The endurance cuisine: designed to show that the cook has time to spare, the endurance cuisine requires that no ingredient is pre-processed in any way. Grind your own grain, bake your own breadcrumbs, chop your own veg. Using grapes? You should have peeled them!

The hair-shirt cuisine: you have to endure some discomfort if it's good for you, right? This cuisine specialises in sour tastes and unpleasant mouthfeel - often using grains that our stone-age ancestors sensibly gave up for nicer ones.

The gold plated cuisine: this one's obvious. Pricier ingredients must be better - or at least show how much the cook can spend

The obscurantist/connoisseur's cuisine: it can't be good if it's easy to find. The cook can only be good if they know exactly how many 'extras' you need in your virgin olive oil, and what classification of wine you should put in your coq'au'vin.

(Okay this is a bit tongue in cheek - but only a bit. I really do think a lot of recipes are unnecessarily onerous in some way)

Cooking fundamentals rather than recipes

Education rather than entertainment ("food porn")

Don't have the right tool? No problem! Here are 3 ways to improvise

Missing that ingredient? No problem! Here are 3 substitutes

Scaling primarily using software/data/ML instead of hardware (capital-intensive) or physical delivery (operations heavy)

Exponentially less content to create with knowledge blocks ("legos") rather than recipes ("what you build with the legos")

"Learn to make this with Parsnip" rather than "buy these groceries" or "order this food" or "watch this video"

Encouraging you to be the creative process vs. outsourcing work to someone else

I believe we have a few aces up our sleeve for avoiding the status trap. You can get a sense of how we're thinking about it here: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/why-now

Wagyu, wellington, organic grass fed, etc. Aside from knowing how to stew it and sear it, there's not really much to it, yet people will create video after video of $150 tomahawks and $200 wagyu ribeyes. And when they aren't cooking it out of the package, they're coating it with all sorts of weird shit that require special fermentation chambers to properly dry age.

Then there are the foods that look easy to prepare because the person in the video has 5 years of professional kitchen experience and can julienne a walrus faster than you can peel an apple.

was a bit of fun and seemed to be "common man".

Except he clearly has some cooking skills, especially with a knife. Not sure he could julienne a walrus (NFI what Julienne is..) but he isn't a pleb in the kitchen.

Also, when you start out, it inevitably feels like a big complicated formal deal anyway, no matter what you're cooking, so why not actually make coq au vin or beef Wellington or something super cool like that? Julia Child's classic beginner's cookbook The Way to Cook paired classic French recipes with "home cooking" versions of the same recipes, and as a twenty-something with virtually no cooking skill, I found the classic versions much more motivating than the home cooking versions. When I got excited by Thai cooking, I made my own curry paste, something I would never bother with now. Some beginners are full of energy and enthusiasm for big challenges, and it would be great to have resources for them, even if other beginners should be steered to different resources according to their goals and motivations.

When my grandmother was teaching me how to cook, what was wonderful was the non-nonchalant way she could subtly be specific...

Meaning, when she was teaching me a recipe, she would tell me "oh just however much you feel is right" but at the same time giving me subtle indicators as to what was appropriate amount.

It took the stress out of cooking, but also let me feel the bumpers to make a strike.

Knowing how to make homemade cheese and applying that skill economically when it'll make a significant difference in the final product is useful... that ends up going with a home made puttanesca sauce instead of some canned pasta sauce... but those two end up covering some store bought noodles because I have priorities about my time.

Much like a lot of we programming folks learned the basics in university (assembly programming, building basic data structures in C++) comprehending the basics can let you make a judgement call on when it's appropriate to put in the extra effort. Someone who has never cooked a load of break may find that task daunting and insurmountable... but someone who regularly cooks fresh rolls for their daily grain and just keeps a weeks worth of dough in a tin in the fridge can whip up fresh rolls for dinner in a matter of minutes.

Parsnip 5 years from now may have a recipes with a slider you can drag with "completely from scratch" on one end and "as fast as possible" on the other, which helps even beginners manage the trade-off between time and simplicity the same way that a much more experienced cook can do in their head.

This kind of magic is how we think we can help make cooking the easiest way to eat.

This makes no sense to me at all. Where does it stop?

"You didn't use pre-peeled carrots, you're doing this for status" "You actually made shortcrust instead of using pre-made, you're doing this for status" "You made your own pesto, you're doing this for status"

Like, this is just some subjective line you're laying down and I do not see the point

I like that the app tells you it's okay to use boullion and even proposes paste as an alternative. And it tells you when not to use canned tomatoes. So it's not violating this principle.

It's a pretty easy UX problem to solve, too, if you're writing recipes manually: just say "one carton of stock (or make your own)" and link to another recipe. If the goal is to teach, why put barriers in front of your students to stop them progressing when they're ready?

Cooking is different things for different people. I feel like tech people see it as nothing but sustenance (yay Soylent!), so the idea is for it to be quick, cheap and easy.

For other people it's a hobby and they actually enjoy the process. Grinding your own grain or peeling grapes can increase the food quality, and it takes nothing but time, so why not? Same goes for buying better ingredients. We probably all waste a lot of money on things that aren't necessary, but we enjoy.

Almost all the afternoon Food Network cooking shows are about shortcuts and easy ways out (Ina Garten, maybe, used to be the exception but even she's now only focusing on her simpler meals on her cooking show as opposed to the more complex stuff she used to do).

Allrecipes.com is absolutely filled with easy to prepare dishes.

And any more fancy recipe site that includes detailed instructions to, for example, make your own bread, will almost always suggest a store bought alternative you can use instead (NYTimes cooking, Bon Appetit, Serious Eats, etc., will almost always have store bought alternatives suggested).

I'm suggesting (as Parsnip seems to agree) that they target people who want to cook food to eat, not just people who want to cook food to demonstrate. People who get delivery 80% of the time and cook on lazy Sundays and for dates are what most food media appeals to. It'd be easier to learn to cook with unedited video of an operating church kitchen over two days than with 48 hours of Food Network programming.

And, if you want prepackaged sliced carrots for whatever reason, just search for Rachel Ray recipes.

I chop onions instead of buying them pre-chopped (is this even a thing?) and you see that as some sort of expression of snobbery or a status signalling behaviour? I can't help but laugh here.

2) Hair-shirt cuisine: I'm curious which grains you're talking about. But a lot of the "old world" grains that have become popular are not popular because people find them uncomfortable to eat. They're popular because they taste good. And many people enjoy the additional texture.

3) More expensive ingredients don't have to be better. But they often can be. And in many cases even if the upfront expense is higher the actual value over a period of time may be equivalent and even cheaper. A classic and common example of this is parmesan. Yes, a block of parmesan will be more expensive than the pre-grated stuff. But it will also be more flavorful so you don't need to use as much and will probably last you longer than the pre grated stuff. It will also usually fit recipes a lot better because the pre-grated stuff has anti-caking agents which will ruin recipes.

Is there a way to avoid this? I can get some chopped vegetables at the grocery store, but the vast majority of vegetables are only available whole.

Is there a reason to avoid this? GP commenter's list of "status" cuisines (including "chopping vegetables" as a status symbol) is just nonsense, you should not expend too much energy trying to interpret it.

The main problems with pre-cut ingredients are that they are cut in one way only (thus you have no control over form), they are compromised in texture, aroma and flavor, they are more vulnerable to pathogens, they degrade faster and they tend to be repackaged in single use plastic which is really terrible for the environment. Being packaged, they can be difficult to inspect and thus often used as a means to dispose of subpar ingredients by penny-pinching retailers. Further, they're also more expensive.

Cooking has a few rules.

1. Use good fresh ingredients 2. Care about what you are cooking and who you are cooking for 3. Enjoy yourself

Questions about eggs barely made sense to me being from the UK, with incorrect pack sizes, animal welfare terms, and completely missed our great standards body that makes it easy to know which eggs have met a reasonable quality bar. It's not that the info is globally applicable, it's that it's an awkward combination of wrong and useless depending on where you live. Starting another quiz about kitchen equipment it seems this is a pattern throughout.

Cooking is deeply embedded into culture, tradition, region, climate, regulatory environment, retail infrastructure, and more. I don't think these quizzes will be able to overcome this without being fully localised per country.

The recipes? Maybe they're better. I don't know, I'm still 7 levels away from being able to know how to make scrambled eggs.

Edit: when I opened the app the first time it asked me how experienced I am and I answered the 3rd out of 4 options, I know my way around a kitchen. The app just asked me to match pictures of eggs to how they have been cooked: fried, scrambled, etc. I'm not sure I can survive this level of patronisation, it's honestly a bit insulting.

Edit: "what sort of pan should you cook eggs in"... "no not a wok, people don't have those at home". Ouch. At best that's incredibly sheltered for a food writer, and at worst it's practically racist.

