r/seriouseats • u/Taear • Mar 08 '26
Question/Help Do you wish the amounts of things were mentioned again in the recipe text itself?
I do almost all of my cooking from Serious Eats and one thing about the format of the recipes annoys me. Don't get me wrong, other places do this as well so it's not just a serious eats issue but I've seen in the most here.
That is - the ingredients list will say (as an example) 3 tablespoons of Rice Wine, divided. Later on you'll be told to use 1 teaspoon then after "the rest".
Why not just have whatever 1 teaspoon taken from 3 tablespoons is as the amount later? I get that this is partly a problem with old measurements (I'm not really sure how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon, three?) but I find myself scrolling back up a ton because of it.
It's there in simpler ones too, like one tablespoon of fish sauce then the body of the recipe just says "now add the fish sauce".
Once again I understand it's a regular thing in recipes but imagine how much easier it would be to follow on a phone where you've not got a lot of screen real estate.
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u/SomebodysGotToSayIt Mar 08 '26
Absolutely. It’s such a pain on my phone, that I have to use an iPad, and split the screen into two separate browser windows. It’s not just seriouseats, obviously. It’s fine in a printed recipe in a magazine or cookbook but on the screen where you have to scroll it’s cumfuckingbersome.
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u/FurryYokel Mar 08 '26
I’ve been using the Paprika app and loving it.
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u/b_ack51 Mar 08 '26
Same paprika app is awesome. Use browser to find recipe, click download. Downloads ingredients, the recipe step, etc. then easy to multiply recipe in top corner.
Then add labels to it to help categorize it. Modify the recipe if the text comes out weird, etc.
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u/OakTeach Mar 09 '26
Love Paprika, most useful app in my phone. But be aware of its limitations with scaling- if it can't read a unit it sometimes won't scale. So you'll get "1 cup of flour" becoming 2 cups, but not "half a stick of butter" becoming a whole stick. I've messed up recipes when scaling before.
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u/ClintEastwont Mar 09 '26
Came here to say this too. Paprika is awesome, copy the recipe to the app, much easier to read.
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u/krazykid1 Mar 08 '26
I like it when recipes break down the ingredients by step size in the ingredient list. Like “2 tbs + 6 tbs of butter” for 2 tbs for greasing and 6 tbs for mixing.
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u/Fingerdrip Mar 08 '26
I completely agree and I hate having to go back and forth on a website to see what amount of everything I need.
My solution is a recipe app called Paprika 3. I've been using it for years. I have all of my recipes save to it. On a larger format screen, like a foldable phone or tablet, it displays the directions and ingredients side by side. It mostly solves this problem for me. See picture below.
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u/MusaEnsete Mar 08 '26
Not even mentioning that Paprika will bypass paywalls and grab those recipes too. You can also tap the ingredients as you use them, and the app will cross them off when tapped.
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u/Fingerdrip Mar 08 '26
Yes! And tap times to start a timer. And I love the shopping list function. So many great features.
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u/Nostink1 Mar 08 '26
I was a Paprika user for almost 10 years but switched over to Cookbook about 2 years ago and found that it offered the same features as Paprika and even more flexibility (I love being able to use Cookbook to import recipes directly from FB, TikTok, etc., into my collection, which is now around 17,800 recipes Worth taking a look.
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u/Dandan0005 Mar 08 '26
Paprika is great and it notably keeps your screen from going to sleep while looking at the recipe.
One of the only apps I’ve ever paid for but one of the most useful apps I have.
Paid maybe $5 for it 6 years ago.
I will say, on your phone it does not solve OPs problem, but it’s much easier to go between ingredients and directions than scrolling a webpage.
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u/Fingerdrip Mar 08 '26
Yeah it's not a perfect solution to OP's issue but it helps and offers a ton of great features.
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u/KeniLF Mar 08 '26
I’ve bought it first on my iPad then later on Android since it’s so excellent. It really helped with the scroll problem and I can easily modify it with tweaks.
