Cooking for Engineers

I remember this from many years ago. Much as I appreciated the step-by-step instructions and their accompanying pictures, I always thought that the genius element - and perhaps one that might have real IP value - was the schematic representation combining recipes and the cooking process.<p>My favourite example of this is the schematic for the &quot;meat lasagne&quot; recipe, which is at the end of the instructions and before the comments:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cookingforengineers.com&#x2F;recipe&#x2F;36&#x2F;Meat-Lasagna" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cookingforengineers.com&#x2F;recipe&#x2F;36&#x2F;Meat-Lasagna</a>

I absolutely hate cooking, the effort vs reward is just not worth it in my opinion. This led to me living off Huel[0] for a long time (at home anyway). I stopped buying groceries and only ordered Huel. The amount of time it saves and the cognitive load it frees up is insane. No longer have to wash dishes, you have a single shaker cup that you wash before you prepare your next drink. No longer have to cook anything, food is ready within 2-3 minutes (wash cup, pour water + huel, shake for a minute). No more writing shopping lists to make sure you buy all the ingredients you need for what you want to cook. No more thinking about when you bought something and determining if it&#x27;s going to poison you or not, 0 food waste as well :).<p>I still ate &#x27;real food&#x27; when going out and at the work canteen. But having to never think about food at home is great. I also felt great, having those 3-5 portions of huel a day gave me significantly more energy and I felt like a brain fog was lifted (that I wasn&#x27;t even aware of before).<p>I&#x27;ve been traveling around for the past ~6 months and I really miss it. I know this kind of reads like an ad, but I have no association with Huel at all. Just a very happy customer.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huel.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huel.com&#x2F;</a>

I wanted to make something similar for years, just with more focus on timing and multi-threading :) I really cringe when I read recipe for normal people and it says something like &quot;Chop ingredients A and B and put them into bowl. Now add previously prepared mixture of C and D.&quot;. I mean, just tell me <i>first</i> to mix C and D, not in the middle of the process. Lazy initialization is not always good :) The same thing when the recipe tells &quot;and now put all of that into preheated oven&quot;. Great, now I have to wait for 15 minutes until oven heats. That should be done on the first thread which waits on a barrier until I finish with the dough in the second thread.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;based.cooking&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;based.cooking&#x2F;</a>

This book is also worth a read for basic cooking that can be built upon but also explains the underlying scientific principles <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cookingforgeeks.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cookingforgeeks.com&#x2F;</a>

Exact quantities at the bottom! LOVE IT. None of those &quot;spoons&quot;, &quot;cups&quot;, ... nonsense, how are newcomers supposed to understand those. What I want in cooking is reproducable builds!

Love the part where he just puts the metric values but without the crazy conversions.<p>I see many websites do the conversion as 1&#x2F;2 lb -&gt; 226,79 grams but guess what, I am not going to the butcher and ask for 226,79 grams of meat. Just like I won&#x27;t do 14,79 ml of oil (1 tbsp) (well, I just use a teaspoon in this case but you get the idea).

Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is a great cookbook if you want a scientific approach to your food

The pumpkin pie recipe made Thanksgiving for my wife and I the years we spent living in New Zealand (and since). I grew up with canned pumpkin in pies like many americans. This canned filling does not exist in New Zealand, however raw pumpkin is sold in supermarkets and is a common vege in savory dishes.<p>From our first time baking this pie recipe, all other pumpkin pie is dead to us. The pumpkin we bought in NZ turns out to be superior to sugar pumpkin or butternut squash. It is Japanese winter squash or kabocha.<p>If using this recipe with kabocha, cut the sugar by 1&#x2F;3 to 1&#x2F;2. It doesn’t need much.

Every time I see an article about cooking, my first instinct is how I can code this information so machines can cook it for me.<p>But there&#x27;s still so many unsolved problems at the moment, especially around object recognition. Maybe in a few decades.<p>Once that&#x27;s solved, I imagine there will be a lot of engineers tinkering at home with their robots, sharing code for say cooking the perfect steak, the best coffee, and a general recommendation engine that can predict what you&#x27;ll probably like.<p>Can&#x27;t wait. I don&#x27;t get excited about cooking, but coding cooking machines gets me going.

It&#x27;s odd to see engineer not using grams everywhere.

In a similar vein to this idea, I have also been wanting to start some sort of cooking blog. The main intention is to write down family recipes and have some sort of reference later on how to cook them. I have so far a single recipe, in a format which I would like to see more recipes in. Intersted in what other people think of it.<p>The recipe: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cfx.lu&#x2F;recipes&#x2F;fondue" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cfx.lu&#x2F;recipes&#x2F;fondue</a><p>In particular, it was important for me to focus on the liquid densities, as a person that wants to attempt this recipe for the first time probably has no reference on what the ideal density of e.g. a cheese fondue is, so I wanted to add videos and pictures to showcase it.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cookingforengineers.com&#x2F;recipe&#x2F;58&#x2F;Peanut-Butter-Cookies" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cookingforengineers.com&#x2F;recipe&#x2F;58&#x2F;Peanut-Butter-C...</a> was the very first thing I ever baked way back when and then I met my now wife and I learned to cook mostly from her.<p>I started late (late 30&#x27;s) but it&#x27;s never too late and this site started me on the road. Now I do the majority of day to day cooking. My wife does most of the baking.<p>edit: Came back to say <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joyofbaking.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joyofbaking.com&#x2F;</a> is&#x2F;was a site I made a lot of recipes from too.

Reading through the comments in a steak recipe, I came across this ripper of a comment. :-)<p>&quot;You shouldn&#x27;t have called it &quot;cooking ro engineers&quot; - you should&#x27;ve called it &quot;cooking for men&quot;.&quot;

Blast from the past!! It’s been around for almost two decades now? Thanks!

Previous discussions many years ago:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2745687" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=2745687</a> (93 points, July 2011, 27 comments)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=79856" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=79856</a> (20 points, November 2007, 12 comments)

Great. All we need now is engineering for cooks. :)

I miss this side of the web, wish more people would publish their own blogs &#x2F; zines devoid of any commercial ambitions.

I love the name but the site&#x27;s content never really did it for me. For me, J. Kenji López-Alt&#x27;s work successfully carries out this spirit.

Surprised to not see an outcry about this site&#x27;s lack of https support. I personally think the importance of https is overstated for casual sites like this, but the argument gets always ridiculed on HN.

Worth mentioning in the same context: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cookingforgeeks.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cookingforgeeks.com&#x2F;</a>

Looks nice, but the advertisements make it almost unusable on mobile. Although they don&#x27;t always seem to show up

I’ve loved this site since 2007!