I'd like to see a cooking teaching app that allows users to work through a recipe in varying levels of detail. For example, consider a Lasagna. A lower level recipe may use ricotta for a quick and easy version, a higher level might explain step by step how to make a bechamel, and the "hardest" level may just say "make a bechamel".

As a user, being able to select a difficulty level and see the differences not only allows me to learn new techniques at a pace that suits me while experimenting, it also teaches me more about the dishes and how recipes can be changed while keeping the spirit of a dish, or the flavour profile.

The best cooking videos on YouTube, people like J Kenji Lopez-Alt and Chef John from Food Wishes dot com, tell viewers what's truly necessary, and what's not. What "makes the dish" and what they're replacing in the recipe themselves because they ran out of the proper ingredient. I've learnt so much from this sort of thing, and am far more confident both creating my own recipes and modifying existing ones, having been a to-the-letter recipe follower for many years.

Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying. Because of you. Learn to make 'mother sauces' straight away guys! They're simple and flavorful.

If we're going to gatekeep cooking behind a lot of prior knowledge perhaps it would be even more efficient to reduce the lasagna recipe to a single sentence: "Make a lasagna."

- most of them are ridiculously easy

- most of them go with most food

- most of them are required for most food

- most of them are the basis of many other sauces

- they are better than store-bought ones

Any recipe apart from maybe putting sliced cheese on sliced bread will be more complex than being able to make a sauce. How is it gatekeeping?

Most foods, or most traditional French cuisine? I've never even heard the term, despite cooking pretty decent food for decades.

It's a fun way to learn history actually, following the influences of cooking techniques and trade. And the French were very influential here. The Spanish influenced Mexican cuisine when they conquered the Aztecs, and Spanish aristocratic chefs trained in France, so you can see modifications of classical French cuisine in Mexican prep edited to local spice profiles and ingredients. Etc... Just look at pan dulce!

French cooking is the C of programming in many ways!

Weird, I've taken a couple cooking classes in the Bay Area, and this never came up.

"The five mother sauces include béchamel sauce, veloute sauce, brown or Espagnole sauce, Hollandaise sauce and tomato sauce." French ones are the same: "The five French mother sauces are: Béchamel, Velouté, Espagnole, Hollandaise, and Tomato"

The techniques and ingredients you use for them are the basis for most sauces used in Western cuisine. You learn those five, you've learned all (or most of) western sauces.

I don't understand at all, honestly - I see a term I don't know, I grab the googs and figure it out. My first reaction isn't to accuse the person who knows something I don't of gatekeeping.

It also gets into the complaint about cultural specificity from the original comment. It might be Cooking 101 - for French cuisine. But to insist people learn to make the French mother sauces from scratch before eg. tacos or curry seems a bit too narrow-minded for "Cooking 101" generally speaking. I think "Salt Fat Acid Heat" has the right idea here.

edit PS: there is almost always a non-gatekeepy way to say the exact same thing. "In my experience, a homemade bechamel adds an incredible homemade taste to lasagna. I'd definitely recommend learning about the French 'mother sauces' sooner rather than later!"

But I really didn't think this thread would go this way, it was clear to me OP knew his way around a kitchen and was from Europe so knew enough about Italian cooking stereotypes to understand the intended humor.

Fwiw, you learn mother sauces after six weeks of knife skills at Auguste Escoffier in the US so you could definitely be right about 102 :)

Some people go their entire lives 1. not making scratch hollandaise 2. knowing it is a mother sauce 3. adding to the mother sauce to make bearnaise, etc

The part that seemed like gatekeeping was the part where they asserted that "a million Italians [are] crying. Because of you" in response to a commenter describing different methods of making a lasagna that require varying levels of skill.

That seemed like an attempt at gatekeeping because it asserts that many people who are making a lasagna in any way besides their preferred method that relies on "mother sauces" is Wrong.

Someone could also claim the opposite that the “easy” version is cultural appropriation.

Jokes are hard nowadays.

1. teaching in a class and taking a test, to 2. teaching in online videos and taking an online test, to 3. modular, choose your own adventure, at your own pace, software-supplemented, continual learning: https://a16z.com/2020/10/16/next-gen-edtech/

That's what we're trying to do with cooking. If we succeed, it's going to be essentially replicating an apprenticeship but you don't need to find a master.

If you are from Louisiana you'd think the Holy Trinity was cooking 101.

>If you are from Louisiana you'd think the Holy Trinity was cooking 101.