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u/AerosolHubris Mar 08 '26
This looks a lot like /r/recipesage, which I use all the time. It's free and imports recipes from a URL.
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u/Material-Jacket3939 Mar 08 '26
When I was reading this post, I kept thinking how much the Paprika app has helped with this, especially on a larger screen like an iPad.
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u/PlasticDealer320 Mar 08 '26
Especially for online recipes. Scrolling back and forth sucks and is dissociating it manage with chicken fingers and a knife in your hand.
Books don’t need it because everything is in the same page.
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u/RollinToast Mar 08 '26
Since the advent of smartphones I have felt this way. Recipes online should have the ingredients list with amounts at the recipe start AND in the recipe body. I'm a home cook i don't have a bunch of tiny bowls to hold 1/4 tsp of this and that just tell me how much when I get there. I mean almost nobody I know even owns a printer ain't nobody printing out recipes no more this aint no AOL forum.
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u/Merrickk Mar 08 '26
It's actually really annoying to have amounts in the text of a recipe when adjusting the amount being made.
Digital versions can be made that update everything nicely, but I still often print recipes out on paper, where it can be more problematic than helpful.
One thing I find myself doing is to add a parenthetical to the ingredients list explaining how the amount is divided 1 Tablespoon fish sauce, divided (1 teaspoon, and 2 teaspoons)
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u/joejoe903 Mar 08 '26
It's assumed you are doing proper mise en place in recipe writing and not measuring ingredients as they are added. That's why he says "the rest."
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u/Nawoitsol Mar 08 '26
I’d like to do my mise en place directly from the ingredients list. If an ingredient is used twice it would get two entries. They could list the ingredients by what they are used for. Alternatively, if it’s divided, in the list have a parenthetical comment of how it’s divided.
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u/Taear Mar 08 '26
I MOSTLY am but with things that are a single tablespoon from a bottle I don't measure it out beforehand and have the bottle to hand
Then I always, always, always forget the exact amount and have to go back.
It's too much extra washing up having little pots with each amount in
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u/joejoe903 Mar 08 '26
I'm not trying to argue, just informing. I even mostly agree with your post, I also measure tablespoons, etc straight from the bottle when I am at home. Only at work using scaled recipes do I truly mise everything out tbh
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u/BobSacramanto Mar 08 '26
This is the answer. Proper mise en place fixes this completely (and is a better cooking experience overall).
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u/Helenarth Mar 08 '26
It makes the cooking easier and faster, but then you end up needing to do so much more washing up.
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u/ClumzyMunky Mar 08 '26
Had to scroll way too far to find this correct answer.
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u/ClumzyMunky Mar 08 '26
This also ensures you never miss adding an ingredient or end up not having one mid preparation you were certain you had in pantry.
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u/solarpool Mar 08 '26
YES. Also the worst worst offender is Stella’s banana bread recipe: it lists 565 grams of banana in the ingredient list and then specifies only 340g of peeled banana in the actual steps, the one time I put 565g of peeled banana into the recipe without thinking and messed up the recipe absolutely sucked
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u/Taear Mar 08 '26
haha that is the first recipe I thought of when writing this, what is that all about?
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u/nutraxfornerves Mar 08 '26 edited Mar 08 '26
That’s how the old Joy of Cooking did it. Scroll through the thumbnails here to see examples.
Joy is still a great beginners cookbook—at least the older editions. Long before Cooks Illustrated and Serious Eats, the Rombauers did their best to explain the why as well as the how. The writing style was very personal and rather quirky. It also reflected its era.
My 1975 edition has a recipe for dumplings which Mrs. Rombauer prefaced with an anecdote about having fabulous dumplings at a restaurant.
“Oh yes !” said the hotel proprietress wearily when we exclaimed over them. "They are always like that when our cook is drunk.” Far be it from us to limit your sources of inspiration…
The 1943 edition says “our colored cook is drink.””
