Redesigning the Recipe: Ingredients or Instructions?
— 4 min read

I never liked cooking by recipe. I’m an amateur cook, professional 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.

Hidden instructions

I’ve been excited to try my hand at cooking Mapo Tofu, and found a recipe I like. Yesterday, I was at the grocery store and got all the ingredients from the ingredients list. Today, it’s time to cook, so I go to the instructions and start following them.

Steps 1 through 4 are about preparing the mushrooms — soaking and chopping them — then making a chili oil base. When I get to step 5, I see:

  1. Heat oil over high heat until lightly smoking. Add garlic, ginger, scallion whites, chives, and yacai (if using). Stir-fry until fragrant, about 30 seconds. […]

Wait. The wok is on high heat, and I need to quickly add garlic, ginger, scallions — but there were no instructions saying to grate or chop them!

I scroll up to the ingredients list and see (emphasis mine):

There were instructions hiding in the ingredients list!

This practice comes from a two-step cooking process: first prepare, then cook. You take out the ingredients, measure them and cut/chop/mince/grate/etc, then you turn on stove or oven and start the time-sensitive cooking.

In US recipes, putting preparation steps in the ingredients list seems to be common practice. I’m from Sweden, where this is not the norm (example). Perhaps I just need to get used to reading through the ingredients list again before I start following the instructions.

Buts something still irks me about this. Step 2 says to “place button mushrooms in the bowl of a food processor and pulse until chopped into rough 1/4-inch pieces”. Why is this preparatory step listed in the instructions, but “3 garlic cloves grated on a microplane grater” is in the ingredients list?

Preparation Separation

There is value in making clear what steps can be done in advance and in parallel, and what steps need to happen while the wok is hot. But putting that information in the ingredients list makes it easy to miss or misunderstand.

The solution? A third section, in between ingredients and instructions: Preparation. The recipe would look something like this:

The ingredients list now has one job, and is less cluttered. The preparation section makes it clear what can be done in advance and in parallel (split up between multiple cooks). And the cooking instructions let me see clearly what steps are time sensitive, since they no longer contain the preparation steps.

Separating out preparation takes up more space on the page, which is one of the reasons paper recipes don’t do it. But these days, digital recipes are more and more common, and there space is free – it’s scrolling up and down that is costly.

A drawback compared to putting the preparation steps inside the cooking instructions is that it’s no longer clear what ingredients need to be prepped for what cooking step. I only need garlic, ginger and scallion for step 2, so if I’m cooking with a friend and we want to be time efficient, I might want to start step 1 while my friend prepares garlic and ginger for step 2.

I’ll discuss this further in the next post, on cooking in parallel.

Thanks to Björn Lindberg, Akvile Marciukaityte and Petter Rylén for reading drafts and providing feedback.

Read the rest of the series: