This is great, but it seems to be missing the requisite 5000 word backstory detailing the author's summer trips to their grandma's farmhouse where the recipe originated or the vacation to a foreign land where the author had a personal encounter with the dish's chef who, after much cajoling, revealed the secret recipe. Without the backstory, each recipe feels ungrounded and detached from time, place, and even reality itself.
My particular favourite of this genre is "Maple Shortbread Bars" from The New York Times which starts with the opening "Shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001"
I thought it's because there's no copyright possible on recipes, but there is on the fluff writing...
I don't know if it's to prevent mass theft of content (oh no, the thieves would have to go through the text and cut off the stories. Although nowadays the biggest IP thieves have built systems to automate this..)
On the normal food blogger pages it is fluff to make room for ads or to get people to misclick on the ads while trying to get to (or back to; the scroll changes feel intentional too) the actual recipe bit. Super effective, especially with people using mobile and trying to scroll with one finger while cooking.
A ton of these sites were bought up and they all look the same now and run the multiple floating ads, especially a wide banner at the -bottom- which is a perfect misclick monetizer.
My neighbor had 1940s Joy of Cooking, which in itself was probably one of the first every recipe, for the most part, just works cookbooks. Between rationing and more important not spoiling when sending cookies from the US to soldiers fighting on the front lines, many cookie recipes were without butter.
Outside of a story like that, there is no reason to include war in your recipe. Cooking is about nurturing and sustaining homeostasis. There is something fundamentally wrong about taking other people's suffering and making it about one self -- it is narcissistic which spoils like cookies made with butter after several weeks of travel.
Oh, it's worse than you think. It's not just "taking other people's suffering and making it about oneself." It's often purely SEO. Recipes get ranked higher when they are preceded by long, "engaging" introductions that nobody reads but that use keywords and address common questions (Like "can I substitute ingredients?). Often the longwinded introductions you see aren't the result of narcissism but of thoughtless SEO.
Very minor point, in the grand scheme of things: when converting measurements from imperial to metric, I would be astonished if many recipes need more than two significant figures. When the recipe says "391.32 gram strained greek yogurt" I would not expect disaster to befall me if I only supplied 391.31g.
A more major point is that I don't seem to be able to select text to copy and paste. I had to type out "391.32 gram strained greek yogurt" like some sort of caveman. And that makes me wonder what a screen reader would make of it...
For recipes, I prefer to use approximate round figures when talking in terms of metric and American customary. So, 1 fl oz is 30 ml, a pound of flour is 450 g, etc.
These are much easier to measure, scale, and remember. There are very few contexts where minute differences matter, and I don't think you're going to find a material crossover figure between those that want recipe help and those that are working on the kind of stuff where it matters.
That works for some recipes, but for bread precise is better. I'm astonished when I read bread recipes that casually ask for 2 cups of flour (which could be wildly different amounts).
Looking through your comments, your spelling indicates you might be from a Commonwealth country, which means you might not be familiar with the fact that a "cup" is a standardized measurement in the US.
Yes but it's a measure of _volume_, whereas flour is best measured by _weight_. Any volume measurement of flour can vary wildly depending on many factors, such as how densely packed it is.
King Arthur Flour have a short video[0] demonstrating the wildly different weight measurements from measuring a "cup" (the same cup size across samples).
Measuring liquids by volume is totally fine because you generally won't get a large difference between two different cups of water (although I still generally measure that by weight as a personal preference).
But that doesn't work. The chart states that 1 cup of 00 flour is 116g which is simply not true. It _might_ be 116g, but it could also be 200g (!). Volume measurement is simply not suitable for baking.
For things like sauces or marinades, you use a much smaller amount, and approximate is generally fine.
Well yes, but it's a matter of perspective I think. Is it the amount that the recipe author used? Maybe, maybe not. But is it the amount you used the last dozen times you used this recipe? Of course, as long as your chart hasn't changed.
To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with your general premise, everything would be much easier if all recipes used weights for powder-like-ingredients. But recipes that actually have weights listed are few and far between, I find.
The issue is that flour is quite compressible. So if you've opened a fresh bag and scooped out a cup from the top, you'll get quite a different amount than if you dig in the cup and compress the flour against the side of the bag.
It's not like scooping out rice or sugar, where a cup is a cup, assuming you're careful to use a measuring cup and fill it exactly level.
I'm not sure of the exact error margins (there is research on these things though if you care to look) but at a guess I'd say you should expect 15% error margins on scooping white flour even if you're extremely careful to fill the measuring scoop to the same level each time. Probably a bit less on heavier flours.
Note, I run a bakery, although I'm not a baker myself. But I am the one focused on making sure we have repeatable processes, as much as that's possible for sourdough!
Volume measurements are extremely innacurate and should be avoided for pretty much everything in baking, except maybe water. Not a big deal if you're baking at home - bread with +-15% flour will be totally edible - but if you want repeatable bread quality, use a scales with accuracy to 0.1g. You can buy one for $20 that's good enough for home use.
If you're going to weigh even one thing, weigh the salt. Small variations can have a big effect on yeast activity and final bread flavor. Volume measurements of salt are not at all accurate because crystal sizes vary a lot. People assume (even some bakers that I've met!) that salt is just added to bread for flavor, but it's more like a chemical reaction rate control dial, and you need to be very accurate in how much you turn that dial.
Sure, but in practice people don't use measuring cups all that precisely a lot of the time. Specifying a weight forces people to bust out the scale and pay attention.
You don't need to get that precise to make bread. I've made bread successfully all the time with volume measurements, it's not like the recipes are that finicky.
It's not that you can't, it's just that it's harder to get consistent results. Switching to weight measurements is the first advice I give to any friends who are struggling with making bread.
You can be wildly off in baking and produce an edible, enjoyable product. Especially if you have a sense of how to adjust the consistency of what you're mixing and can adjust baking times.
But-- if you use weight measurements and attend to precision, you'll have to adjust a lot less and you'll come much closer to the best possible output.
An Apple press release about how much gold they could recover from recycled iPhones pissed me off so much. And all the "journalists" just copied and pasted the number with too many significant digits...