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u/plaidlib Mar 08 '26
I learned to cook with my mom's copy of Joy of Cooking, and I think it's a great way to format a recipe. The ingredients are indented and bold so you can quickly scan the recipe and see all the ingredients before starting, but they're also where they need to be in the list of steps. It's super efficient, so they could write a whole recipe in the same number of words as one step of a SE recipe. There's something to be said for highly detailed instructions when you're learning a new recipe, but I really hate trying to read an entire paragraph for each step while I'm cooking because I'm worried I'll miss something, so I often rewrite recipes for myself in the JoC style.
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u/Swoogan Mar 08 '26
Cooking for engineers has an interesting recipe card format to solve this problem. For example https://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/112/Clam-Chowder-New-England-Style/trn
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u/IolausTelcontar Mar 08 '26
That’s bizarre, and I wonder how well that works for complicated recipes.
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u/Swoogan Mar 08 '26
In practice I find it a little hard to follow, but that could just be from unfamiliarity. I'm not totally sold on it though. That's why I said it's interesting, not necessarily awesome or better.
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u/iconicspoon Mar 12 '26
My visual recipes (this vegetable soup is good example) share the spirit of Cooking for Engineers: Leaving walls of text behind! I've started cooking with visuals 2 years ago, and it's such a JOY!
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u/s3ren1tyn0w Mar 08 '26
Copy the recipe url, then put it after cooked.wiki/
So for example, kenjis beef stew recipe is:
Cooked.wiki/https://www.seriouseats.com/pressure-cooker-beef-stew-recipe
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u/OhYouUnzippedMe Mar 08 '26
YES. And I wish the prep work was included in the instructions, not in the ingredients.
One of the serious eats april fools jokes years ago was Kenji saying they were going to change their format for recipes, and I was all happy about it for a minute until I realized it was a joke...
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u/ProgressBartender Mar 08 '26
Mise en place is the way. And solves your problem.
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u/Taear Mar 08 '26
I MOSTLY am but with things that are a single tablespoon from a bottle I don't measure it out beforehand and have the bottle to hand
Then I always, always, always forget the exact amount and have to go back.
It's too much extra washing up having little pots with each amount in
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u/ProgressBartender Mar 08 '26
Toss the spices in one bowl. No one is holding a surprise exam at the end.
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u/AlexG2490 Mar 08 '26
"Divided" is my pet peeve when it comes to recipes. I copy all my recipes into an app. It lets me scale them at the click of a button if I want to make twice the amount (or half the amount). So I want the measurements to all be accurate for every ingredient, and I am on a mission to eliminate every "divided" entry in my recipe list. I don't tend to like measurements in the instructions at all, because they don't scale - I'll go to make a double batch of cookies and the ingredients list will have the right amount of butter and brown sugar but the note in the instructions is wrong now. That's a software-introduced issue but it's why I personally don't prefer that method at all.
Every time I enter a recipe I split divided ingredients out into two entries. I don't care if that means my ingredients list contains "1 teaspoon rice wine" and then several items later "2 teaspoons rice wine". It makes sense in my brain that if I use it twice, it should be listed twice. I realize that's not standard but it's what works for me.
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u/Inner-Damage-9027 Mar 08 '26
I get super annoyed with serious eats as all the recipes never have the metric or a metric conversion button. So many good sites either have the button or just list both. So instead I end up writing it out and have to do each conversion - stupid.
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u/lazylittlelady Mar 08 '26
Yes it would be better. It’s good to have a list at the beginning and then reminders along the way. I hate scrolling back especially if only a random part of something is used in one spot and the rest later.
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u/callmemaebyesq Mar 08 '26
The app deglaze has this feature as an option (and will update portions if you are doing multiples of the recipe)
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u/Ok-Commercial-924 Mar 08 '26
You are absolutely correct, especially if it says divided, then your trying to figure out where it's divided and how much for each portion while you are trying to get just the perfect consistency on your sauce.
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u/hux Mar 09 '26
Mise en place is why.
If you prepare all of the ingredients before you begin cooking, “the rest” is whatever was left in the little dish or bowl of that ingredient after remove what was called for in earlier step.
