Show HN: CookTime – Recipe index (letscooktime.com)
Hi HN,
COVID lockdowns made me and my wife cook a lot more at home, and we had a need to streamline our recipe management woes. These were some of the problems we identified:
- Most recipe websites are what I call "mommy blogs", and the principal problem is that the recipe ingredient list and instructions are buried in a SEO-laden essay that we don't care about. We were sharing links to our favorite recipes, but links don't allow you to skip past the unnecessary essay prefacing the recipe. We knew we wanted a way to have recipes uncompromised by unrelated essays.
- Popular recipe aggregating websites are run by publishing companies that do not want you, the reader, to contribute your own recipes. This is not true for all of them; Allrecipes.com does allow you to enter recipes but that UI leaves a lot to be desired. We knew we needed a way for us (and you) to write your own recipes.
- Most recipe websites do not allow you to scale recipe ingredients. We like to cook a lot at once, and we don't like to keep track of a 2x, or 3x multiplier in our heads while cooking. We knew we wanted a simple way of scaling ingredients.
- Most recipe websites do not contain adequate nutrition information about their recipes. When they do, they don't show their math, or their sources. We knew we needed an automatic nutrition calculation for recipes based on ingredients and their quantities.
- Recipe creation
- Ingredient highlights in recipe text
- Recipe components
- Automatic nutrition calculation
- Grocery lists
- Scaling recipes
- Tagging
- No blogging, just recipes! No bullshit essay to scroll through.
- Dark mode!
Without a CookTime account, you can:
- Browse recipes
- Read their nutrition facts
- Scale ingredients temporarily
- Share links to recipes
- Add your own recipes
- Add recipes to your personal groceries list
104 comments
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I'm glad you also care about accessibility so here is some, I hope, constructive feedback. The site is already considerably better with a screen reader than other recipe sites. Poking at it with VoiceOver on I noticed a few things. I'm looking at the Açai Bowl page, but I presume most if not all of the following will apply more generally.
1) The alt text for the picture of the dish is a GUID or something. A brief description of the image would be better.
2) The little calculator icon next to the kcal doesn't have any description.
3) The plus and minus buttons are described correctly, but there is an odd one second pause between it saying "button" and then "add" or "minus." At first this made me think it was just going to be described as "button" which is common on many sites and apps.
4) Various snippets of text, such as the ingredients and the nutrition facts are split in such a way that VoiceOver recognizes them as separate elements. So instead of reading "One tablespoon milk powder" it reads "1" "tablespoon" "milk powder" as the user swipes through each element. This last issue doesn't seriously impact usability.
The "mommy blog" problem is real, I think a lot of it is people trying to create a brand for themselves, but honestly I don't care a bit about where you first tried this, who you met, what they were wearing or how your evening went. I also think that sometimes that's to do with copyright - it seems you may not be able to copyright just a recipe, but you can copyright all the rest of the narrative around it.
I'll check your site out...
In a transactional approach, I'm looking for the recipe; and just giving me the recipe (plus some useful tips for how to prepare the dish) is useful. "mommy blog" preamble is useless.
In a social approach.. food inherently exists in relation to people. -- Maybe it makes more sense in person to talk about the context of the meal you cooked, and it just doesn't translate to search engine result pages?
But I do that when I want to read something whimsical, informative or entertaining. 99% of the time, if I've found someone's cooking-blog it's because I want to cook something specific, right now!
I guess the annoyance is someone trying to sell me on one thing when I really want the other :)
There are badly written blogs, or manipulatively structured websites, but writing introductions per se isn't bad.
To be honest, the "mommy blog" epithet comes across as sexist to me.
No one would level that label at Kenji Lopez Alt or David Lebowitz but they use the same format:
https://www.seriouseats.com/classic-smashed-burgers-recipe
https://www.davidlebovitz.com/quiche-lorraine-recipe-recette...
You might object and say those are different because they're well-written and informative, but then isn't that my point?
There's nothing wrong with a "just the recipes" website — to each their own, and some things are useful in the right context. But there's also nothing wrong with a website that explains the recipes and tells a story along the way. You might not be interested, or it might not be that well-written, but that's the way written communication has always worked for eons.