It said "Apple recovered 2204lbs of gold" from recycled iPhones. Guess who just did a plain conversion from a tonne (1000kg) to lbs.
The whole environmental report from Apple had more numbers, and you could clearly see that they were all converted from metric to imperial and made to look really precise...
"We recovered two thousand and four pounds of gold!" sounds a lot more precisely calculated than "we recovered about 1000kg of gold" ("Not 2203lbs, not 2205lbs, but 2204lbs!"). And no journalist caught this...
This reminds me of making a trip to a jeweler when I was < 10 years old, and noticing that they had a weighing scale that seemed to be down to decimal points of a gram (which I guess counts when you're weighing gold, etc).
And the numbers kept changing even when the scale was empty. I think I had a whole conversation with my grandpa about why that was happening, and we came up with "probably just variations in air/breeze around the scale causing them to change"
No idea if that's actually what it was, but it's plausible if you're doing sub-gram weighing?
> No idea if that's actually what it was, but it's plausible if you're doing sub-gram weighing?
Yes, even dust particles landing on the scale can impact the reading, which is why when you're measuring really small things and want to be precise, you usually have a little glass/plastic cube around the entire thing too.
Also frequently used for people who measure drugs for various purposes.
I have a scale in my kitchen that measures with 0.1g precision, and it doesn't do what you describe (change while you're not touching it). Perhaps technology has advanced since the anecdote you describe? Or maybe my scale is just lying to me.
Hmmm then I bet it was a flaw. Or maybe modern scales have microcontrollers that adjust for this?
This was a scale in a jeweler in India. It might have been in the late 80s or mid-90s. I might be misremembering too. So take my anecdote with a grain of salt.
I'm not convinced that the units conversion is right. The example of 2 Cups of greek yoghurt being 391.32 g. 1 US cup is 240 ml (or 236.5 ml depending on which type of cup you are using). The density of greek yoghurt is somewhere between 0.96 g/ml and 1.04 g/ml (depending on which website you trust the most). This leads me to calculate that 2 cups greek yoghurt weighs between 454 g and 499 g). The 391 g value is way off.
Also, depending on the ingredient, it makes more sense to use cups as a measurement of volume, not mass, when converting to metric. E.g. liquids, yoghurt etc.
Another thing: although not strictly metric, but European recipes also use tablespoon and teaspoon as measurements for smaller volumes, so no need to convert this.
Just my two cents, other than that very nice work!!
Please, please try using weight whenever possible, aka for all amounts >= 2 grams.
1. People are bad at measuring volume. This has been tested. There is much more variance in amounts measured by volume than be weight. See "science and cooking" (ferran adria).
2. Using a scale means doing a lot fewer dishes! (measuring cups, spoons, etc.)
The app looks very nice. Small suggestions: Show the price of the premium plan when not logged in. Many users may not entertain an app depending on the price, and logging in shouldn't be needed to see it.
Also the ability to halve recipes would be great, sometimes you just want to make less.
This is amazing, and at first glance it is going to solve many of my problems. I see offers to start a free trial but nothing about pricing. The sign up page doesn't work well with my password manager, I imagine you need to add auto fill hints to the textboxes, looks like your using flutter, so add these to each textbox you want to autofill: https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/material/TextField/autofillH..., it should also work with mobile
Are you still taking suggestions? You should have a "random recipe" button that loads something random from your database. Right now, your product is very one-dimensional: Someone has a specific problem, they find your solution, they use it. But, adding another dimension for people who don't have that problem is a good idea. And I think a random recipe button will naturally open you to finding what that second dimension is.
- Browser history seems to go in a circle (at least in Chrome); try use the browser's native "back" arrow a few times after clicking through the link you shared from HN.
- Transition animations and element "load-in" animations make the whole thing feel slow and hard to use. As it is, I'm frustrated trying to look through recipes or moving through pages.
Should the measurements be included in the instructions or just left out to avoid that? Instead of "add 1/2 teaspoon of ingredient", just say "add ingredient".
growing up, we had the old red/white gingham Betty Crocker cookbook where the scaled measurements were written in the book. the instructions never had any of the measurements in them. based on that, it just feels natural to the point of adding the scaling into the instructions seems overly complicated. just took a look at couple of other recipe examples, and they all leave out the measurements in the instructions.
I personally prefer leaving the measurement in the instructions for two reasons.
1. I'll often use the ingredients list (and quantities there) before cooking to ensure that I have everything I need ahead of time. Depending on what ingredient it is, I might not mise en place it. In those cases, a step that says "add ingredient" would require me to go reference the list in the beginning, losing a bit of context.
2. It's not often, but I've followed a few recipes that require a particular ingredient in 2 different steps in different amounts.
recipes that don't separate their ingredients into steps like crust/filling/icing when using common ingredients like butter are just poorly written recipes.
apparently I've imported 10 recipes....but I haven't used it. But then it had a freakout when I went in and tried going back, and .... yeah. Somehow I'm stuck on a link that has another link to turkish pasta. Guess I'll wait another 4 years
Fantastic. I was actually working on something like this myself. I was planning to use an LLM as a fallback for recipes that don't contain properly formatted recipe data.
Curious as to how you get around some of the anti-scraping measures like Cloudflare. I put in a recipe blog (https://www.maangchi.com) that usually blocks me with Cloudflare but your site was able to scrape it just fine.
Edit: also as a very minor point your counter on how many recipes have been imported seems to keep going up each time I try to visit the same recipe. It says I've converted 5 but I've just tried to visit the same recipe 5 times.
Hello, I am using different datacenter IPs first. If all fail to crawl, I have a Raspberry Pi in my house that crawls using my residential IP. ;)
My home IP has not been blocked yet since I regularly do human-like operations from it. Hehe.
But on a serious note, you can try services like Bright Data or Apify that have a ton of residential IPs. So if you see a cloudflare block page, just rotate the proxy.
I think it’s first time I’ve seen stuff like tablespoon, teaspoon, cup converted when changing to metric. These are very normal units to use in Europe when cooking. We don’t measure teaspoons by the grams when we make food. If measuring flour or something then of course grams would make sense.
