogany". I don't find it useful when a recipe says how long to reduce a sauce, but when it says what kind of reduction in volume I should be looking for, that can be helpful. In practice I just have an image of the final product and can taste to tell if I've cooked out the acidity and water sufficiently for how I want the dish to taste.

To put a finer point on it, knowing which elements of a recipe are standard procedure and which are distinct and important to the character of the dish is an acquired skill and not something any system that describes recipes as strict assembly instructions can quantify or even qualify.


Totally, we are on the same page.

First of all, you can't really model exactly what chefs do algorithmically. Or you can, maybe, but you shouldn't do that in a recipe. Unless you are building an autonomous robot-chef arm. I've seen these in China, they only cook very simple dishes.

What developers tend to forget, the recipe is a tool, and it helps chefs put together a dish. A mere combination of ingredients and maybe cooking techniques is usually sufficient for that. It is NOT an algorithm.

That's why I liked the 3 column layout linked somewhere else in this topic better than the cooking for engineers forget: it has less information which makes the things that matter stand out more.




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