Syntax for Cooking Methods/Techniques

[messInPlace]

I am interested in capturing "cooking methods" (e.g., sauté, boil, sous vide) differently from Cookware or Ingredients. This could allow querying for "all braised recipes" without text-scraping the instructions.

Would there be any consideration to a specific token to denote a method, similar to @ for ingredients or # for cookware? Perhaps a caret ^?

• Example: Add @potatoes{1%kg}(peeled and diced), -@Cold water{to cover}, and -@kosher salt{to make the water taste of the sea} to a #medium saucepan{3-4 quart}. Bring the pot to a ^boil for ~potatoes{10%minutes} .

Maybe there is another way to approach this I'm not considering. Looking forward to the discussion.

[undermark5]

An idea I have is to use the metadata tags and include the preparation method in those tags. Yes, this would require manually adding it to recipes that don't already have it, and if you're searching through some one else's recipes, that is a bit problematic. However, I feel like outside of cooklang things have already operated in this fashion well enough. Between naming recipes (eg Roast Potato Something vs Boiled Potato Something) and using tags indicating methods you'd end up with a decent enough approach.

Granted this is my opinion more as a lurker in the cooklang community and only recently getting so fed up with the meal planning app I use to the point of deciding to utilize cooklang to make my own.

[messInPlace]

Thank you for responding. I thought of tracking cooking methods as an array in the metadata as well. However, I ultimately decided against it and in favor of a markdown approach based on two factors:

1. The cooklang manifesto highlights the need for recipes to be both human- and machine-readable. Distancing the cooking method in the metadata from the body of the cooking instruction text is more intuitive to a human than a computer. A metadata tag of "roasting" applies to the recipe as a whole, but does not create the same association with ingredients and cookware as having the markdown in the instructions. With the rise of LLMs, which can work with cooklang text very easily, being able to quickly indicate that is the @carrots being ^roasted in the #cast-rion skillet{} creates a robust data connection that is more responsive to association.
2. Complex recipes may encompass multiple cooking methods. I'm working on a recipe for a plated dessert now that includes sous vide sweet potato cremuex, apple ferment, buttermilk bay leaf ice cream, pecan soil, and benne seed nougatine. By the time I consider all the components, its not easy to tell from a tag if the buttermilk is being churned or folded into a mousse. I could create separate recipes for each component and reference them in a meta-recipe for the dish, but that seems less intuitive since I will not likely make these components independent of this dish as I might with a tomato pasta sauce.

Glad to see I'm not the only one looking to create an app after not being satisfied with the current market. Hope it goes well!

[undermark5]

So, I'm still not certain that I fully understand the actual desired use case. Your initial post (IMO) seems to focus on the search/querying aspect, which I think is adequately covered by metadata (either tags, or custom metadata), aside from the fact that in your example #‌2 you would have to add information about the fact that the butter milk is being [folded|churned] into a mousse accordingly, which is tedious to represent in the metadata alone, and also, as you describe in example #‌1, this information is possibly far away from the actual usage (though, you still would specify roast the @carrots in the #cast-iron skillet{} which has the information right there for humans).

In my mind, there are a few reasons to know what methods/techniques a recipe will use ahead of time

1. You want to use or avoid using a particular piece of cookware/appliance for whatever reason (cookware already handles this case)
2. You want to know if a recipe you're unfamiliar with is something you'd be able to make
   a. If it requires a tool you do not have, or a technique that you are unfamiliar with, you may not be able to make it appropriately (you could possibly find substitutes or alternative methods)
3. You want to use or avoid a particular technique for whatever reason (you've injured your hands and now can't safely hold a knife)

Any one of those reasons becomes fairly irrelevant when you're familiar with the recipes or could pretty easily be managed by tags. That said, you do mention a part of the manifesto about recipes being easy to read for both humans and machines, and a machine is not going to be familiar with a recipe the same way that you would be and that even if you are familiar with the recipes, it's still certainly more cognitive load to filter them out if the machine could just handle that for you without you having to remember to manually add tags.

You may also notice that the example you provide in your initial post Bring the pot to a ^boil for ~potatoes{10%minutes} implies you're boiling the pot, which is somewhat incorrect, but as humans we're typically smart enough to know that you meant the contents of the pot to a boil (an LLM may also come to the same conclusion, but they're also inherently non-deterministic so it may get it right one day and wrong the next). I'd suspect that there needs to be a specific way to tie the "verb" to one or more "nouns", which is something also mentioned in #‌56.

[dubadub]

Referencing related discussion #56

[dubadub]

And slightly related #83