It's great to see other people working on this. It's a problem that needs solving, and you've solved it in a meaningful way. I have been building https://spoonme.kitchen/ for a couple of years now (but with a different focus) to help solve this problem and a few others that are meaningful to me.
One aspect that I've been really wrestling with is how can we make the end user experience of seeing a recipe better, while still providing meaningful income to the recipe creators who labor so much to share their stuff with us. I'd be interested in your thoughts on this. That to me would be the very meaningful, positive change: that end users get a better experience, and creators get paid. That's been my overarching goal and motivation.
I created an account, but when I clicked on the confirmation link in the resulting E-mail, it took me to a log-in page that said, "Sign in to api.onlyrecipe.com:443.
I wasn't surprised when I used my sign-up info and got nothing but a Kong error for my troubles. So... looks like sign-up is not yet working.
Funny timing, I've been building something like this for my own use -- but your feature list has everything I wanted :) How much do you charge? Would love to know without downloading an app
I assume that (like most recipe apps out there) he's just trying to parse the json Recipe schema when it is attached. Most blogs attach them because it helps Google get them indexed.
I posted the first version of OnlyRecipe here about four years ago [1], and the response was incredible. The feedback in that thread shaped a lot of what I wanted to build next. That initial momentum proved that the core problem (ads, life stories, and clutter on recipe blogs) needed a solution.
Progress since then has been slower than I hoped — I had some health issues and was building on and off — but I kept coming back to this project because I genuinely love working on it. I’ve been working on the project on and off, fitting development in whenever I could. This post represents a huge personal milestone.
Here’s what’s new after all this time:
Import from Videos: Import directly from TikTok, Instagram, Youtube and Facebook videos
Import from Handwritten recipes: Import from handwritten notes and screenshots
Unit Conversion: A highly-requested feature. Instantly convert US Customary (cups/oz) to Metric (grams/ml) for any extracted recipe.
Grocery Lists: Consolidate ingredients from multiple saved recipes into a single, clean shopping list.
Meal Plan: Plan your weekly meals in advance
Controls: Full recipe editing, PDF export, printing, and cross-device sync
Mobile-First Design: While the web view (linked above) is great for quickly seeing the result, the mobile apps have dedicated native controls for cooking mode (e.g., screen stay-awake, timers, and offline access).
In-App Browser: Directly import from any site within the app and many more...
To see these features in action quickly (small gif/videos), check it out on the landing page [2]
The link above is a deep link to a live demo on the web app.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new utility features and the performance of the parser! Try it out here [5]
- many recipe sites let you check/uncheck things you want to print. I'd love to print just [ name, ingredients, instructions ] without [ photo, metadata/servings/nutrition/etc. ]. I much prefer one page recipes to two pages.
- on desktop, some text-break like "6 servings" breaks to 2 lines
Very cool! it does get a bit confused about number words that aren't amounts, like "3 large russet potatoes, peeled and halved lengthwise" becomes "3 large russet potatoes, peeled and cut in 0.50 lengthwise" which when scaled up becomes "cut in 1 lengthwise"
1. The most unexpected thing that I learned was the absolute nightmare it is to set up subscriptions.
I initially thought it would be a simple task. I started off with writing APIs and webhooks for Play store and App store.
But then as I got into the specifics things got complicated very quickly.
The combinations of subscriptions (monthly/yearly, AI and non-AI), cancellations, cross device subscription sync, how to handle trials, how to manage subscription states of users, and then when users upgrade, that's another few cases to handle.
There were just too many cases to handle.
I then just used a third-party provider (RevenueCat). They have handled all the complexities beautifully.
2. Supabase self-host is another nightmare in itself. Just the sheer amount of configs needs (through the .env file) is insane. They have intentionally made it so difficult to configure.
3. Setting up SMTP and sending emails is actually a very tiring and cumbersome process. AWS SES is just too much work. Mainly the domain reputation (emails always landing in spam) and also there are not many providers that give a generous trial.
Conversion to weights from volume (e.g., converting '1 cup of flour' to grams). One developer noted they'd look into generic conversion feasibility.
Scaling a recipe (e.g., adjusting ingredients for 1.5x or 2x the batch size).
Unit Choice: Offering a clear choice between metric and imperial units.
Unit Specificity: The ability to differentiate between US and non-US cups for accurate conversions.
Data Structure: Displaying ingredient data with consistent units in a database to enable easy batch size adjustments and visualization of value changes.
Structured Data and Presentation
C4E Format: Converting recipes to the format used on Cooking For Engineers.
Process Visualization: Displaying the entire recipe process using Gantt charts or a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) / graphviz to illustrate dependencies between steps.
SEO/Integration: Incorporating JSON-LD support for better recipe recognition and advanced features.
Printability: Generating dedicated print-friendly pages.
Standard Layout: A simplified, standardized layout for better readability across all recipes.
Sharing: A feature for sharing recipe "image cards" (screenshots) with friends.
Management, Search, and Tools
Shopping List: Creating a grocery list from the scraped ingredients.
List Filtering: The ability to exclude common ingredients (salt, pepper, olive oil) from the automatically generated shopping list.
Nutrition: Generating automatic nutrition labels.
Personal Database: The capability to ingest every recipe from every cookbook into a personal, searchable database.
Search Function: Allowing search for recipes instead of just requiring a URL input.
Sync/Backup: Enabling server-sync and export/import of recipes.
Timers: The option to set a timer linked to the time specified in a recipe step.
Custom Lists: Allowing users to create their own categorization rules for ingredients on shopping lists.
Platform and UI
Dark Mode: Adding a dark mode for late-night cooking.
iOS Integration: Implementing a Safari extension feature for the iOS app to open recipe pages automatically within the app.
Video Parsing: The capability to parse recipes from YouTube URLs or videos.
I feel deep gratitude to you for this, and the timing of your post. Thank you!
Seriously. I also feel like you're owed an apology for having had to write this in the first place.
