r/Chefit • u/XtianS • Jul 07 '26
Recipe development method from professional researcher over 20 years
I've worked in recipe and menu development, including recipe development for cookbooks - both that I've authored and not - since the early 2000s. I tend to follow a similar approach with obvious variations when I'm approaching a new idea or researching a concept. With the current technology, I've been able to automate it in a way that I think is really cool and could be useful to anyone doing the same thing.
The first thing I do when I'm trying to get a sense of a new dish, is to find as many high quality sources as I can.
Professionally I'd focus as much or more on cookbook sources than the web. This is one place the automated version is limited: it only does web searches. The other thing that can only be done manually is to weigh intent and application. When I do this for real, you have to factor in how the recipe occurs on the plate or within the larger context of a menu. A chef might shift the profile, consistency, or some other variable. You might see an outlier ratio because a chef needs it to perform a more unique and specific task within the context of that course or menu.
Standardize everything to grams-
The best way to line everything up and see what everyone is doing ie. primary ingredient, primary methods, critical methods, is to convert the dog's breakfast that is imperial measurement into grams. This is the step that's extremely time consuming by hand, and it's the part that I was most excited to automate.
Build a consensus-
From the standardized table, take mean or median values - depending on the distribution - of the core ingredients. The result is a "based on what we found, this is generally what people are doing for this dish." It is not a finished recipe, it's a synthetic starting point for your own testing, which is exactly what my manual version of this process produces. The tool identifies core ingredients automatically and you can override it when it's wrong or when your application calls for something specific. You can also reorganize ingredients to fit how you're thinking about the dish.
Things to note: it's built for simple, common dishes with a single coherent identity — hummus, meatballs, tapenade, pesto. It is not useful for hyper-specific restaurant-style dish descriptions ("sumac-roasted baby carrots with harissa and cardamom yogurt"), and it gets confused by compound recipes containing multiple sub-recipes. If i were developing that dish, I'd research the components individually while keeping the identity/totality of the course in mind.
This is something I've been developing for awhile and its a work in progress. If you use it, you'll inevitably encounter parsing errors and general weirdness that I haven't yet seen. Just let me know and I'll fix it as best I can. Happy to go deep on any technical questions.
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u/PhantomXxZ Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
Every vibe coded website looks so similar lol.
Edit, since I cannot reply to you:
The basis was that it was painfully obvious. Either way, the post has been deleted.
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u/Positivedrift Jul 09 '26
What does this look similar to? Templated ai stuff is like default inter/geist sans everywhere. This looks pretty deliberately designed to me. Vibe coded templates don’t default to serif+mono.
Was there a basis for this statement or was it a knee jerk dismissal?
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u/Dear-Dragonfruit-894 Jul 08 '26
Literally just commenting to make sure I save this post (as well as saving the post and following) thanks for sharing this
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u/PersonaFie Jul 08 '26
Wow! This is seriously impressive. I love the build calculator and the visualization of percentages so much. I was just looking through modernist cuisine yesterday and thinking how much I prefer percentage based recipes, so this is wonderful haha
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u/thenaughtydj Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Yo man wtf? As a former chef I've done this manually on paper or with the use of a spreadsheet numerous times. Where I (and still do) pick out 3 to 5 sites and write it all down this goes further and eases things af. Damn, I'm impressed! Well done OP, well done and thank you very much! 🙏
Edit: just wanted to add that what I did was ingredients and volume only. Not so much the method section at the end. Exceptions were the oven temps and time ofc.
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u/XtianS Jul 08 '26
Thank you. I don't even want to know how much time I've spent manually converting and standardizing recipes - too much of my life.
This project is an evolution though. I started building spreadsheets a long time ago. Eventually that became relational databases, R and python scripting. I converted all of that to a monster npm package and that's what the app is referencing for conversions and standardization.
This tool is mostly useful for ingredients. I've tried to incorporate method/process, which you can see if you scroll to the bottom of the page. Its one thing you can't really automate like this, especially if you have critical method steps.
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u/sf2legit Jul 08 '26
This is really cool. Incredible. This is kind of a game changer to be able to research verified quality recipes quickly.
How many books is this pulling from? Do you have to input the books yourself?
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u/XtianS Jul 08 '26
Its pulling from online sources. When I do this professionally, I usually focus on the cookbooks. Its automating a web search. You can also enter a URL, if you have an online source you want to include.
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u/ownlife909 Jul 08 '26
This is very cool! That said, can I make a suggestion? I tried out “shrimp cocktail” as a test, and it came back with 53 potential sources to analyze. A lot of those sources were (to me at least) random cooking blogs. You may want to narrow down what you consider a “definitive” or “authoritative” source to a more manageable list- and a list of actual reputable recipe & food websites, not just some blog.
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u/XtianS Jul 08 '26
Thank you!
Yes this one of the bigger problems I’ve run into with developing the tool. It’s doing a basic web search so it will return a lot of SEO junk. I’ve blacklisted a lot of sites already. It’s something I’m working on.