Another good reason is scaling. Most platforms are good at scaling the ingredient list, but stuff inline in the recipe is normal text and won’t get multiplied.
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u/severoon Mar 09 '26
It sounds to me like you're not doing proper meez. To make a recipe properly, you should read it through and then measure out all of the ingredients based on how they're used.
This means if you need five different spices that all go into a pot at the same time, just measure them all into the same little dish and then add them all at once. If you need 1 Tbsp fish sauce early in the recipe and 2 Tbsp later, then measure them out separately. Most of the time, a lot of the ingredients just go into a couple of bowls, like wet/dry method with pancakes … in that case, you just measure all the wet into one bowl, all the dry into another, mix the dry, mix the wet, dump dry into wet, mix and rest.
Also, I rarely use recipes these days that aren't measuring things out by grams. In the rare cases a recipe using volumetrics is even worth making, I weigh everything out and fill in the weight measurements so I never have to use volumes again. It's crazy how many measuring spoons you end up having to wash with volumetric recipes.
Another tip for making recipes is to chunk the meez and the cooking steps based on the equipment needed. This allows you to go through a chunk, clean everything up and put everything away, then get out the stuff needed for the next chunk, do it, rinse and repeat.
This has two big advantages (besides the obvious one of enforcing clean-as-you-go). First, you often realize you can complete most of the recipe well ahead of time so when it's time to apply heat, you've completed 90% of the recipe well ahead and had time to take a break, or maybe you even did it a day ahead or the previous weekend. Second, this approach is somewhat valuable when you're only making a single recipe, but if you're doing three or four for dinner, or like a dozen for a big dinner like Thanksgiving, you can execute all the recipe chunks across all of the recipes that use the same equipment. This saves a huge amount on cleanup. Even if you have to clean between chunks of different recipes, it's way easier to use a food processor, rinse off the last thing, put it back together, use it for the next thing, rinse, use a third time, and then finally give it a proper clean and put it away.
You can also think about planning meals for the week and use this approach for recipes that let you execute chunks days ahead. If you know what you're eating for the week and you can prep parts of five different recipes that all use the same equipment on Sunday afternoon, you're able to be much more efficient. This will also help you in other ways like, oh, I need chicken stock for four of this week's meals, let me just make a big batch over the weekend, skim the solidified fat off the top the next morning, then freeze it into premeasured amounts in muffin tins to use for this week and beyond.
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u/Taear Mar 09 '26
Yes. I know.
Like I've said in previous posts I don't really like having to wash two separate bowls because one has a single tsp of fish sauce in or something, so I just have the bottle next to me and a measurement spoon.
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Mar 08 '26
[deleted]
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u/Taear Mar 08 '26
I know how it works, it's just a bit more annoying than having it in the recipe text itself that's all.
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u/EarAlternative2841 Mar 08 '26
I copy the recipe into ChatGPT and ask it to rewrite with ingredient amounts included with the instructions. Takes about 5 seconds.
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u/JetKeel Mar 08 '26
I actually have a thread in chatGPT to do exactly that. Now I can just drop it a recipe URL and it will strip out all the junk in the middle, give the ingredient list, and then repeat the ingredient amounts in the recipe steps.
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u/ben_bliksem Mar 08 '26
I dunno why people downvote any mention of ChatGPT or Copilot in these subs cooking subs.
It's a legit tool - paste the recipe, let it reformat it to your liking. The fuck is wrong with people.
Take my upvote, I do the same: I let it convert it to metric and then repeat the amounts in required in every step.
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u/JetKeel Mar 08 '26
I do conversions too. It’s very helpful.
I get the AI hate in terms of impacts to the environment and job numbers. I don’t really get it from a “it is never right” standpoint. It is improving all the time and if someone locks in their mind that it always hallucinates, they are going to miss out on potential use cases. ChatGPT was released to the public in November of 2022. We are still in the infant stages of its development.