I'm coming at "figuring out the Kitchen" for what is almost the first time in my life in I-wish-I-were-in-my-mid-40s[0] and I'm thinking "The Internet in the Early 00s was pretty good for that." And then I fire up a browser on desktop while making a grocery list and once you filter for "things that are obviously AI Hallucinations representing partial recipes", I'm met with one or all of the following: (1) Pages and pages and pages of obviously made-up nonsense anecdotes about the discovery of this magical, uh, air fryer grilled chicken marinade, (2) a pretty haphazard set of instructions that don't bother to include ingredients separated with pleasant units and conversions, but hide them throughout with quantities like "a few tomatoes" here, "an onion" there, (3) which doesn't seem to impact the 4.8 stars after hundreds of "user ratings.". (4) And rather than help these miserable imprecise, ingredient-less recipes with pictures of what "until moist and brown" might appear, you're going to show me a bunch of chopped ingredients in separated bowls that I don't have and then a picture of it finished, delicately decorated in whatever-or-another sauce, and "HEY, here's some lady who's cooking something unrelated to the recipe in this neat little video window I popped up for you! Let's watch the top of her head and this bowl of something on mute for a little while!"
Good God, man, it's like they've optimized the design to break people with ADHD. Some sites were so bad, it felt like "the actual recipe I was looking for" was obfuscated on the page like sketchy sites will hide the "actual Download button" somewhere unexpected and give you a big green "Download" button that leads to revenue. And that's not even getting into the weird bad on some of these AI-churn sites. I end up opening a notepad on the side and refactoring the things that seem like they might work from time to time, but I popped a few recipes in there, including a Chili recipe that "barely had any problems other than layout and annoying cooking lady videos" and just turned it into the perfect representation of that recipe.
I don't know what the original feedback was, but beyond how clear and organized laid out the recipe, here's what I saw as really useful little touches (I'm half wondering if some were even intended): (1) Besides my affinity for circled numbers, I lose my spot when referring to recipes so I like to print out the ones I really like, laminate them, and mark 'em up with the whiteboard markers I have for fridge notes as I go, you gave me a wonderful spot for that -- I'm so prone to re-read/second-guess where I'm at when I need to "put a bunch of things together at the last moment", that was the first thing I noticed, (2) Your highlighting did the same thing for making my grocery list (I DoorDashed it, today) -- it's so much more readable and "easy to find my spot" the way it appears on my desktop compared to any other site, (3) Because of your choice positioning, I can scroll down slightly and see the ingredients and all of the instructions without having to touch this thing, again, while I'm cooking if I use the tablet in the kitchen.
Oh, and thank you for making it just work in the browser. I hate using my phone for this kind of thing and I'm not even crazy about using my tablet for it.
[0] The backstory being unexpected, but very much desired, custody change led to me cooking for my children all of the time, including one who struggles with weight. I was blessed without that struggle, I eat "whatever" atrociously (not picky), and about what I burn, I'm under-weight and my blood work is perfect. One of my kids is identical, just not the one that sounds exactly like me :).
This is great, but it seems to be missing the requisite 5000 word backstory detailing the author's summer trips to their grandma's farmhouse where the recipe originated or the vacation to a foreign land where the author had a personal encounter with the dish's chef who, after much cajoling, revealed the secret recipe. Without the backstory, each recipe feels ungrounded and detached from time, place, and even reality itself.
My particular favourite of this genre is "Maple Shortbread Bars" from The New York Times which starts with the opening "Shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001"
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017089-maple-shortbread...
TBF, the recipe starts on the first screen for me, so that's a huge improvement over 99% of the recipes on the internet...
I haven't laughed that hard in a while, WOW. I genuinely wonder if people believe this or if it's necessary fluff to sell.
I thought it's because there's no copyright possible on recipes, but there is on the fluff writing...
I don't know if it's to prevent mass theft of content (oh no, the thieves would have to go through the text and cut off the stories. Although nowadays the biggest IP thieves have built systems to automate this..)
On the normal food blogger pages it is fluff to make room for ads or to get people to misclick on the ads while trying to get to (or back to; the scroll changes feel intentional too) the actual recipe bit. Super effective, especially with people using mobile and trying to scroll with one finger while cooking.
A ton of these sites were bought up and they all look the same now and run the multiple floating ads, especially a wide banner at the -bottom- which is a perfect misclick monetizer.
The purpose of the website is to sell ad space. The recipe brings you to the site. The story keeps you there longer and makes more space for more ads.
My neighbor had 1940s Joy of Cooking, which in itself was probably one of the first every recipe, for the most part, just works cookbooks. Between rationing and more important not spoiling when sending cookies from the US to soldiers fighting on the front lines, many cookie recipes were without butter.
Outside of a story like that, there is no reason to include war in your recipe. Cooking is about nurturing and sustaining homeostasis. There is something fundamentally wrong about taking other people's suffering and making it about one self -- it is narcissistic which spoils like cookies made with butter after several weeks of travel.
Oh, it's worse than you think. It's not just "taking other people's suffering and making it about oneself." It's often purely SEO. Recipes get ranked higher when they are preceded by long, "engaging" introductions that nobody reads but that use keywords and address common questions (Like "can I substitute ingredients?). Often the longwinded introductions you see aren't the result of narcissism but of thoughtless SEO.
Very minor point, in the grand scheme of things: when converting measurements from imperial to metric, I would be astonished if many recipes need more than two significant figures. When the recipe says "391.32 gram strained greek yogurt" I would not expect disaster to befall me if I only supplied 391.31g.
A more major point is that I don't seem to be able to select text to copy and paste. I had to type out "391.32 gram strained greek yogurt" like some sort of caveman. And that makes me wonder what a screen reader would make of it...
For recipes, I prefer to use approximate round figures when talking in terms of metric and American customary. So, 1 fl oz is 30 ml, a pound of flour is 450 g, etc.
These are much easier to measure, scale, and remember. There are very few contexts where minute differences matter, and I don't think you're going to find a material crossover figure between those that want recipe help and those that are working on the kind of stuff where it matters.
That works for some recipes, but for bread precise is better. I'm astonished when I read bread recipes that casually ask for 2 cups of flour (which could be wildly different amounts).
Looking through your comments, your spelling indicates you might be from a Commonwealth country, which means you might not be familiar with the fact that a "cup" is a standardized measurement in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit)#Customary_cup
Yes but it's a measure of _volume_, whereas flour is best measured by _weight_. Any volume measurement of flour can vary wildly depending on many factors, such as how densely packed it is.
