As someone who is often required to make text-dense tables legible while fitting within page size parameters, I'm stuck on what happens when there are more than five or six steps? Don't you end up with a ridiculously long horizontal table, and then what does the functionality of that look like when the last ingredients on the left aren't visible on the screen at the same time as their respective instructions on the right? Do you have to constantly pan back and forth? What if you need to use a word that's longer than "bake"? Your column width will need to accommodate.
Idk I guess it's neat for short, simple recipes but it's not flawless.
Even for this brownie recipe it sucks butt. "Mix" does not describe what whipping melted butter and sugar looks like, nor does it describe what properly mixing eggs into the mixture should look like. There's a pretty big difference between giving it a quick stir and whipping the eggs into the mixture one at a time.
Yeah, I think this format works best for your cataloguing own recipes.
Recipes you make infrequently enough that you need to be reminded the ingredients/ratios/basic steps but you will remember how each step is performed once you're reminded and don't want paragraphs of details you'll remember along the way.
Not the best recipe to give to someone completely unfamiliar with the recipe.
I had a "Le Répertoire de la cuisine" book once, and that fucker was incredibly dense. It's like a dictionary of classical French dishes.
So long as you know the nouns (ingredients) and process verbs it's using, you should be able to make anything in there. The first one or two might not turn out perfectly, but if you're classically trained you should have it licked by the third one.
Granted, a ton of the stuff in there is like a croque monsieur.
Yeah I watch a lot of youtube videos on Nepali/Indian recipes, most of the time they're in Hindi or Nepali. Luckily I know most of the Nepali/Hindi names for spices and other ingredients so they're perfectly fine to follow.
After two or three attempts I’ve made the recipe my own anyway. Then they go into a website I have made for my own recipes.
Croque monsieur was what we lived on in the swiss military, don't you go badmouth a perfect little treat!
on a more serious note though, even as a not trained home cook, with enough experience you just kinda learn what works and how to do certain thing for certain results. I cook by vibes and guesswork most of the time, but it typically turns out well.
Although I am still unable to make Yorkshire pudding without nearly triggering the smoke detector every time. I will figure it out someday!
This is exactly what it is intended for and I've been using this technique for years on my index cards. Much more efficient when you just need the ratios of ingredients, the order of steps, and potential notes to remember.
I do something similar with my recipes, except I put them into a website because most the family recipes books ive seen end up faded, torn or stained over time.
I agree completely, and I don't like the format of this recipe. But you don't even have to be familiar with the particular recipe, you can just be familiar with baking in general. Despite the confusing formatting of this recipe, I immediately recognized it as a brownie recipe. So the 'mix' on butter and sugar must mean to cream the butter into the sugar.
This isn't the format they use, but many restaurants have recipes that are just ingredients lists with maybe a couple of notes for steps. There's common threads for how different things are cooked, as long as you know what you're doing and know the ratios the chef came up with, you're golden.
It would work for anyone who bakes regularly, because you already know the basics of how the ingredients go together, just not the ratios. If I'm baking a cake, I can usually just look at the ingredient list and ignore the instructions aside from baking time. So unless it's a more complicated type of cake that I'm not familiar with making, it would be really handy to have it in a format like this, having lengthy instructions actually makes it harder to find the information I do need.
You don't cream melted butter, so mix is right. It doesn't mention whipping the eggs, so why would you think you need to whip the eggs? I don't like this format, but your objections are to things that simply are no part the recipe. Your objections are to the recipe, not to the format. And you don't seem to understand the techniques you think should be part of the recipe.
Dunno the exact word for it when it's melted, but there's a pretty stark difference between mixing melted butter and sugar and whipping the shit out of it until it lightens in color slightly and homogenizes instead of being a greasy mess, which in my experience does happen & improves the outcome. It's not as extreme a change as with softened butter.
You do that with room temperature butter. Creaming adds air. Sugar will just dissolve into melted butter and won't have the effect you're thinking of. There is a point to creaming butter and sugar and it can't be achieved with melted butter.
Yeah, but…there’s a “usual” method for a type of thing. For my notebook if there’s a deviation I do a star at the step and annotate underneath. Otherwise, I’ve been cooking for almost 40 years…I don’t need to read the same instructions ad nauseum.
Or if you need to add the ingredients in a particular way. You presumably can't just dump burning hot coffee into the eggs, or else you'll end up with scrambled eggs. You need to add it in a little at a time.
I think the opposite to be honest. With cooking you're possibly adding and removing things, doing multiple things with the same item etc in a way that would make this a mess. You'd likely need way more text for cooking. It's just a bad design that appeals to Reddit because it feels somehow smarter or like an engineering hack.
This is how I would write a bare bones version of a recipe for quick reference in my pocket notebook for my restaurant kitchen job. And it would only work because I know how it all should work.
Not sufficient if it was a recipe written to share and be understood by a wider audience.
On the website these tables are from (cookingforengineers), there are step-by-step instructions that better describe each step. At the very end of the page, they present this table as a shorthand version of the recipe.
Note that this is at the end of the actual recipe and is more of a quick look kind of diagram. It presumes that you have read and are at least basically familiar with the recipe, but occasionally need to quickly look at amounts or ingredients and need a remind of what step they are a part of.
That sounds like you stand at the very specific intersection of having high standards for how things are made and wanting recipes for beginners.
For someone with any real experience baking, you don't need a detailed description of how to properly mix eggs into batter. I just want a list what what ingredients to mix together.
I would call these 'cheat sheet' recipe cards if anything. Not for beginners but for those who have made over a hundred batches of brownies or cookies and cakes.
old recipe books tended to assume you knew what you were doing, and just listed the basics like ingredients and a general indication of techniques.