Yes, and you'd learn bases like soffritto/mirepoix/holy trinity as well. They are also a part of cooking 101.

Is this cooking 101?

A lot of cooking is essentially variations on a theme. If you can make béchamel, you're now also only a step away from a bunch of other sauces (Mornay, Soubise, etc), simply by adding different ingredients. The technique for making béchamel is similar for espagnole and veloute, but with different liquids in the first step.

Extracting out this general principle is, for me, a thousand times more comprehensible than memorizing that (((butter + flour) + milk) + onions) -> soubise but (((butter + flour) + milk) + cheese) -> mornay.

Mac and Cheese is basically a sort of béchamel, even the out of a box kind and I wouldn’t call that gatekeeping.

I would argue that the real fundamental things for basic cooking are more like how to use a knife, how to sauté things, what happens to different veggies, meats, and herbs as they cook for various times and temperatures, etc.

As for the mother sauces, they’re prepared ingredients that one might make at home to use in various recipes. There are plenty of other examples: stocks, various things that can be made out of eggs, various Asian sauces, hot sauces, various cooked garlic preparations, sofrito, etc. Béchamel is just one example.

You clearly know a lot about food and seem to enjoy it, which is fantastic!

I do not cook professionally so the idea of me spending literal weeks in a cooking school or reading cooking textbooks sounds fun but also incomprehensibly decadent. My partner and I spend about three hours per week on meal planning and prep for our family, and we typically end up cleaning the kitchen concurrently with cooking. Because of this we end up cutting a lot of corners and incorporating meal kits and frozen food into our weekly rotation.

If I could improve the nutrition and/or taste of my meals by spending an additional ~15 minutes a week I would consider it, so Parsnip seems like it might be relevant to me.

But I assume that anyone who talks about "taking a class" or "reading a book" or "learning to make all the master sauces" is coming at food from a wildly different perspective that is probably wonderful for them but not particularly relevant to my life where I get home and have about twenty minutes (less if there's traffic) to figure out how to turn the ingredients from the fridge into something my kids will eat.

If you want to learn this stuff, there textbooks on cooking. Not quite the same thing as a cookbook!

Some stuff can be made shorter by just saying things like "deglaze the pan" instead of "pour some flavorful liquid such as stock, broth, or wine in this hot pan that you think would compliment the taste of whatever you're cooking and make sure to scrape the brown bits while at it." It's the same thing as programming, one might say to a professional programmer to "sum these items" while a beginning programmer would get "write a for loop with an accumulator variable, and for each iteration of the loop add the item to your accumulator."

They're both the same thing, it's just that one is more succinct.

A good example is carbonara. So many people learn to make it with cream etc because they think it'll be easier, or the person they are learning from believes it's easier to make, but when you look at the differences it's actually barely easier to do than the traditional, or even harder in some cases, so why not just learn the traditional.

I'm not Italian, so I don't care as much...

Also, as the original comment mentioned, this is supposed to have different degrees of how easy/flexible/practical it is

Believe it or not there are tons more cuisines out there besides French all their their own prior knowledge, staples, customs, sauces etc.

And also, if you look at the best cooking schools in the US such as Auguste Escoffier they also start with lessons on Italian and French cooking because of its influence on so many other cuisines.

This stuff is like learning variables and functions in programming - they're just core essentials and if you want to learn cooking, as you'd expect from an app-based course on cooking, you'd expect these to be early topics :)

Of course we're getting off track here because I was originally just joking with the OP as mentioned in another comment and seen in their reply. The Italians are stereotypically very protective of traditional cooking recipes (watch almost any Italian chef on youtube make a dish).

And none of them use the mother sauces except the Western tradition.

Humans have great diversity in food, and that is wonderful.

A lot of North Indian dishes start with a base of tomato, onions, ginger, and garlic, to which various things are subsequently added. I think you could call that a "mother sauce", and people occasionally do: https://food52.com/blog/19216-does-indian-cuisine-have-mothe...

You don’t need to know how to make a bechamel to know how to make a lasagna.

( Beside this, making a bechamel is time-consuming and a lot of Italians just use the prepacked ones you find in every supermarket all over Italy. )

I'm not Italian, but I'm willing to give the OP the benefit of the doubt in the following way:

Have you ever read a professional cookbook ? I (would like to) think that what the OP was saying is that "hardest" level would equate to professional cookbook instructions.