King Arthur Flour have a short video[0] demonstrating the wildly different weight measurements from measuring a "cup" (the same cup size across samples).
Measuring liquids by volume is totally fine because you generally won't get a large difference between two different cups of water (although I still generally measure that by weight as a personal preference).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUSovVHpqsU
Absolutely, which is why you need an ingredient weight chart. There are print versions, but personally I have this link bookmarked and it comes out every time I bake: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/learn/ingredient-weight-cha...
But that doesn't work. The chart states that 1 cup of 00 flour is 116g which is simply not true. It _might_ be 116g, but it could also be 200g (!). Volume measurement is simply not suitable for baking.
For things like sauces or marinades, you use a much smaller amount, and approximate is generally fine.
Well yes, but it's a matter of perspective I think. Is it the amount that the recipe author used? Maybe, maybe not. But is it the amount you used the last dozen times you used this recipe? Of course, as long as your chart hasn't changed.
To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with your general premise, everything would be much easier if all recipes used weights for powder-like-ingredients. But recipes that actually have weights listed are few and far between, I find.
We all know what a measuring cup is.
The issue is that flour is quite compressible. So if you've opened a fresh bag and scooped out a cup from the top, you'll get quite a different amount than if you dig in the cup and compress the flour against the side of the bag.
It's not like scooping out rice or sugar, where a cup is a cup, assuming you're careful to use a measuring cup and fill it exactly level.
I'm not sure of the exact error margins (there is research on these things though if you care to look) but at a guess I'd say you should expect 15% error margins on scooping white flour even if you're extremely careful to fill the measuring scoop to the same level each time. Probably a bit less on heavier flours.
Note, I run a bakery, although I'm not a baker myself. But I am the one focused on making sure we have repeatable processes, as much as that's possible for sourdough!
Volume measurements are extremely innacurate and should be avoided for pretty much everything in baking, except maybe water. Not a big deal if you're baking at home - bread with +-15% flour will be totally edible - but if you want repeatable bread quality, use a scales with accuracy to 0.1g. You can buy one for $20 that's good enough for home use.
If you're going to weigh even one thing, weigh the salt. Small variations can have a big effect on yeast activity and final bread flavor. Volume measurements of salt are not at all accurate because crystal sizes vary a lot. People assume (even some bakers that I've met!) that salt is just added to bread for flavor, but it's more like a chemical reaction rate control dial, and you need to be very accurate in how much you turn that dial.
Chef John (an American) wrote a blog post in 2010 about why cups are the wrong unit for flour:
https://foodwishes.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-to-measure-cup-o...
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rvz0WKanGU
Sure, but in practice people don't use measuring cups all that precisely a lot of the time. Specifying a weight forces people to bust out the scale and pay attention.
You don't need to get that precise to make bread. I've made bread successfully all the time with volume measurements, it's not like the recipes are that finicky.
It's not that you can't, it's just that it's harder to get consistent results. Switching to weight measurements is the first advice I give to any friends who are struggling with making bread.
You can be wildly off in baking and produce an edible, enjoyable product. Especially if you have a sense of how to adjust the consistency of what you're mixing and can adjust baking times.
But-- if you use weight measurements and attend to precision, you'll have to adjust a lot less and you'll come much closer to the best possible output.
An Apple press release about how much gold they could recover from recycled iPhones pissed me off so much. And all the "journalists" just copied and pasted the number with too many significant digits...
It said "Apple recovered 2204lbs of gold" from recycled iPhones. Guess who just did a plain conversion from a tonne (1000kg) to lbs.
The whole environmental report from Apple had more numbers, and you could clearly see that they were all converted from metric to imperial and made to look really precise...
"We recovered two thousand and four pounds of gold!" sounds a lot more precisely calculated than "we recovered about 1000kg of gold" ("Not 2203lbs, not 2205lbs, but 2204lbs!"). And no journalist caught this...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/apple-ton-of-gold-recycling_n... including a link to the full report. Appropriately from a website cosplaying as journalism
This reminds me of making a trip to a jeweler when I was < 10 years old, and noticing that they had a weighing scale that seemed to be down to decimal points of a gram (which I guess counts when you're weighing gold, etc).
And the numbers kept changing even when the scale was empty. I think I had a whole conversation with my grandpa about why that was happening, and we came up with "probably just variations in air/breeze around the scale causing them to change"
No idea if that's actually what it was, but it's plausible if you're doing sub-gram weighing?
> No idea if that's actually what it was, but it's plausible if you're doing sub-gram weighing?
Yes, even dust particles landing on the scale can impact the reading, which is why when you're measuring really small things and want to be precise, you usually have a little glass/plastic cube around the entire thing too.
Also frequently used for people who measure drugs for various purposes.
> why when you're measuring really small things and want to be precise, you usually have a little glass/plastic cube around the entire thing too.
These weighing instruments with draft shields are usually called analytical balances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_balance
Most likely the op amp (or whatever gain stage) noise. After a certain point, you get thermal noise.
But with such scales, low sample rates and averaging are key.
I have a scale in my kitchen that measures with 0.1g precision, and it doesn't do what you describe (change while you're not touching it). Perhaps technology has advanced since the anecdote you describe? Or maybe my scale is just lying to me.
Your scale may smooth out the fluctuations automatically.
Mine takes a little while to notice when I'm adding something like a tenth of a gram of yeast to a recipe.
Yeah, I'd guess this is what's happening.
Hmmm then I bet it was a flaw. Or maybe modern scales have microcontrollers that adjust for this?
This was a scale in a jeweler in India. It might have been in the late 80s or mid-90s. I might be misremembering too. So take my anecdote with a grain of salt.
> Or maybe modern scales have microcontrollers that adjust for this?
This seems likely to me.
> So take my anecdote with a grain of salt.
Oh, come on. Surely the scale wasn't that precise.
Thank you for the feedback. Will definitely release an update by tomorrow for this.
Regarding selection of text, that has been a problem with flutter. I will find a way to make it selectable.
