543
It’s beautiful
(thelemmy.club)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
543 points (97.1% liked)
GetBetter
150 readers
8 users here now
anything science based to improve, health, mental, technics, skills
founded 9 months ago
MODERATORS
This is terrible - forces me to scan across and then forget what I'm looking at.
It's contrary to mis-en-place: ingredients listed first, then instructions.
My technical brain does like the visual, this just doesnt work in reality, especially as recipe complexity increases.
Huh, well, I think it's awesome. The ingredients are listed first if you just consult the first column. In your defense, I would absolutely be interested in seeing this format applied to far more complex recipes. The blank boxes could easily be used to fill independent simultaneous preparation, though. One could simply fill the cells as one works from left to right. This is awesome!
Yeah, from a computer science perspective, cooking recipes are just algorithms. And I'm pretty sure, they need to be "turing-complete" in that, i.e. you can't really put a general boundary on their complexity.
A particular case that you can't portray with this scheme, is loops. It doesn't happen a lot, but
You could obviously work around it to some degree by writing e.g "Prepare 10 dumplings" and maybe list the steps for that separately below.
But yeah, there's going to be other complexities like conditions, e.g. "if you're doing the vegan version, mix in the agave syrup now".
...But I guess, there's also no law that forces you to use that scheme for all recipes. You can totally write it out in prose when the boxes start getting hacky.
A workaround for loops is to simply label every box A1, A2, B1, etc. and have it say "repeat steps A1-5" or whatever. You can also just edit the framework of the box entirely or use separate tables for totally independent parts. Anyway, I just dig the visual stacking lol.
Mis-en-place format makes sense if you’re a professional or have adopted professional methods.
However, a lot of home cooks/bakers don’t prep everything first and instead grab as they go or “chunk” the recipe steps like in the image.
Preparing all the ingredients before starting is something you learn in school?
That’s direct from Wikipedia and, yes, mis-en-place is taught in culinary schools.
You can certainly use it at home or even apply the principles outside of cooking.
However, I learned to cook in junior high home economics class and “mis-en-place” was not taught. I didn’t learn the term or its meaning until much later after adopting cooking as a hobby.
Unless a home cook has a strong interest in cooking as a hobby there’s lots of terms and techniques they wouldn’t likely know or apply. Think things like an aebleskiver or ~~tamagotchi~~ tamagoyaki pan.
Edit: autocorrect
I kind of suspect the people that don't agree with you don't cook often, at all, or are very amateur. It absolutely starts instructions at the top and LEAVES OUT those ingredients used for prep in the ingredient list. While this isn't a big deal for this recipe (extra flour and butter) this can be annoying when actually making something that requires different ingredients during prep.
Furthermore, I honestly don't see how you could use this format for anything beyond the most basic of baking recipes. I tried to think my way through writing a recipe for potatoes fondant in this format, and my mind started to melt thinking about to convey technique at each step. I also struggle to see how it's less complex to read than a traditional recipe format. Additionally, I fully agree that this recipe is going to result in misreading which ingredients go in each step, especially when you have to separately mix two separate sets of ingredients that are 10 or 11 columns out. It's just making a fairly simple list of steps way more complicated than necessary.
Maybe I'm missing something though. If someone has a more detailed explanation of how this style is supposed to work that would might be helpful. Otherwise it just seems sort of useless beyond cooking a box cake or a basic buttercream.