It's interesting. Wholesale scraping of thousands of other peoples' recipes is ballsy, clever, but makes me a bit queasy.<p>But, I'm not sure how useful it is <i>in this packaging</i>.<p>The service that makes a shopping list for me for a given dish seems valuable. But the service that tries to lay out quantities seems sketchy. All you're providing is an ingredient list, not the technique; to get technique, you have to click through to one of a zillion recipes, and none of the ingredient lists in those recipes corresponds exactly to the ingredient list in your app.<p>Also, you need to do a better job with proteins. You can't make duck confit with "N pounds of duck"; you need duck legs (also fat, which didn't come up in the list at all). Similarly, chicken paprikash is made with thighs, not "N pounds of chicken". The solution to this is probably just to break animals up into retail cuts in your database.<p>There's a genuinely valuable "recipe lab" product to be built using a database of flavor profiles (like The Flavor Bible), a database of ratios (like from Ratio), and a database of core techniques ("roast", "braise", "fry", "aromatize", etc).<p>One thing that'd be neat to do would be to scrape flavor pairings from your database of recipes, do build a bottom-up "Flavor Bible" instead of trying to figure out a way to get the rights to the Flavor Bible itself.
A lot of comments here are about what you can't do with this site (with the usual conclusion that therefore the site is useless). Sure, there are some things it doesn't do. It doesn't teach you how to cook, or do your shopping, or do your homework...<p>But for what it is, I love it. A recipe is two parts - the ingredients (in what proportions), and how to use them. This completely separates the "how" from the "what" and that's great. Sometimes, I know how to make something, but I need suggestions on what the proportions should be. I like that I can add my own ingredients and find out proportions, or that new ingredients are suggested below. In fact, coupled with the recipes on the side, I can find out how to make it, and immediately vary to my taste. A normal recipe doesn't do that, and unless I've made something many times, I might not have the proportions down pat.<p>Complaining that this product isn't a different product doesn't make sense to me. If you are completely uncreative when cooking and require exact recipes then don't use this. Or if you already know how to cook something, then why do you care, for example, that "duck" is listed instead of "fat" and "duck legs"? For anyone in between, I think you can use this to easily and successfully adjust a recipe you already sort of know. And that's cool.
I think this is really cool from a technical perspective, but I don't understand the purpose of the guided recipe tool.<p>Why would I want to create a recipe with the tool in the first place? If I'm just submitting an existing recipe of mine to an online database, then the ingredient/quantity predictions aren't that helpful. If I'm trying to create a new recipe, then why would I want to submit it? I've never cooked it before - it might be terrible!<p>Even a short blurb on the recipe tool page explaining what I should use it for and why it's useful would be helpful. As it stands, this dumb user doesn't get it.<p>BTW, I love the design of the main page and the "create a recipe page". Very clean and easy to use. However, while viewing a recipe, I found it a little odd that the ingredients were listed in the right column. I found myself looking at the picture and reading the instructions before ever seeing the ingredients.
One cool feature would be how to handle substitutions. For example, if I am trying to make a pie crust. And I don't have butter, it would be good to be able to cross out butter, and see crisco or vegetable oil added to the list. Or by adding Crisco, see that the butter is removed from the menu. Because a Pie crust recipe without shortening does not a pie crust make.<p>However general baking is more difficult than cooking, since the ratios are so much more important. But it also means the app would have so much more value added in this context.
It looks nice. I like the simple and functional design.<p>I don't know how I'd use this though. If I want to make pancakes and type that in it gives me six of the seven ingredients required for basic American pancakes.<p>What would be useful is if I can input the ingredients I have and the app will tell me what I can make -- and create a shopping list for items I don't have (including coupons).
I see the biggest value in the auto-generated Nutritional Information. Obesity is one of the major factors behind high healthcare costs in the U.S.<p>If you can incentives image upload along the recipes, you could build a nice database with image and calories as a label. Then you are one step towards building algorithm where you shoot a photo of your food and get approximate calories. This gives you millions of dollars of healthcare venture capital from obesity prevention programs for household environments.<p>P.S. Plum Vodka is called Slivovitz.
Pretty cool - I like it. Sort of like the Chef expert system written years ago by the Conceptual Dependency people except I bet you are matching recipe title names and recipes on the web to the text entered for "What is the dish?"<p>Because it is really important for my health to track my vitamin K intake, five years ago I built a recipe web site (cookingspace.com) that gives a breakdown of nutrients in recipes that I use. Simple to do, except figuring out the USDA nutrition database.
You need units; I typed in lasagna and got suggestions for "200 cheese" and "1 beef".<p>EDIT: just realized that I actually typed in "lasanga", hence the weird ingredients.
Did you do the OSQA implementation yourself? I want to deploy OSQA for an idea in a niche area I'm testing. I want to do Q&A but I also want to add a news section sort of like the setup here on Hacker News. I'm not sure how easy it is to customize OSQA though. I am not a developer so I would be willing to part with a few dollars to get this done.
Interesting concept. I suppose this is based on statistics/ml, which is nice for finding positive matches. It doesn't work with diets avoiding certain ingredients like vegetarian, vegan or gluten-free. Typing gluten free, the first ingredient I get is flour. Vegan curry gives me some butter curries.
Edit: order of words
Very nice job and I although I'm not much of a baker I think I could see myself using this as I have always wanted to tweak some of my favorites. One thing I noticed if you import a recipe is that you get a bunch of <i>0.666666666667</i> type units, you probably should just provide the fraction for those.
Hmmm, lamb rogan josh requires 54 onions? And 406 (and a half) lambs?<p>As other's have said, probably better not to focus too much on quantities and more on necessary/optional ingredients and how to source them.
Great idea - I particularly like the "just add basil" option when I was making lasagna.<p>Btw, you spelled "cholesterol" wrong in the nutrition information section.
Is there any way of changing how the ingredients are measured ie pounds to grams?<p>Also.. perhaps cups is not the best way to measure onions ;)<p>Nice work though, design looks slick
Yum, except you might have to tweak whatever function you're using to add or multiply ingredients... I typed in "popcorn" and it suggested using 9 1/2 cups of popcorn =)
I think you might need to average that out???
<a href="https://strikesapphire.com/popcorn_ludicrous.png" rel="nofollow">https://strikesapphire.com/popcorn_ludicrous.png</a><p>Also, btw. Corn syrup? Not a common household ingredient (nice rip off the packaging list, I guess?) 3/8ths cup of sugar on TOP of the corn syrup? Dude, you're crazy!