There is an alternative. You can share the recipe or click print. There you would be able to select it.
Or, you could share the recipe and it would be copied to your clipboard.
I know that is not exactly what you want, but it will solve the purpose for now.
I'll fix it soon. Apologies.
I'm not convinced that the units conversion is right. The example of 2 Cups of greek yoghurt being 391.32 g. 1 US cup is 240 ml (or 236.5 ml depending on which type of cup you are using). The density of greek yoghurt is somewhere between 0.96 g/ml and 1.04 g/ml (depending on which website you trust the most). This leads me to calculate that 2 cups greek yoghurt weighs between 454 g and 499 g). The 391 g value is way off.
Thanks for pointing it out. I'll look into it and fix it by tomorrow.
This should do the trick https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/material/SelectionArea-class...
Also, depending on the ingredient, it makes more sense to use cups as a measurement of volume, not mass, when converting to metric. E.g. liquids, yoghurt etc.
Another thing: although not strictly metric, but European recipes also use tablespoon and teaspoon as measurements for smaller volumes, so no need to convert this.
Just my two cents, other than that very nice work!!
Please, please try using weight whenever possible, aka for all amounts >= 2 grams.
1. People are bad at measuring volume. This has been tested. There is much more variance in amounts measured by volume than be weight. See "science and cooking" (ferran adria).
2. Using a scale means doing a lot fewer dishes! (measuring cups, spoons, etc.)
3. It's faster, try it!
"Also, depending on the ingredient, it makes more sense to use cups as a measurement of volume, not mass, when converting to metric."
Hmmm... What kind of cup? :-)
US "legal" cup (240ml)
US customary cup (246,6ml)
metric cup (250ml)
UK cup (170,5ml)
edit: fixed typo 150ml -> 250ml
Not sure where that 150ml came from - our metric country (New Zealand) 1 cup is 250 ml.
Thanks, I mistyped. I meant 250 ml.
Thanks for the feedback. I've made a note.
so use cups and tablespoons but put in parenthesis the value in mL
Certainly. That would provide a good user experience. Thank you.
My kitchen scale only shows grams to the nearest integer anyway.
The app looks very nice. Small suggestions: Show the price of the premium plan when not logged in. Many users may not entertain an app depending on the price, and logging in shouldn't be needed to see it.
Also the ability to halve recipes would be great, sometimes you just want to make less.
Thanks. Yes, makes total sense.
Will make these changes and release soon.
Four years soon?
Haha. No, not this time. ;) It'll be released by this weekend and I am focusing on this project completely right now.
No one requested "highlight the ingredient names in the recipe steps"? That's a top request from me.
Thanks. I'll add this as an optional user preference
Highlighted ingredient names and inline amount/sizing so there isn't as much back-and-forth referencing!
This is amazing, and at first glance it is going to solve many of my problems. I see offers to start a free trial but nothing about pricing. The sign up page doesn't work well with my password manager, I imagine you need to add auto fill hints to the textboxes, looks like your using flutter, so add these to each textbox you want to autofill: https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/material/TextField/autofillH..., it should also work with mobile
When I sign up, I get an error when confirming my email: This site can’t be reached The webpage at https://api.onlyrecipeapp.com/?code=XXX
Good work, looks very promising.
Oh shoot!
That's a reverse proxy configuration error. I just fixed it.
Please try registering again.
Are you still taking suggestions? You should have a "random recipe" button that loads something random from your database. Right now, your product is very one-dimensional: Someone has a specific problem, they find your solution, they use it. But, adding another dimension for people who don't have that problem is a good idea. And I think a random recipe button will naturally open you to finding what that second dimension is.
Hey! I never really thought in that direction.
That's a great insight. I'd definitely look into it.
Thank you
In addition to random recipe.
Have a recipe of the day. Rotated per 24 hours.
So we can all enjoy and refine a recipe together
Great suggestion. Adding it to my TODO list. Thank you.
Congratulations on the work.
Some nits/notes:
- Browser history seems to go in a circle (at least in Chrome); try use the browser's native "back" arrow a few times after clicking through the link you shared from HN.
- Transition animations and element "load-in" animations make the whole thing feel slow and hard to use. As it is, I'm frustrated trying to look through recipes or moving through pages.
Thank you.
You have confirmed the two issues that others are also facing.
I'll definitely look into this
This looks great. Something I'd like to see in a recipe app is scale is not only reflected in the ingredients list but also in the directions.
The linked recipe is a great example. The 1/2 teaspoon in step 1 is never modified regardless of the scale of the recipe.
Also scale should go below 1 (like .5).
Should the measurements be included in the instructions or just left out to avoid that? Instead of "add 1/2 teaspoon of ingredient", just say "add ingredient".
growing up, we had the old red/white gingham Betty Crocker cookbook where the scaled measurements were written in the book. the instructions never had any of the measurements in them. based on that, it just feels natural to the point of adding the scaling into the instructions seems overly complicated. just took a look at couple of other recipe examples, and they all leave out the measurements in the instructions.
I personally prefer leaving the measurement in the instructions for two reasons.
1. I'll often use the ingredients list (and quantities there) before cooking to ensure that I have everything I need ahead of time. Depending on what ingredient it is, I might not mise en place it. In those cases, a step that says "add ingredient" would require me to go reference the list in the beginning, losing a bit of context.
2. It's not often, but I've followed a few recipes that require a particular ingredient in 2 different steps in different amounts.
I've taken to combining them. As in, I put a list of items needed above a paragraph describing what to do. I don't know if it's good, but it helps me.
Example: https://imgur.com/7qXRNTH
recipes that don't separate their ingredients into steps like crust/filling/icing when using common ingredients like butter are just poorly written recipes.
Noted this. Thank you.
apparently I've imported 10 recipes....but I haven't used it. But then it had a freakout when I went in and tried going back, and .... yeah. Somehow I'm stuck on a link that has another link to turkish pasta. Guess I'll wait another 4 years
Fantastic. I was actually working on something like this myself. I was planning to use an LLM as a fallback for recipes that don't contain properly formatted recipe data.