Some people like the format of food blogs, most people don't. Every single person I talk to about CookTime immediately mentions how they love there is no backstory, context, literary prose they have to scroll through to get to a recipe. We are already solving the problem of too much food blog text on a page.
When I'm looking for a way to cook a particular thing, the recipe is worth everything, and anything around it is simply a waste of my time and attention.
> No one would level that label at Kenji Lopez Alt or David Lebowitz but they use the same format. You might object and say those are different because they're well-written and informative
I'm absolutely not going to say they're different because they're well written and informative - if I'm just looking for the method and ingredients for a particular dish that I already know I want to cook, right now, which is 95%+ of my interaction with recipe websites, their text is equally useless and obstructive.
You're right 'mommy blog' might be the wrong term here, and may even be sexist, but it absolutely is a blog and honestly, I don't care. I'm here for the ingredients and mechanical instructions.
> there's also nothing wrong with a website that explains the recipes and tells a story along the way.
There's nothing 'wrong', it's not some grave sin to create such a thing, but it's certainly far less useful and not what I'm interested in.
> that's the way written communication has always worked for eons.
Sure, but I'm not looking for communication, I'm looking for a way to make quiche with as little distraction as possible. I'm making dinner, not reading your site for fun.
I wouldn't very much mind all the extra text if the JavaScript didn't interfere so much.
Search engines like it. That's the entire story.
There's good long-form recipe content, but nearly all of it's only there for SEO reasons. Most of these sites just make up the "genuine" stories so they have something for Google to chew on. No-one involved, reader or writer, cares about it, except search engines.
Not to humiliate myself, but the level of visual boiler plates and JavaScript crap plagued on these run of the mill dynamic pages is akin to a porn site. And of course that's how high traffic sites operate, people want/need money. I look forward to aggregated recipe platforms. They're straight to the point and commentary is segregated. As others have said, recipes are usually not original content anyway.
I think there's a common preferrable layout for recipe pages and it goes:
Recipe > Instructions > Optional Summary
what is stopping domains registered in the last 30 days from showing?
The site times out for me as well in firefox, but also in curl. i think it is broken
> Block Newly Registered Domains (NRDs)
> Block domains registered less than 30 days ago. Those domains are known to be favored by threat actors to launch malicious campaigns.
:(
2. talking of pepperplate, bulk import and export would be a great feature. every recipe app and site eventually dies and its incredibly painful to extract years of recipes and notes from generation N to import into N+1. For PP I had to resort to sqlite hackery.
3. multiple grocery lists, and a meal planning calendar. cozi is a ugly botch of an app with a ui that looks like 1992 but it does this well.
Only had a quick glance at the logged out sits, but nice work!
Who are you aiming for most with this site? People who'd like to lose weight and use this as a tool? Or perhaps the sporty person who'se very aware of the nutrition values, etc?
As for commercial potential, you can try provide our service of offering weekly mealplans. It requires a bit of work to do this well, but also a fun technical challenge :).
What is not (yet?) our focus, but what I think would be cool, is to focus in on a niche of specific patients who have special diet needs.
Based on how things are loading I'm claiming there's a max connections somewhere with some queuing mechanism.
Regardless, simple caching would avoid most of that stall. Never dismiss easy solutions to hard problems.
Super gross framing, especially when you're yanking the content those other people actually created to siphon off their traffic.
I didn't get the impression they were directly scraping other sites.
Also, it is very unlikely the recipe originated from those posters. I would guess those people learned the recipe from friends/family/cookbook/website, made some small modifications, then re-posted it in blog format.
I find searching for recipes online to be difficult for the same reasons they mentioned and I appreciate the attempt at another solution. Hope this one catches on.
Thanks for the feedback!
Given the choice between a recipe site that has a thousand words about someone's grandmother or a recipe site that divides the ingredients by two, I'll choose the latter.
A lot of "secret" family recipes usually have their origin in something like this.
Incredibly unhelpful and hostile way to start your argument, especially because you chose to put words in the author's mouth as well. Why even respond if all you have are emotional appeals to make people feel bad about their hard work providing something folks clearly want?
I know two wrongs don't make a right, but neither does one so by taking again the amount of rights in the world has not decreased.
Most of those recipe sites, no-one involved in the site has ever cooked the recipe, despite what the ghost-written made-up story about it would lead you to believe. That's why so many have obvious mistakes in them.
As far as I can tell, copymethat let me create an account with my email, but didn't actually confirm that I own the email. It's one of my pet peeves now.
There are many great tools when it comes to recipes, it is just I am not all that excited about cooking, maintaining a recipe book, tracking nutrients. This goes for the vast majority of people. If I was you, I would track down users of similar apps and ask them what would make them use your spin on the idea, what they tried in the past, what they miss elsewhere, that is a must-have feature other apps/website already have... Get the insight who already uses a competing product. Couple of these people will give you more insights than whole HN. Look for hardships, explore desire.
A "prestige" might be a factor. Ability to have followers, achievements, the whole social shebang. I understand that might go against the principle of simple, just spitballing. As I said, I am not that person.
If you ask anyone on HN, they will tell you data portability, nobody wants to be locked in... that is nobody who is a nerd and cares about privacy, retention. Regular users (sadly) care much less. My mom likes to print out recipes from the Internet, paper is much easier to work with in a messy kitchen. Plus, the ability to generate good-looking PDFs doubles as a poor man's export.
I would add a mission statement, basically assure people the thing won't be gone in a year. If you can't, also good. Say it is an experiment, allow people to contact you, outline the plan, ideally address how are you planning to pay for hosting, if there are plans to monetize, introduce your kid.
That is all I got for you today, good luck!
Yet, when I am looking for a recipe, I always look for the blogs. Why ? Because the alternative is a commercial website full of ads and trackers, trying to upsell me on paid features on every page.
Yes I have to scroll past an uninteresting paragraph, but it's much better than the alternative.
This new website might be more respectful of my privacy now, but it is yet to be seen what will change when/if they need to monetize it.
Here's the current site, albeit it's built in a fairly minimalist fashion: https://based.cooking/
I guess the entire initiative came out of complaining about modern web bloat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvDyQUpaFf4
Here he talks more about the actual site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykNEkiYr0QM
Personally, i don't really enjoy his tone or vocabulary choices, but the site works and one has to admire creating lightweight websites, even if they're largely incompatible with the modern trends in content publishing.
Congrats on your site, though!
I use it as a showcase of how to make simple websites when they need to be simple.
1) http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
2) https://thebestmotherfucking.website/
Personally, i think that the sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle:
Here's a nice presentation about website bloat (from 7 years ago, though little has changed): https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htmHere's my boring homepage, for example: https://kronis.dev/
The heaviest thing on it probably is the icon font (a legacy from the days past, from the Materialize library, instead of just SVG icons or even emojis), but it would absolutely exclude me from many front-end dev/designer positions (apart from the HTML/CSS being lazily written, of course).
The second one is the one I am for. When I finally start my blog (a 15 years effort so far) I will use that style.
I find the messy one too loaded :)
Does this mean the recipe instructions actually say the quantity of the item when they mention it in the recipe? I've really wanted that, I hate having to go back and forth between the instructions and the ingredients just because I didn't feel like doing mise en place (not every recipe requires that, and I'm not about to dirty a bunch more dishes just to get things ready).
Yes! On a phone you have to tap the highlighted ingredient, on a desktop browser you have to mouse over the highlighted text.
Moreover, scaling is a great feature, but needs refinement: Nobody is helped by "13⁄16 tablespoon olive oil". Perhaps there should be a warning for scaled (baking) recipes as well, because more dough might need more time baking or will not behave as expected in very large or small quantities.
Nutrition information is based on "servings", but the number of servings used seems independent from the scaling of the recipe? E.g. Pizza Dough seems to be calculated in the base recipe as 10 servings, but if I scale it up to 5x, the nutrition label still mentions "10 servings" without any change. Same foe nutrition by ingredients.
I agree that using fractions during scaling is a little unhelpful, but we have not gotten consistent user feedback. Some people prefer fractions, some prefer decimals. I think it may be a healthy compromise to use fractions for non-metric units and decimals for metric units.
The nutrition per serving should not be affected if you make more or less of a recipe. The assumption is that you will divide a larger batch into the same sizes the original recipe would be served at. For a recipe like pizza, I guess it would make sense to scale the servings proportionally to the size of the pizza. I will think about how to implement this in a simple way.
Thanks for the feedback!!
