A new recipe format for cooking
Cooking from recipes is painful. RecipeBlocks is a new visual recipe format that aims to make recipes easier to follow and cooking more enjoyable.
For something that can both teach and reward you, I think that recipes are highly undervalued. Maybe it’s because they’re so abundant. Google a recipe for anything and you’ll likely come across dozens of results.
But as a food lover and amateur cook, the allure and promise of recipes is mesmerizing. At their essence, recipes are the instructions for taking a bunch of ingredients and transforming them into something delicious and memorable. Whenever I dine out and eat something tasty, my first instinct is to see if I can make it myself. I’m obsessed with understanding how to make good food and as a result, I’m obsessed with recipes. Short of training under a professional chef or going to culinary school, recipes provide the blueprints for creating deliciousness.
In my 20s, I used to look forward to each Fall when the latest cookbooks would be published. Whether they were authored by renowned chefs like Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal, or prolific cookbook authors like Melissa Clark and Dorie Greenspan, I was there for it. While my friends were counting down the days until the next Harry Potter novel, I eagerly awaited the release of the latest cookbooks. On the day they arrived, I would spend countless hours poring through the pages, looking for recipes to try, and cross-referencing the recipes in the cookbooks with dishes served at the chef’s restaurant. After choosing a few recipes, I would visit purveyors and grocers across Toronto to buy ingredients and spend my weekends cooking.
While I no longer have the time to make elaborate dishes and travel the city searching for ingredients, I still enjoy cooking immensely. But instead of buying the latest cookbooks, I put my trust in Google and browse TikTok for interesting recipes to make.
Cooking from recipes is painful
If there’s one thing that pains me about cooking, it’s how difficult recipes are to actually cook from. Scrolling back and forth between ingredient quantities and instructions with a semi-clean pinky finger is tedious. Trying to read paragraphs of detailed instructions with food on the stove is stressful. Continually trying to start, stop, rewind and rewatch a TikTok video while cooking is inefficient.
While many aspects related to recipes such as cooking techniques, food photography, and plating have progressed greatly over the past several years, the format of the recipes themselves has remained largely unchanged. In fact, today’s recipes use the same format popularized by The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook by Fannie Merritt Farmer Little which was published in 1896 and was the first cookbook to use standardized measuring spoons and cups! Look at any recipe from the past 125 years and it will likely be presented the same way, with a list of the ingredient quantities followed by paragraphs of long-form written instructions. To be fair, today’s cookbooks and food blogs often include a lot more supplementary information such as photos and videos, but the presentation of the ingredient quantities and instructions (which is the main thing that you refer to when you’re cooking) haven’t changed.
While there have definitely been cookbooks that have sought to make recipes easier to understand and consume, these are still very much the exception. For example, Jill Norman’s The Cook’s Book in 2005 was one of the first cookbooks I came across that had colour instructional photos for every recipe in the book. Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine at Home in 2012 and Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab in 2015 both provide step-by-step photos that meticulously document what a recipe looks like at every step. Katie Shelly’s Picture Cook is one of the few cookbooks that provides fully illustrated recipes and completely dispenses with written instructions. Online, BuzzFeed’s Tasty popularized the fast-motion cooking video that’s perfectly suited to our short attention spans.
Despite these advances, today’s typical recipe, whether it’s from a cookbook, food blog, or video is still quite difficult to cook from. To get likes, shares, and generate hype, today’s recipes tend to prioritize entertainment over education. Whether it’s artfully arranged photos in the latest celebrity chef cookbook, action-packed cooking videos on TikTok or lengthy essays describing the origin story of a particular dish, the recipe itself is often an afterthought — poorly written and difficult to use. As someone who wants to actually use recipes for cooking and not just imagine how delicious they taste, this is very disappointing.
In search of a better recipe format
Recently, I started thinking about how recipes could be improved to make them easier to cook from. As a starting point, I made a list of some of the characteristics that I think make a recipe great, good, poor, and terrible to use.
If we were to just include all the items in the Good and Great columns, the resulting recipe would inevitably become very long and this would probably make it more difficult to use. But if we start with first principles and define a recipe as a set of steps for combining and processing ingredients in a specific order to consistently achieve a desired result, then perhaps there’s a different way to present the recipe that doesn’t involve pages of long-form text and photos.
After a bit of trial and error, here’s what I came up with…
The RecipeBlock recipe format
A RecipeBlock is a visual depiction of a recipe that describes the chronological sequence in which ingredients and their resulting mixtures are combined, processed, manipulated, and presented. It consists of ingredient blocks and method blocks where:
- ingredient blocks represent starting ingredients or the resulting mixture you get after processing one or more ingredients, and
- method blocks describe how the ingredients in the ingredient blocks above are to be combined or processed.