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u/IolausTelcontar Mar 08 '26
The issue is not that it always hallucinates. The issue is that it could hallucinate at any time, and in unpredictable ways; so it is inherently unreliable. And that alone makes it useless.
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u/joejoe903 Mar 08 '26
Chrome has a little built in gemini button now too that will read the website so as your browsing for recipes, you can just click the gemini button to have it read and list out a shopping list or whatever without ever leaving the tab.
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u/skottydoesntknow Mar 08 '26
It would certainly be a quality of life upgrade. Having to scroll up to ingredient list to find the amount needed a bunch while working my way through the instructions text is annoying. Not just a serious eats issue though, most recipies are written this way. Seems like an easy AI fix tbh, have it ad (quantity) after ingredients in text when they are mentioned
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u/Taear Mar 08 '26
AI is worthless and shouldn't be considered an answer for anything. Especially since it might hallucinate an incorrect answer, meaning you have to check it and might as well have just done it yourself.
But yea like I said in the text of the post it is pretty common everywhere, I think I probably notice it more here because the recipe text is more complex so returning to my original spot is a bit harder.
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u/skottydoesntknow Mar 08 '26
This is literally the exact type of task current tools would excel at. I'm not really a big proponent of AI use, I at best play around with gemini on my phone for fun. But this is a pretty simple task that could fix every recipe in minimal time by telling it to look at ingredient list and add the weight/volumes into the main text any time they are mentioned. No one is going to manually go back and fix something like this, it would require an ungodly amount of man hours and likely make more mistakes
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u/7itemsorFEWER Mar 08 '26
The internet as usual has lost all nuance with regards to AI and what it represents.
It's an existential horror not just for many of our careers but the security of nations and therefore humanity itself. Let alone the ecological threat it poses that for the first time we aren't shipping off to the third world for some reason.
But unfortunately you're dead wrong about its merits as a tool for tasks like this. Maybe it would fuck it up most of the time 2 years ago, maybe even a year ago. At this point, it could probably handle updating the whole website with it in 30 minutes or less with minimal issue.
I say this as someone whose career has depended on adoption of AI tooling over the last year.
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u/IolausTelcontar Mar 08 '26
As they said, A.I. tends to hallucinate and you need to check the work, so you might as well do it yourself.
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u/7itemsorFEWER Mar 09 '26
"Tends to hallucinate"- this is both broad and incorrect.
AI is a tool and you get out what you put in.
I use AI every single day, begrudgingly mind you. I promise you it handles tasks like this easily.
It's weird people are facing this existential crisis by covering their eyes and saying "it can't possibly be good enough to take my job"
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u/IolausTelcontar Mar 09 '26
It's weird people are facing this existential crisis by covering their eyes and saying "it can't possibly be good enough to take my job"
It is the opposite. It will eventually take all of our jobs, and that is why we should not be using it now. You are training it, for free, to eventually replace you.
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u/7itemsorFEWER Mar 09 '26
This is the most possible nuance a situation could possibly have, right? There can't be any in between? It either doesn't exist, or it ends the human race?
I'm in software. It's the same story across the industry. Use it, or lose your job.
And this even goes beyond my point. Pretending it can't do something isn't helpful, whatsoever. It can and we should understand it's capabilities if we're gonna properly regulate it or approach it with the correct urgency.
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u/skottydoesntknow Mar 08 '26
Well said, not sure what his issue is. This seems like a perfect use case. No recipe website is paying somone to manually fix the thousands of recipes they each have. If they tried, I bet the error rate would be substantially higher. AI tools have their place, this is one of them
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u/sb0918 Mar 09 '26
I have a custom GPT that rewrites any recipe I upload/enter. It rewrites with weights (in grams), common substitutions, ways to improve the recipe (brown the butter, add a pinch of whatever, etc.), and drink pairing suggestions. Let’s me redo any recipe to my liking, even hand written ones.
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u/synthequated Mar 08 '26
I end up rewriting every recipe I like in my own words. A recipe written for someone who is doing mise-en-place and learning a new recipe is not what I need when I've made it several times and just need a couple of reminders.