E.g. take pizza dough: Default is 10 servings and the base recipe calls for "2 ¼ teaspoon active dry yeast" -> nutrition facts shows: "2.25 teaspoon Active dry yeast - 2.25 teaspoon Leavening agents, yeast, baker's, active dry | 3 calories per serving". Now multiply the recipe, say for 40 servings. Recipe now calls for "9 teaspoon active dry yeast" (as expected). But nutrition by ingredient still shows: "2.25 teaspoon Active dry yeast - 2.25 teaspoon Leavening agents, yeast, baker's, active dry | 3 calories per serving" (not wrong, but kind of misleading). And "Nutrition Facts" still mentions "10 servings in recipe" instead of 40. HTH
Where do you receive the nutrition information from?
What is this: hxxps://az416426.vo.msecnd.net/scripts/a/ai.0.js ? And why is it there? It was adblocked by my browser. I see... telemetry... of course a new website needs telemetry... not like you can't do this already with a logging middleware, no you have to push azure cloud telemetry down your visitor's throats/browser.
The site is very slow.
Also I'm not buying the story.
That script you ad-blocked is injected by Application Insights in Azure. We use Application Insights as our APM system, but of course you're free to ad-block it.
I increased our VM size after the HN traffic wave, it should be better now.
Ok, sorry to hear that :) it's a true story.
I wanted to extend this to other common kitchen tasks like making crepes or pancakes, but to my dismay I found that almost all recipes use cups and teaspoons.
I did end of finding one recipe, and it turned out the most consistent crepes I've ever made. Sadly I can't find that site again!
Let's hope metric measurements are supported on your site!
Does that help?
> - Most recipe websites are what I call "mommy blogs", and the principal problem is that the recipe ingredient list and instructions are buried in a SEO-laden essay that we don't care about. We were sharing links to our favorite recipes, but links don't allow you to skip past the unnecessary essay prefacing the recipe. We knew we wanted a way to have recipes uncompromised by unrelated essays.
1) You may not want to advertise the site this way based on what happened to Recipeasly: https://www.today.com/food/recipeasly-recipe-website-taken-d...
2) While lots of people will doubtless be able to relate to this issue, you might want to find a more neutral phrase than "mommy blogs" which could potentially sound insulting or sexist to some users.
The "fun" thing would be to growth hack your site by web scraping and then having that data posted under fake/bot accounts. Even more protection if you actually have bots from outside the company do it so there's some reasonable deniability. This is my level of pessimism from startup websites now.
> And many food bloggers expressed concerns that a website like Recipeasly could be hugely detrimental to this business model.
Facts are not copyrightable. (IANAL) Strip out the prose, API/schema/DDL it all away.
Your tool sounds orders of magnitudes more valuable to humanity than bloggers' random ramblings with a surprise recipe at the bottom.
Anyone who wants that, can literally and easily ignore your product and continue using the existing internet. SEO spam will only get worse.
With that out of the way, I’ve thought of the same website model as OP. I came to the conclusion that recipes would have to be contributed by users. It’s not right to scrape recipes from others blogs.
Always a good idea to check Google Structured Data to see if a format exists for the thing you're doing. Odds are Google has a format for you, and odds are it's a good format to adopt for a lot of reasons.
This format is what makes the nice recipe cards show up in Google Searches (https://www.google.com/search?q=pot+roast).
I get not wanting to have a "mommy blog" approach to content, but things like prep-time, cook-time, and just consistently formatted XML behind the scenes is good for your users.
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...
Once you have it set up, it'll be easy to add in something like https://www.basketful.co/ and that'll make it easy for people to shop their local grocery store -- and give you a revenue source for your work.
Next up, you just need user reviews! (= This will also help you build a community... having a sign up, being able to email market to people when new recipes they might like come up, or just have a tool where you send them 3 choices a day for dinner options, and a "buy now" link to their favorite retailer.
Lots of good stuff you can do with this site. Nice work!
Really useful tip about basketful, I'll follow up on this.
Reviews are just the tip of the iceberg! Favorites, lists, recommendations, etc... having accounts unlocks all of that.
Thanks for the feedback!
My case: I couldn't care less if my recipes account gets 'hacked'. I just want to use my usual 9 letter password for services I don't care for securing. Heck, if I could just enter my email and anyone else could too that'd be fine by me.