Curious as to how you get around some of the anti-scraping measures like Cloudflare. I put in a recipe blog (https://www.maangchi.com) that usually blocks me with Cloudflare but your site was able to scrape it just fine.
Edit: also as a very minor point your counter on how many recipes have been imported seems to keep going up each time I try to visit the same recipe. It says I've converted 5 but I've just tried to visit the same recipe 5 times.
Hello, I am using different datacenter IPs first. If all fail to crawl, I have a Raspberry Pi in my house that crawls using my residential IP. ;)
My home IP has not been blocked yet since I regularly do human-like operations from it. Hehe.
But on a serious note, you can try services like Bright Data or Apify that have a ton of residential IPs. So if you see a cloudflare block page, just rotate the proxy.
I think it’s first time I’ve seen stuff like tablespoon, teaspoon, cup converted when changing to metric. These are very normal units to use in Europe when cooking. We don’t measure teaspoons by the grams when we make food. If measuring flour or something then of course grams would make sense.
It's great to see other people working on this. It's a problem that needs solving, and you've solved it in a meaningful way. I have been building https://spoonme.kitchen/ for a couple of years now (but with a different focus) to help solve this problem and a few others that are meaningful to me.
One aspect that I've been really wrestling with is how can we make the end user experience of seeing a recipe better, while still providing meaningful income to the recipe creators who labor so much to share their stuff with us. I'd be interested in your thoughts on this. That to me would be the very meaningful, positive change: that end users get a better experience, and creators get paid. That's been my overarching goal and motivation.
- if you change to metric system suddenly you get numbers like 453,59 grams fusili pasta - its quite demotivating
- instead of grams I would like also tell me how many americano coffee cups more or less than looking for scale.
- I wanna scale down - if serving is for 6 people i want to scale down to to servings
I've added it to my notes. Thanks
Neat but as soon as I clicked it, a recipe for Turkish pasta came up and it hijacked the back button.
Apologies.
I am looking into it.
Getting the same here, macOS, Firefox
Hi, it's a known issue. I'm debugging it as we speak.
Should be fixed soon.
Great job! Seems to work well.
I created an account, but when I clicked on the confirmation link in the resulting E-mail, it took me to a log-in page that said, "Sign in to api.onlyrecipe.com:443.
I wasn't surprised when I used my sign-up info and got nothing but a Kong error for my troubles. So... looks like sign-up is not yet working.
Ahh. That's not expected. Please tell me if you were using web or the mobile app. I'll have a look.
Web.
Congrats on the updates, TIL I've been using the original version for 4 years now!
The OG.
Glad to hear it. Thank you. Do give this new version a try. It is wayyy better than the first one.
It's beautiful and helpful. Thanks for sharing. Which are your top competitors in your opinion?
There are many that do this TBH.
But currently the only competition I consider is Paprika. They have been in this game for over a decade.
I am going to add recipe imports directly from Paprika soon too. For people who would migrate from Paprika to Only Recipe.
I know it's a long shot, but I am going for it. :)
Funny timing, I've been building something like this for my own use -- but your feature list has everything I wanted :) How much do you charge? Would love to know without downloading an app
Glad you liked it. There is a free tier. So you don't necessarily have to purchase. The pricing summary is here https://get.onlyrecipeapp.com/pricing
Thank you
feature request: common substitutions
i dont have ingredient x, but i do have y, which is close enough
like, i just ran out of browb sugar, but i do have some melases or honey
Nice. I should find a list of alternatives for each ingredient. I'll see what I can do. Thank you for suggesting.
Doesn't seem to work for this blog: https://foodwishes.blogspot.com/2016/03/tartiflette-french-p...
I assume that (like most recipe apps out there) he's just trying to parse the json Recipe schema when it is attached. Most blogs attach them because it helps Google get them indexed.
Chef John doesn't
Easily fixed. After all, you are the mason of your own JSON.
Ironic, considering that FoodWishes has been on Blogspot forever. Blogspot (Google) could auto-generate it on the fly.
You are right. I'll add a fallback to parse it using LLM.
This one didn't work either: https://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-cook-moist-tender-chicken-b...
Noted. I will fix this soon.
Noted.
This page probably does not have the standard recipe attributes that are needed for parsing the recipe.
I am adding a fallback mechanism for such cases. The text will be parsed using LLM like ChatGPT.
Should be released by tomorrow. Cheers!
Hi HN,
I posted the first version of OnlyRecipe here about four years ago [1], and the response was incredible. The feedback in that thread shaped a lot of what I wanted to build next. That initial momentum proved that the core problem (ads, life stories, and clutter on recipe blogs) needed a solution.
Progress since then has been slower than I hoped — I had some health issues and was building on and off — but I kept coming back to this project because I genuinely love working on it. I’ve been working on the project on and off, fitting development in whenever I could. This post represents a huge personal milestone.
Here’s what’s new after all this time:
Import from Videos: Import directly from TikTok, Instagram, Youtube and Facebook videos
Import from Handwritten recipes: Import from handwritten notes and screenshots
Unit Conversion: A highly-requested feature. Instantly convert US Customary (cups/oz) to Metric (grams/ml) for any extracted recipe.
Grocery Lists: Consolidate ingredients from multiple saved recipes into a single, clean shopping list.
Meal Plan: Plan your weekly meals in advance
Controls: Full recipe editing, PDF export, printing, and cross-device sync
Mobile-First Design: While the web view (linked above) is great for quickly seeing the result, the mobile apps have dedicated native controls for cooking mode (e.g., screen stay-awake, timers, and offline access).
In-App Browser: Directly import from any site within the app and many more...
To see these features in action quickly (small gif/videos), check it out on the landing page [2]
The link above is a deep link to a live demo on the web app.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new utility features and the performance of the parser! Try it out here [5]
[1] Original post from Jan 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29795482
[2] Landing Page: https://get.onlyrecipeapp.com
[3] iOS App: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/only-recipe/id1602130759
[4] Android App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nsqr.onlyr...
[5] Web app: https://onlyrecipeapp.com
Constructive feedback on current state:
- many recipe sites let you check/uncheck things you want to print. I'd love to print just [ name, ingredients, instructions ] without [ photo, metadata/servings/nutrition/etc. ]. I much prefer one page recipes to two pages.
