a/n

kojak_edwards_15889

In Chef Steps recipes, sometimes there is an ingredient with a a/n next to it. What does a/n mean?

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Jack_Mayer_85396

I'm guessing it stands for "as necessary" or "as needed"

Brendan_Lee_56950

It's a placeholder because of the way recipes need to be input.

Chris_Young_80640

It does stand for "as needed" and we try to use it in situations where it's really up to the cook to decide how much of something is required.

Manfred_18311

Unfortunately

in the community recipe section I noticed some recipes use a/n inflationary in

a whole column which really renders the recipe, in the sense of a recipe,

useless. A product Items list shall not be mistaken with a recipe.

With the

new site features for recipes it should be easily possible to give exact units amounts.

If it’s just 0.5g or a knife tip it can and should be expressed in the recipe.

Adjusting/ tweaking

any recipe for optional personal preferences or varying ingredients balance need

a foundation, the unit size. Excessive use of a/n isn’t a help. Especially beginners

should prefer exact amount of units as anchor point or lead way to experiment with.

michaelnatkin

Hey @Manfred - we totally agree, we prefer recipes to specify as many ingredients in grams as possible. (There are times where a/n makes sense, often with garnishes where it really isn't necessary to weigh a few thyme leaves for example.) That said, we are happy to have any delicious user-contributed recipes and we don't want precision to be a barrier to prevent people from contributing. I see a couple of approaches that may help - one is to have the recipe input tool give you more help and encouragement and simplicity in creating a solid recipe. Another is to have community editing. Right now we have forking, so a user can come along and create their own version of another user's recipe, but we don't have what github users would call "pull requests" - there is no way to ask for approval from the original author to incorporate your changes back into the base recipe.

Manfred_18311

Michael, thats Interesting, haven't checked yet on the fork feature.