Redesigning the Recipe
I’ve never liked cooking by recipe.
A recipe has a list of ingredients, and a series of steps to follow for preparing and combining the ingredients into a meal. This structure and the amount of detail in most recipes imply that: if you follow along correctly, you’ll end up with the beautiful dish in the picture.
To me, a sub-average home cook, things rarely turned out that way.
I’d follow the steps to my best ability, and then be confused about what had gone wrong.
Maybe it was unfamiliar and vague jargon? (What does “brown” or “golden” mean exactly?) Maybe there was a mistake in the instructions? Maybe it was because of miscommunication when cooking with a friend?
I tried to follow the instructions even more closely, but found it very taxing to keep flitting back and forth between cooking and reading — and this wheel-spinning was a new potential source of mistakes.
The recipes made me feel dumb. Like I had zero attention span, no short-term memory. Like me and my friend were bad at communicating. Like it was obvious what the recipe writer intended, and I was stupid for not getting it.
So I swore off using recipes.
Instead, I would improvise. Look in the fridge, see what’s available, combine what I had in various ways. (Most ways were vegetable stews.) I would stick to stuff I knew, like “onions and garlic as a base, then add other vegetables”. I didn’t have to constantly check if I was doing things right — I was just doing whatever I felt like in the moment. It was liberating. I felt safe.
But there was always an itch in the back of my mind. Recipes seemed like the way to learn new dishes and ways to cook. Sometimes I’d eat something new and have no idea how to make it, and my recipe celibacy meant I’d never learn.
A thought started brewing: What if the reason recipes are hard to follow and learn from is how they are designed? After all, it seemed like they’d hardly evolved at all in my lifetime — a 2025 online recipe is pretty much indistinguishable from the paper recipes that have existed for centuries.
Maybe I could invent a better kind of recipe? One that would make cooking fun.
Redesigning the Recipe
This is the first post in a series detailing my attempts at redesigning the recipe, making it more visual, approachable and easier to follow.
- The next few articles will be going in-depth on the problems I’ve found with typical recipes. How they slow me down in the kitchen, confuse me and make collaboration hard.
- I’ll present a few different recipe redesigns, from me and others, and share some templates for you to make your own improved recipes!
- Since I made those design explorations, I’ve come to realize that I’d misunderstood recipes — who they’re for and how to use them. Maybe this project was doomed from the start?
- In light of this misunderstanding, I’ll revisit the problems and the solutions, and see what can be salvaged.
I don’t yet know where exactly this project will end up. But wherever that is, it’s been inspiring for me to rethink recipes. Instead of discouraging sub-average home cooks like myself, imagine recipes that would inspire us!
Stay tuned for part 2, coming soon.
Thanks to John Chang, Björn Lindberg and Petter Rylén for reading drafts and providing feedback.