- on desktop, some text-break like "6 servings" breaks to 2 lines
Thank you for the feedback. Appreciate it. I have made a note of this. I will fix it in next release.
Very cool! it does get a bit confused about number words that aren't amounts, like "3 large russet potatoes, peeled and halved lengthwise" becomes "3 large russet potatoes, peeled and cut in 0.50 lengthwise" which when scaled up becomes "cut in 1 lengthwise"
Yeah it tries to convert generically. I have noted this edge-case and I'll add special handling for cases like this.
Thank you for pointing it out
directly visiting the linked page, I get "Null check operator used on a null value"
I would be amazing if you released this as a Windows app. I would love to use it on my surface which sits in the kitchen.
That should be doable. I have made a note. Thanks.
Since a recipe can be for multiple services, the ability to scale a recipe down would be helpful.
Yes this has been added to my todo list. Thank you.
Any planned import options? I would love to import my plantoeat csv into it
Oh yes!
I had planned only for Paprika app. But adding Plantoeat should be doable.
I'll keep you posted.
Thank you for this!
[comment about issue that is present in original recipe removed]
Congrats on releasing and steadily improving. What was the most unexpected thing you learnt lately?
Thank you.
There are many learnings:
1. The most unexpected thing that I learned was the absolute nightmare it is to set up subscriptions.
I initially thought it would be a simple task. I started off with writing APIs and webhooks for Play store and App store.
But then as I got into the specifics things got complicated very quickly.
The combinations of subscriptions (monthly/yearly, AI and non-AI), cancellations, cross device subscription sync, how to handle trials, how to manage subscription states of users, and then when users upgrade, that's another few cases to handle.
There were just too many cases to handle.
I then just used a third-party provider (RevenueCat). They have handled all the complexities beautifully.
2. Supabase self-host is another nightmare in itself. Just the sheer amount of configs needs (through the .env file) is insane. They have intentionally made it so difficult to configure.
3. Setting up SMTP and sending emails is actually a very tiring and cumbersome process. AWS SES is just too much work. Mainly the domain reputation (emails always landing in spam) and also there are not many providers that give a generous trial.
The animations are laggy and the transitions make the website slow.
Can you also tell me which browser and/or version you are using? I'll check it.
I have actually added same transition as mobile apps. But there shouldn't be lags ideally. I'll have a look.
It's most likely because all 3d acceleration is disabled in my browser. Using chrome up-to-date on linux.
Hijacks the back button :/
Sorry for that. I am still handling cases in web app. This is built in Flutter and released as a mobile-first or tablet-first app.
I am fixing many such issues right now. Should be at par with the mobile apps soon.
would love to see the original requested feature list ?
Here is a list (summarized by LLM)
Conversion, Scaling, and Measurement
Great job!
Thank you :)
Clicking on back button of my mouse starts an infinite loop.
I feel deep gratitude to you for this, and the timing of your post. Thank you!
Seriously. I also feel like you're owed an apology for having had to write this in the first place.
I'm coming at "figuring out the Kitchen" for what is almost the first time in my life in I-wish-I-were-in-my-mid-40s[0] and I'm thinking "The Internet in the Early 00s was pretty good for that." And then I fire up a browser on desktop while making a grocery list and once you filter for "things that are obviously AI Hallucinations representing partial recipes", I'm met with one or all of the following: (1) Pages and pages and pages of obviously made-up nonsense anecdotes about the discovery of this magical, uh, air fryer grilled chicken marinade, (2) a pretty haphazard set of instructions that don't bother to include ingredients separated with pleasant units and conversions, but hide them throughout with quantities like "a few tomatoes" here, "an onion" there, (3) which doesn't seem to impact the 4.8 stars after hundreds of "user ratings.". (4) And rather than help these miserable imprecise, ingredient-less recipes with pictures of what "until moist and brown" might appear, you're going to show me a bunch of chopped ingredients in separated bowls that I don't have and then a picture of it finished, delicately decorated in whatever-or-another sauce, and "HEY, here's some lady who's cooking something unrelated to the recipe in this neat little video window I popped up for you! Let's watch the top of her head and this bowl of something on mute for a little while!"
Good God, man, it's like they've optimized the design to break people with ADHD. Some sites were so bad, it felt like "the actual recipe I was looking for" was obfuscated on the page like sketchy sites will hide the "actual Download button" somewhere unexpected and give you a big green "Download" button that leads to revenue. And that's not even getting into the weird bad on some of these AI-churn sites. I end up opening a notepad on the side and refactoring the things that seem like they might work from time to time, but I popped a few recipes in there, including a Chili recipe that "barely had any problems other than layout and annoying cooking lady videos" and just turned it into the perfect representation of that recipe.
I don't know what the original feedback was, but beyond how clear and organized laid out the recipe, here's what I saw as really useful little touches (I'm half wondering if some were even intended): (1) Besides my affinity for circled numbers, I lose my spot when referring to recipes so I like to print out the ones I really like, laminate them, and mark 'em up with the whiteboard markers I have for fridge notes as I go, you gave me a wonderful spot for that -- I'm so prone to re-read/second-guess where I'm at when I need to "put a bunch of things together at the last moment", that was the first thing I noticed, (2) Your highlighting did the same thing for making my grocery list (I DoorDashed it, today) -- it's so much more readable and "easy to find my spot" the way it appears on my desktop compared to any other site, (3) Because of your choice positioning, I can scroll down slightly and see the ingredients and all of the instructions without having to touch this thing, again, while I'm cooking if I use the tablet in the kitchen.
Oh, and thank you for making it just work in the browser. I hate using my phone for this kind of thing and I'm not even crazy about using my tablet for it.
[0] The backstory being unexpected, but very much desired, custody change led to me cooking for my children all of the time, including one who struggles with weight. I was blessed without that struggle, I eat "whatever" atrociously (not picky), and about what I burn, I'm under-weight and my blood work is perfect. One of my kids is identical, just not the one that sounds exactly like me :).
hahahahahah i remember you! <3
OG gang. :)
Do try out the new version and let me know what you feel about it.