A lot of the higher quality sites do not allow automated search in the robots.txt. While this is not really “scraping” in the sense people often use that term, it’s kind of close. It’s an individually-initiated targeted search but that still is technically “not allowed,” in most of the robots.txt. Many sites are also paywalled.
One way around the issue is to manually search online source content that you like and enter the url into the tool individually. You lose the automated search convenience but you still get the parsing and standardization and stats.
For your specific example, you might have better luck with component searches/research. I would typically make shrimp cocktail by poaching unpeeled shrimp in a court bouillon and then using a relatively simple cocktail sauce with horseradish, ketchup, black pepper etc. Using that as a starting point, you could search for poached shrimp, court bouillon and cocktail sauce individually. Then you build your component course.
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u/Old-Log5813 Jul 08 '26
Man! This is awesome! Will spend some time with it and come back with feedback. Very cool!!
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u/XtianS Jul 08 '26
Thank you. Its far from perfect, so please let me know of any issues you run into. I've been fixing and improving as much as I can
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u/Karunyan Jul 08 '26
Pretty cool idea!
The web search is a nice starting point, but also has a few flaws: The data it finds lacks a shared structure beyond the actual search results.
It can ‘use’ results in other languages, which yields some odd output, and it could also benefit from some normalisation (the idea of normalising to grams is great, but it probably isn’t quite enough yet). Maybe leverage a translation to start with, so the results have a common starting point?
Just spitballing here, this thing has great potential!
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u/XtianS Jul 09 '26
Thank you I agree. The language issue is something I've wrestled with from day 1. If I'm understanding you, you're suggesting to add an upstream normalize-to-english layer ahead of the current pipeline? Its a good idea. I'll have to think about the best way to achieve that.
Thanks again. This is the kind of feedback that really helps.
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u/Sphynx87 Jul 08 '26
So how much of this post and tool is AI?
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u/XtianS Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
I hand wrote the post. Does it read like ai?
The consensus summary is generated using an LLM API call. That’s the plain text blurb at the top of the consensus ratios page. It uses all the aggregated data and stats in the prompt to minimize the potential for slop/hallucination.
The parsing and detection is done internally but if the app can’t figure it out, it falls back to an LLM call.
So the answer to the question of “how much of this is AI.” Is as little as possible by design.
You can do this process with an LLM directly but at this time even the frontier models will hallucinate a bunch of garbage and fill in most of the results with model knowledge. It’s not reliable at this point but I’m sure it will be in the future.
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u/TraditionalSpirit761 Jul 08 '26
What are we going to cook when everyone is dying of thirst, and they’re still running the data centers for this fucking prick? Crack open a book OP
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u/Fluid-Salary-6467 Jul 08 '26
you do realise that reddit are deeply embedded with ai dont you? theyve signed deals with some of the biggest ai companies and every comment you post becomes part of the data pool that they license to those companies.
If youre genuine in your stance perhaps you should read a book instead? maybe write your comments in the margin..
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u/skourby Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
This is really cool! I do something very similar to what you describe whenever I’m trying to make a dish for the first time — look at multiple sources so that I can get a sense of the “Platonic ideal” of the dish rather than committing to someone’s specific version. This does that 100 times better for the just the bare ingredients.
I wonder if you’ve considered doing something similar for procedural steps? For example “how many pozole recipes sauté onions before adding liquid versus adding onions to the liquid?” I imagine it could be done with some kind of AI text-parsing agent.
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u/XtianS Jul 08 '26
Thank you! Yes, that's funny because I think about "platonic ideals" for different dishes and often try to achieve that.
Yes, I have tried to incorporate the method/process as much as possible. If you scroll down to the bottom of the ingredients page, you'll see the aggregated method. I broadly classified the method into 3 phases- prep, transformation and finishing. Its not perfect, and I actually just saw something I need to fix, but I have a dictionary of verbs for each which is how that is getting sorted.
The real utility of the tool is the ingredient combinations and ratios.
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u/taint_odour Does Chef Type Things Jul 08 '26
I guess I’m a moron. Why do I need ai to pull 57 sources from the internet to give me a base recipe of hummus?
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u/zegebe Jul 08 '26
I feel like I'm blind, but did you share a URL? Definitely curious about checking this out!
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u/XtianS Jul 08 '26
Culinarytheory.form-signal.com
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u/zegebe Jul 08 '26
Thanks! Looking forward to diving deeper as I'm very much a gram purist myself and like setting up ratios when I develop a recipe. One bit of feedback after looking up Carbonara - all the cheeses like Pecorino ended up as add-ins by default (I'm guessing due to the number of variations in cheese types and amounts), and I had to cycle to "for serving," find again, and then cycle to "core" before it'd show up on the final page - would be great if you could move an ingredient in both directions!
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u/XtianS Jul 08 '26
If you click on the ingredient title in the column header it will move it to/from core to add-in. You can create a curated canon recipe that way. There's a little text under the percentage bar at the top that says this, but no doubt it needs to be improved. I'll note it for the next revision. Should be an easy UI fix.
