Redesigning the Recipe: Insufficient Amounts
— 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.

How much?

I’m making this chocolate cake, looking through the instructions for the next step:

  1. In a large bowl, add the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Whisk well to combine.

Immediately, I need to know: how much flour? how much sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, salt?

The answers are in the ingredients list:

And the cross-referencing begins.

An instruction step and the ingredients list, with arrows pointing back and forth.

“ok, flour” — jump to the ingredients and scan for “flour” — “ok, 2 cups” — add the 2 cups of flour to the bowl — jump back to the instructions — “what’s after flour? ok, sugar” — jump to ingredients and scan for “sugar” —

… rinse and repeat for each ingredient. I have to double-check to make sure I haven’t missed an ingredient amidst all the jumping back and forth.

In this recipe the ingredients are listed in order of appearance in the instructions, so I sort of know where to look. But that’s not always the case — sometimes, the ingredients are listed roughly by grocery store aisle, to aid when shopping — so I can’t rely on their order.

If the recipe is on my phone, I have the additional cost of scrolling up and down between instructions and ingredients, making it even harder to remember my place in either.

It’s like I’m a lawyer cross-referencing contracts or an auditor comparing bank statements. Just let me cook!

Twice the amounts

The solution is so simple: List the amounts in the instructions too!

  1. In a large bowl, add 2 cups flour, 1  3/4 cups sugar, 3/4 cups cocoa powder, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1  1/2 teaspoons baking soda and 1 teaspoon salt. Whisk well to combine.

You may object that the above sentence feels busy, hard to read. I agree. But that’s because it’s really a list in disguise. Let it be true to itself:

Now there’s just one place to look while cooking. No more jumping back and forth between instructions and ingredients.

I’m surprised I don’t see recipes do this, not even recipe apps, where the amounts in the ingredients and the instructions can be linked and scaled together.

Measure once, cook once

The lack of amounts in the instructions implies a two step process: First, measure all the ingredients. Second, start the actual cooking (mixing, heating, etc). In professional kitchens, this kind of preparation is called mise en place. When an order comes in, you need to cook the dish quickly, so everything that can be prepared in advance is. And the prep pays off, because you are making the same dish many times a day.

But I’m designing for home cooks, not professional chefs. On the plus side, following “prep first, cook second” means there’s less logistics while cooking, and thus less overwhelm when learning something new. In practice, though, no one I know has the patience or forethought to do this kind of planning. We all just pull up the recipe and measure up the ingredients as we get to the instruction where they’re needed.

The two-step process also feels inefficient for a home kitchen — if I prepare all the ingredients before I start cooking some of them, the dish will take longer to make than if I start as soon as I have the ingredients ready for step one. And measuring up that many ingredients in advance requires a lot of measurement cups/containers/cutting boards/countertop space.

Something else that implies a two-step prep-then-cook process is the annoying practice of hiding preparation instructions in the ingredient list (”3 carrots, finely diced"). That’ll be the topic of the next post.

Thanks to John Chang, Joar Granström, Hjalmar Thulin and Nils Wireklint for reading drafts and providing feedback.

Read the rest of the Redesigning the Recipe series: