A Proposal for Improving Recipes

I've been baking for about 14 years and it's always annoyed me how recipes are formatted.

List all the equipment needed for the recipe

Sure, some of the stuff may be obvious, like an oven. But there are tons of recipes where you get to step 10 of 12 and they want you to have cheese cloth and twine and a tea infuser. If you need certain supplies or gear or appliances in order to complete the recipe in a reasonable amount of time, then all of those are ingredients too, just inedible ones. Like a hot water bath or bain-Marie: that’s water, and a pot, and a heatproof bowl all in one. Those are the ingredients of the appliance you have to build for a recipe!

​All gear, equipment, supplies and appliances should be listed at the top of the recipe. To be fair, I have occasionally seen recipes that do this but the overwhelming majority don’t.
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Rough sketch of my idea

Group items that can be combined

A lot of times there are initial combinations of ingredients have to be mixed together which are then added to something else later. These initial combinations are usually things like flour, cocoa, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and so on… dry ingredients that just need to be physically mixed with no catalyst or chemical reaction. If a step of the recipe is to combine those five things, then all those five things should be listed as a group clustered together at the top of the recipe with a box around them. That way you can visually know right away that they go together and you know a bowl must be dedicated for that.

Specify divisions

Lots of recipes say things like “500 grams of sugar, divided” but they never say how to divide it at the top of the ingredients listing. Just say “500 grams of sugar (divided into 400g and 100g)” Better yet, list them separately as “100g sugar” and then “400g sugar”. That’s better and easier for mise en place anyway.

List temperature ingredients

Dry ingredients rarely need a temperature beyond ambient, but for anything with liquid, you shouldn’t have to guess. The classic example is eggs: as a general rule room temperature what you want, but there are many common techniques that require the eggs to be cold. All the ingredients that don’t need a special temperature should be printed in black, anything cold should be printed in blue and anything warmer than ambient should be pink or red.

​Use metric (or explain how to survive using imperial units)

Imperial measurement is a catastrophe, one that we colonists have been enduring for hundreds of years. All recipes should be using metric measurement; all masses should be in grams.

If you still want to use imperial units, then the recipe should explain what it means to loosely pack something versus hard packing it, the proper technique for scooping flour/pouring flour/leveling flour, the difference between weight versus mass versus volume and why liquids use volume measurement and not weight, and when 4 ounces means liquid versus 4 ounces of weight. Countless people don’t realize that there is a difference between an ounce of something liquid and an ounce of something solid. That is the VOLUME of bullshit you have to deal with in imperial, and metric is MASSively easier. The whole imperial system is old and confusing and stupid and inferior. Don't take my word for it. 

Anticipate bowl size

​If the recipe wants you to add the dry ingredients to your wet ingredients, it should warn you that one of those bowls needs to be large enough to contain the contents of the wet and dry together. Otherwise you have to dirty an extra bowl and now I have more washing up to do later. Some notation telling you that the bowl you use for step two will also need to contain all the ingredients from steps three and four could help avoid that.

Repeat the amount of the ingredient

For example, at the top of the recipe it says “75 g of cocoa”, and later in the recipe (below the fold, page 3 of the printout, etc.) it says “mix the cocoa with the sugar.” What it should say is “mix the 75 g of cocoa with the 200 g sugar.” Then I don’t have to scroll up to the top of the recipe or flip backwards in the recipe to make sure that I’m using the right amount, because it’s right there when I’m being told to use it.

If you have ideas for healing our world through the power of smart recipe writing, lemme know.