New ways to scale the ingredients in a recipe and change the units

michaelnatkin

Go visit any recipe and hit the gear-shaped icon above the main ingredients list. Play. Let us know what you think!

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Manfred_18311

I noticed

it yesterday in the recipe section. Absolutely helpful feature, I certainly

like it!

DiggingDogFarm_65362

That's handy.

michaelnatkin

@Manfred - thanks! It actually has changed a lot since yesterday, so if you get a chance to checkout the new gear menu we'd love your feedback.

Matthew_Snyder_68770

That's pretty useful. Just note that when you change the scaling, I think the other measures (like Yield and Timing) might need to change as well. But that's a good improvement.

michaelnatkin

@Matthew Snyder - quite right! Can't do that right now because Yield is a text field that sometimes says things like "Empowerment", which is hard to scale, and Timing would be impossible to scale algorithmically in general. But for yield, we do have a long term plan to have a gram yield available so it can be scaled. Maybe we should highlight those two fields to indicate they are "out of spec" when the scale isn't x1.

Manfred_18311

Even better..,

a quick doubling or tripling, switch between g and oz…, the one feature what

really does it to me is feeding the table with personalized weight volumes and have

the table recipe volumes adjust to it. Nice work in deed and very useful whether

you cook for yourself or a family or on restaurant scale.

I agree, since

the time change by the volume it should be read “out of spec”. It certainly opened

the road for extensions and improvements, like a integrated souse vide calculator.

Manfred_18311

@Matthew_Snyder

I wouldn’t worry

too much about the cooking time; there are too many possible variables. In Souse

Vide, thickness of the package/bag is decisive for the cooking time. Four steaks,

equally cut take the same cooking time as one. Cooking period of 1000g/2.20lBS vegetables

is equal to 250g/8.82oz if filled in the bag to a thickness of 2cm/0.8in.

Matthew_Snyder_68770

@Manfred, the Timing field takes into account cooking and prep; it's the total time commitment to make the dish. My point was more about how scaling a recipe will affect timing with regard to prep; 500g of an ingredient will take longer to prep than 150 g.

But in thinking about it I understand what @Michael said wrt timing being impossible to scale.

Manfred_18311

@Matthew_Snyder

Raise the pace

John_Erik_522

Great feature and works perfectly on desktop (Safari) as well as on mobile (iOS).

Tim_Salazar_36007

Hi All, anyone have 15 minutes to run through their experience with scaling with me? I'd like to just observe you going through a recipe and interacting with it. If you've already done it, let me know what you like, don't like. If you haven't, I'd like to just observe while you use it. If that sounds like something you can do, please let me know; we can just hop on Google Hangouts for a quick chat! tim@ chefsteps

Thanks!

Manfred_18311

Hi Tim, I use

the new features in receipt section rather extensively and colleting right now all

the loose paper, booklets and notices I wrote over the years to cast them in

the CS format for further use.

As for now

I can’t give any negative comments on it as I haven’t found any major flaws yet.

auto;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1">1. Adjusting the complete volume of the

recipe by changing any amounts of ingredients is basically one great feature

for simple recipes. Single out only one or two ingredients for a change requires

the edit function of course. Edit I suppose only works in - create Recipe - or -

Fork recipe-.

auto;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1">2. Once you have chosen the unit you

want to work with you can go along without further adjustments but can use the

drop down menu to change single units if you want to.

text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1">3. Quick scaling x 0.5 –x 4 is good and

helpful if you an experienced cook as not all ingredients double or triple automatically

by an extended amount of ground products: veal, poultry or fish. This even more

by rather complexes, detail rich recipes.

Resume: Certainly

a helpful program in an easy to use format and presented in a clear, well-arranged

design. It shortens the time and effort required for documenting a recipe but

still allows/requires adjusting preferences within a recipe. The scaling feature to me is important by

developing a new recipe. I haven’t found similar yet in any other cooking software

and I have tried some.

Matt_67991

If I had one suggestion, it would be to chain the yield to the recipe scaling, so that you can target the yield. I can see how this would cause some trouble though.

I also noticed on the baked bean recipe:

"Soak 433g of dry navy beans for at least 6 hours. Strain and reserve the beans. This will yield about 400g of soaked beans."

instead of 866g. The problem was circumvented on the navy beans recipe, and was done correctly on the chickpeas recipe.

I do like recipe system a lot. It's already the best I've seen. I honestly want to convert all of my boring baking recipes into the format.

michaelnatkin

@Henri - we'd love to have you input your baking recipes! Feel free to add them anytime - just click Add Recipe in the recipes menu, and be sure to publish them in the upper right when you are done.