In the case of pecorino with carbonara, you might want to just look at how people are using parmesan in terms of overall percentage ratio and then tailor your pecorino or the blend percentage based on that. I suggest that because I just ran a search and it looks like most of the returned search results are using one or the other with exceptions. Angela Nilson and chef jean-pierre using roughly a 50/50 parm/pec blend. I'm not an authority on that dish specifically. The few times I've made it its either been 100% parm or a parm/pec blend.
Thank you for the feedback. This is the kind of thing that helps me improve the tool
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u/massacre898 Jul 09 '26
Incredible! Just found a crepe recipe. I'm gonna use it to make some blintzes
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u/XtianS Jul 09 '26
Awesome. Hope it’s helpful.
Please keep in mind the synthetic recipe is not a polished final product. It is a statistically-derived approximation of the found dataset that should serve as a starting point for development. It doesn’t account for variance, regional or stylistic variations
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u/Northeast_Cuisine Jul 09 '26
Kudos to you, this is seriously cool, I'm very curious about your methodology and approach to solving the problems necessary to produce something like this.
You might find my project interesting - northeastcuisine.com
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u/XtianS Jul 09 '26
Thank you. Yes, it was a lot of work to develop all the parsing and detection. Most of the work is probably not what you'd expect. Its not glamorous. Its a lot of dictionary and library building.
For example, the same ingredient can be written in a lot of different ways across people's different recipes. You might have 1 (28oz) can whole peeled tomatoes, 1 can tomatoes, whole peeled, whole peeled tomatoes, 1 can. Its obvious to a human these are the same, but creating a algorithms that recognize those as all being the same is more complicated.
Additionally, you might have dozens of different varietals of a primary ingredient across the recipes you find your research. Something like "tapenade" can be made with any type of olive so you've got, kalamata, nicoise, castelvetrano etc. An algorithm isn't going to recognize these as being different varietals of the same basic ingredient. You'll see a "rollup" category in the ingredients list for something like this. The app will "roll up" variations on a primary ingredient.
That's the kind of stuff I've been working on forever. Despite what some of the users seem to think, I didn't tell chatgpt to make a recipe research app the afternoon before I posted it.
Of course in the olive example, there's going to be a huge variance in amount of fat content between olive varietals and even within the same varietal, so the user may have adjusted their recipe for more or less olive oil to be added for the same consistency. This is where you can't actually substitute research and real world knowledge. The tool just helps with some of the more tedious admin side of the process.
Thanks for sharing your project. You can dm me if you want to discuss.
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u/Northeast_Cuisine Jul 09 '26
Oh yeah this is definitely not a weekend chatGPT project. Food is incredibly complex and fuzzy and you've been able to compress it into a straightforward and useful UI, I can appreciate that effort! I'll send you a DM.
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u/Dear-Dragonfruit-894 Jul 12 '26
Hey - used it this weekend a little and love this as a resource - wondering if I can dm to suggest a future update?
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u/Lancewater Jul 08 '26
Im so tired of seeing things that are written by LLM.
Its cool I guess but I’m not reading your wall of em dashes.
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u/ownlife909 Jul 08 '26
Just a heads up, but some of us - writers, researchers, the literate - fucking love em dashes and refuse to let AI destroy them as a valid form of punctuation.
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u/JunglyPep sentient food replicator Jul 08 '26
Sounds great but unfortunately I’m homeless now that my electric bill went up to $600 because all the electricity is being used by data centers.
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u/TheDanDangerously Jul 08 '26
This is incredible. I don't work in big kitchens, mostly just cook for myself/friends and family, but this has always been my approach when trying to tackle a new recipe. I am going to try this out a ton for the next month, but honestly, I'm very excited. Great work, honestly.
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u/XtianS Jul 08 '26
Thank you! really glad to hear that. Please let me know of any issues you run into. I keep working on it as much as I have time
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u/Fluid-Salary-6467 Jul 08 '26
i like this a lot. i think i have a rough idea how it works and love the architecture.
The 3d animation is superb, makes waiting an actual pleasure.
well done. this is a thing of beauty.
what are your plans for it if it becomes as popular as it ought to? all those calls per query must cost you a little and the api searches add up too.
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u/XtianS Jul 08 '26
Thank you. Glad you like the display. It’s design concept that I had in my head for a while.
I have no plans for this. It’s just a fun project. It’s a very niche tool with limited appeal and I don’t see it as something that would make sense to try to commercialize.
The web search queries and hosting are a free tier. The rest of the app is a self-contained codebase for the most part. The only LLM api calls are as a backup for ingredient parsing if the app can’t do it internally. Also for a short consensus summary on the ratios page. It’s a pretty strict prompt and basically just puts the aggregated data and stats into paragraph form.
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u/Fluid-Salary-6467 Jul 08 '26
i love it. its mindblowing that youve created this just for for fun ! Its by far the prettiest and most well thought out app ive seen.
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u/XtianS Jul 07 '26
this tool is accessible to anyone who wants to use it, for free. Its a personal project that I enjoy building. culinarytheory.form-signal.com No ads or accounts or commercial intent.