I never liked cooking by recipe. I’m an amateur cook, but an expert designer, and one day I’d had enough — I vowed to redesign recipes to be more visual, more approachable and easier to follow.
If you haven’t read the intro, start there. This post is about one of the problems I frequently encounter when cooking by recipe:
A step is not a step
I’m in the middle of cooking this mushroom pasta, and I’ve just added salt and pepper to the pan with the mushrooms.
What’s next? I was on step 3 …
- Add all the mushrooms and toss them around in the pan for a couple of minutes, adding another drizzle of extra no a virgin olive oil. Season with a good pinch of kosher salt, black pepper and the rosemary. Cook the mushrooms for about 7 to 10 minutes, tossing occasionally, until they turn color and release their juices.
That’s a lot of text for one “step”!
It’s hard to remember where exactly I was reading about salt and pepper, so I have to scan line by line to find that sentence. This takes me a few seconds. And if I don’t read carefully I might miss “the rosemary”.
Losing my place in the recipe, and scanning to find it again, is something I find myself doing a lot — maybe 10-20 times while cooking a typical dish. And when I do it, I often lose track of what’s going on in the kitchen. If I had better short-term memory I could remember more steps and consult the recipe less, but that’s hard when the dish is new to me and there’s a lot going on in the kitchen.
Let’s see what we can do to make it less effortful to find and remember my place in the recipe.
Breaking apart the “step”
Let’s first break step 3 into one sentence per line.
- Add all the mushrooms and toss them around in the pan for a couple of minutes, adding another drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.
- Season with a good pinch of kosher salt, black pepper and the rosemary.
- Cook the mushrooms for about 7 to 10 minutes, tossing occasionally, until they turn color and release their juices.
Immediately this seems more manageable.
Now, each line is something I can keep in my head while cooking. And if I forget what comes after the salt and pepper, it’s easier to scan for.
Let’s break it down even further, into single actions, one per line.
- Add all the mushrooms to the pan
- Add a drizzle of olive oil
- Toss around the mushrooms in the pan for 2 mins.
- Add kosher salt
- Add black pepper
- Add rosemary
- Cook for 7-10 mins, tossing occasionally, until the mushrooms turn color and release their juices.
We’re starting to see how the original paragraph is really a list in disguise.
Some of the lines are longer, because they describe something happening over time. Let’s turn these additional instructions into sub-bullets.
- Add all the mushrooms to the pan
- Add a drizzle of olive oil
- Cook for 2 mins
- Toss frequently.
- Add kosher salt
- Add black pepper
- Add rosemary
- Cook for 7-10 mins
- Until the mushrooms turn color and release their juices.
- Toss occasionally.
(Here’s the original for comparison.)
- Add all the mushrooms and toss them around in the pan for a couple of minutes, adding another drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. Season with a good pinch of kosher salt, black pepper and the rosemary. Cook the mushrooms for about 7 to 10 minutes, tossing occasionally, until they turn color and release their juices.
Compared to the paragraph format we started with, the list format is easier to follow and faster to scan. Cooking actions always start on a new line, which makes it easier both to remember my place and to scan for a specific action. I no longer have to translate back and forth between cooking actions and recipe sentences.
There are a couple of tradeoffs to the list format. It takes up more space on the page, which matters for a dense cookbook, but is less important for a web recipe. The bullet list also feels more sterile than prose. Compare “Add salt, Add pepper, Add rosemary” to “Season with a good pinch of salt, pepper and rosemary”. But it’s not all or nothing. If page real estate or poetry is important to the recipe writer, they can choose something in between paragraph and one-instruction-per-line.
A step in the right direction
The list format is a clear win for most recipes. For an amateur cook like myself, it leaves me with more brainpower to focus on what’s truly important — cooking a tasty meal for my loved ones.
In the next installment, I’ll talk about another brain-sucking part of following most recipes: unnecessary cross-referencing. Stay tuned!
Thanks to Björn Lindberg and Petter Rylén for reading drafts and providing feedback.