From the example below for making a chocolate hazelnut cake, you can see how the ingredients on the top row are combined, processed, and then combined and processed again with other ingredients and so on, to produce the final product.
Compared to the written version of this recipe, a RecipeBlock is a lot easier to understand at a glance. It allows me to see exactly how the recipe comes together through the combination and processing of ingredients. I can also see what the ingredients should look like at the end of each step, which helps ensure that I’m on the right track before moving on. In addition, I no longer have to toggle back and forth between ingredient quantities and instructions, or reference supplemental photos or videos since they’re all built into the recipe.
While a printed or static version of a RecipeBlock can be fairly limiting, I can envision all sorts of dynamic and interactive features that could potentially be layered on top of a digital version of a RecipeBlock. This could include usability features like:
- zooming/panning
- changing the text size
- seeing uncropped versions of the ingredient block photos
but also interactive features like:
- switching between imperial and metric units and weighted and volumetric measurements
- scaling ingredient quantities based on the number of servings required
- viewing the recipe’s critical path
- viewing additional information about ingredients and videos demonstrating techniques described in method blocks
Ideally, the digital version of the RecipeBlock would work on a variety of kitchen devices including phones, tablets, Amazon Echos / Google Homes, and maybe even one day AR glasses!
The RecipeBlock format can be used for simple recipes like the marinara sauce recipe at the top, and also complex recipes with many ingredients and steps. Here are a few more recipes I’ve tested with this format.
Conclusion
My hope is that by making recipes easier to cook from, the probability of a successful outcome will increase significantly. Since this is all very new, I’d love to hear what you think!
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be testing out this new recipe format with different types of recipes and gathering feedback. I’d love to hear your suggestions and ideas on whether you find it useful and what can be improved upon.
If you’re a food blogger or chef and would like to try using this new format for your recipes, I’d love to have you test it and see what you do with it, and I would be happy to provide some tools and templates that you may find useful for creating your own RecipeBlocks.
Update July 27, 2022:
Here’s a new RecipeBlock for a Frozen Strawberry Parfait that I’ve been making since I was a kid. It tastes like a more delicate version of strawberry ice cream. In this RecipeBlock, I added a full-size photo of the finished dish at the bottom, so you can see what it should look like when it’s done.
Update August 8, 2022:
With peaches now in season, here’s a recipe for a refreshing Peach Confit with Mint dessert that I love making. It’s inspired by a recipe by Thomas Keller that appeared in Food & Wine many years ago.
In this recipe, I came across a step where one ingredient was divided into two parts which were then separately processed. In order to do this, I had to create a starting ingredient block that spanned two blocks. However, this also created some limitations where the steps that followed for each part had to be the same number of steps before being combined into the final dish. I also improved the contrast for the method blocks to make them more legible.
Update August 19, 2022:
Based on some feedback I received, I’ve made a few changes to the format of the RecipeBlock.
Reading Sequence
- Problem: The reading sequence is not very intuitive. Unlike a recipe, which follows a linear progression (e.g. Steps 1 through 5), it’s not clear how to follow the RecipeBlock since there are often several paths happening in parallel. Also, there’s nothing to indicate that the user should be reading the RecipeBlock from top to bottom.
- Challenges: Although the standard recipe format likes to enforce a linear sequence to it, the reality is that recipes are more akin to a family tree, where multiple ingredients are combined and combined again to form the final product. There are likely multiple paths a user can take to arrive at the final result and the RecipeBlock shows this. For example, in the Peach Confit recipe above, it’s up to you whether you want to cut the peaches or create the liquid first.
- Solution: To provide some general guidance, I’ve added Start and Finish markers at the beginning and end of the recipe respectively. Hopefully, this clarifies the direction of progression.
Method Block Complexity
- Problem: Instructions in method blocks are difficult to understand. Not clear which tools/equipment to use.
- Challenges: Due to the limited space available in the method block, I’ve often made the instructions in the method blocks too concise at the expense of clarity. Also, in the current format, ingredient blocks have a lot more weight than method blocks, even though the instructions for processing ingredients are just as important as the ingredients themselves. My previous response has been that techniques are best explained using formats like video. But admittedly, this doesn’t work for a printed version and ideally, a RecipeBlock should be self-contained and self-explanatory. Users shouldn’t need to regularly open a new window to get more info.
- Solution: To add more clarity to the instructions that are currently crammed into the method blocks, I’ve increased their size, broken out instructions into discrete sub-steps and will use the following format to ensure that the instructions are clear: (1) equipment/tools needed, (2) processing instruction (e.g. stir, fold, whip), (3) time duration, (4) description of result (e.g. until smooth). In addition, I’ve added icons to visually represent each sub-step. Hopefully, these changes to the method block format make them easier to understand and use.
Below are a couple of examples of my two most recent RecipeBlocks with the changes applied. Let me know what you think!