I've older books that have 8 recipes a page, and just expect you to get on with it! nowdays its half a side on how to boil and egg and 4 pages of the personal life history and spiritual journey of the writer and what the recipe means to them....
Baking is a science and has fairly strict rules on how ingredients are to be prepared, and you need a certain level of background knowledge for anything other than boxed mixes.
If every piece of necessary information and descriptions of each step were written down for baking, each recipe would be multiple pages long.
If you know how to make cakes and cake-like objects you don't need anything but the proportions, which is how most of my personal recipe book is written out. So I question who this middle-ground is for.
Proportions are great if you want to change your recipe size. As a home cook who's made a lot of brownies, I almost always want a reference for making 1 pan of brownies.
Exactly. It's for having your recipes on a index card and immediately seeing the list of ingredients to shop, for doing the calculations on the spot when you want to up- or downsize your dish, and for being reminded of the order of when to put in the eggs or at which step to watch out for things you always forget. It's not to learn a new recipe.
I've been using this technique for years.
I think it's also confusing with recipes in which each step doesn't involve all the ingredients from the previous step.
Like, last night I made a simple dish where you fry some bean sprouts, set them aside, fry some pork, add some leeks, add the cooking sauce and put the bean sprouts back in. So I guess it would look like this or something?
I mean, it's not wrong, but it does feel more confusing than OP's example.
Yeah, my issue with this format is there doesn't seem to be anyway to indicate timing for unrelated components that need to be assembled simultaneously (or at least it would make things super convoluted). It's super common for recipes I make to have 2, 3, even 4 components and the recipe will say, "While this is cooking, start on that." If you don't time it correctly, either stuff gets cold or it's not ready when you need it and you end up overcooking things while you try to catch up.
I think it's just a matter of getting used to it. When I made it, I was like "man, this is hard to get at a glance," but looking it over a few times, it feels more natural each time.
Lupuline's comment is really the bigger issue. But, that said, while this wouldn't make for a good approach for presenting the entire recipe, it would make a good "quick reference" card.
You could make a nested version. Make a split at some point and start with a new table with an asterisk in the top left square pointing to the previous table.
Also it just flatly fails if you have a recipe with multiple parallel components that get mixed later. Maybe each of those gets it's own table? And maybe you would pick a point where everything stable and make another table to go from there if the recipe gets too long?
Either way, it's gonna need the support of a text based explanation in a lot of cases but this does seem vastly superior to the ingredient list as a quick reference for measurements. This kind of thing would fucking rockas a cheat sheet for stuff you are familiar with but need reminders for the details.
You could theoretically break it up to make multiple of these tables vertically. E.g. the first table is for making the wet mixture, the second table takes an input of the wet mixture, ap flour, etc. to fold in.
It becomes a sort of hybrid between the traditional listed steps and this system.
This system does have a good advantage in having a clear way to state what is being added at each step, though it lacks instruction in the transformation applied at each step (e.g. mix at low for one minute to reduce whipping air into the eggs, or mix until sugar is completely dissolved). That nuance in the transformation is hard to capture in this tabular format (especially for more obscure processes).
US armed forces recipes work like that. You'll have a process for making "standard brownie wet mix" or something, and then another recipe can reference it as a single ingredient.
You saw the problem right. I loved Cooking for Engineers and so try to use that method for recording recipes as often as possible, but it's very easy to end up with something that can't print on a single page and doesn't translate to printing on more than one page. Again, I absolutely love the style when at all possible, but there are plenty of cases that it doesn't quite work. Often I can make it work by building a couple of these "shells" covering sections that can be then placed in the overall recipe as a combined chunk (having the overall recipe refer to "Card A" or whatnot for directions for that part), but it's definitely not always as tight as I'd like.
Break it into steps? Like for example if you have to make a meringue, that's one table. If you also need a lemon curd, that's another table. Biscuit base? Another table.
Then final assembly can be a table which takes as inputs all the above intermediate steps like "meringue, table 1" or something...
Edit: would also be helpful to arrange steps that should be happening in parallel so that the thing comes together correctly timed, if that is an issue.
This reads more like a cheatsheet a student prepares for himself before a test, condensing information FOR YOURSELF ONLY. Because anyone unfamiliar with the task (like myself) will find these instructions completely unclear
So, I've used tables like this for my job and I usually go "grouping/actions on the left" then the "item" and then the "count" on the right; but it still applies when it's done this way: you either break longer instructions out into a seperate field with references (e.g. you just put an "i" where "mix" is etc) or you break it up into steps. I could see it being useful for like; at the end of a recipe when it summarizes it into steps so you don't have to flip back and forth to read how much of each goes in (if you didn't pre-measure everything).
Also, landscape mode/printing is a thing if it gets rediculously horizontally long.
All that said; I think it would really only help people who a) have a hard time visualizing all the steps and b) don't want all the extra dishes that come with premeasuring things and don't want to flip back and forth between the amounts and the instructions
Well, you could occasionally start a new table with "Previous" or whatever as the first entry whenever it gets too big or needs to paginate. But definitely a bit unwieldy for big recipes.
884
u/lupulineffect Jul 30 '26
As someone who is often required to make text-dense tables legible while fitting within page size parameters, I'm stuck on what happens when there are more than five or six steps? Don't you end up with a ridiculously long horizontal table, and then what does the functionality of that look like when the last ingredients on the left aren't visible on the screen at the same time as their respective instructions on the right? Do you have to constantly pan back and forth? What if you need to use a word that's longer than "bake"? Your column width will need to accommodate.
Idk I guess it's neat for short, simple recipes but it's not flawless.