In other words, if you were to look at a professional recipe for Lasagne, it would simply list "n ml Bechamel" as an ingredient and the recipe would simply state "layer using the Bechamel".

i.e. it would not list out the Bechamel ingredients, and nor would it tell you how to make it. The professional cookbook considers that you are reading a recipe for Lasagne. And that as a professional cook, you already know how to make a Bechamel (or already have some in the fridge from your prep). Professional cookbooks do the same for stocks and other preparations such as crème pat.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nWoI923LnY

Yes, the modern equivalent book might be (for example) Practical Professional Cookery by Cracknell & Kaufmann. 928 pages of pure text. Not a single illustration or photo.

Its a fabulous reference book. But certainly not for the noob, it requires comfort both in the kitchen and the style of recipe presentation.

The recipes are not quite as extremely terse as those in the 100 year old book. The ingredients are presented with their weights. But the method descriptions remain short and to the point, basically bullet-point one or two phrase statements.

Rather than what currently often happens with novice cooks, which is blindly executing an algorithm without knowing what it's doing or why.

cookwithmoment.com

i am sure they have a english page somewhere and you can order in euroupe. but for some reason it is showing up only in portuguese

Once I leave the Bay Area and move back to Europe I'm keen to take an extended work break and complete a 'proper' cooking course at Le Cordon Bleu for fun but realistically I don't think I can just take 6 months out of work and spend 22k on a hobby! https://www.cordonbleu.edu/london/diplome-de-cuisine/en

if it was a bit more affordable I would certainly use every week.

https://beta.parsnip.ai/module/E8pxMsWM22jlTzhqMPhf

This is a great idea, but it turns out you can't get product traction without actually a scaffolding for teaching the basic knowledge first. So we had to work on that, and we plan to return to this theme you suggested later on.

Jacques Pepin's book La Technique often refers back to earlier basic recipes to construct more complicated recipes, kind of similar to this idea (I guess nearly all cookbooks do this, but it seems like Pepin's does it more than usual).

The 2 of them are true OGs of food media education on the internet.

To be fair I feel the same way about duolingo but the knowledge graph is so deep and dense there that i wouldn’t be able to consume information in a couple of sittings. With recipes, I am pretty sure I could “learn” everything I wanted to learn about eggs or tomatoes or bread in just one evening. There’s probably real life experience that would add to that knowledge but that’s not something I would get from this app anyway.

That book does what this app says it does (but doesn't), and teaches you why things are done the way they are. It also occasionally has a recipe.

To the authors of the app, some suggestions. Firstly get rid of the quizzes. You don't need them. Get users to actually cook something, and then follow up with "this is what you should have got", and "if you ended up with X this is what you did wrong". Secondly this app is trying to teach all the wrong things (and getting many of them wrong too!). You should be doing things like teaching people what oil to use for what task, depending on smoke point, taste, nutrition etc rather than having opinions about how many people own a wok. Read the book I mention above - it'll give you a much better template for doing this well.

Here's the technical approach we're taking with the goal of taking a very hairy knowledge graph and turning it into a remarkably simple, even magical, user experience: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope

Ideally one would be able to learn language with the same kind of etymological study, however I put it to you that is FAR more complex and boring and doesn't have more fact / science based rules than cooking does.

Also, cooking is a very personal / familial / cultural experience. Recipes can be passed down a single family, whereas language is much more broad.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the knowledge graph for cooking is smaller and more personal, and is better served as a personalized note taking system as opposed to a gamified interface to a public database.

For example, if I would prefer recipes with eggs and potatoes as opposed to recipes with spinach and mushrooms, I should be able to cater my knowledge graph to learning more about recipes that use those ingredients (ideally with some balance in nutrients).

One thing at a time, though! This is just an MVP.

HN is going to tend to attract more of the individuals who prefer the deep dives.

As always, the trick is finding that first customer base, and figuring out how you can grow with them to keep them, and get them to spread the word.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cookingforbeginners/comments/vbgqq6...

The picture of quizzes on their blog post was odd too. The idea of washing ground beef to make a hamburger is very weird. Sounds like the result of an algorithm that decided that washing {ingredient} was always the first step in any recipe.

But if it isn't, mea culpa and I'll get that fixed.

link: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

In this case, the point was to teach users about common mistakes and remind them NOT to do that. If they added this to the sequence they'd get it wrong. We haven't shipped this (yet) for simplicity's sake, but may add it later.

To reiterate, one of the goals of Parsnip is to teach people all the things they shouldn't do, rather than just the right answers. Thanks for reading that memo, by the way.

Scrambled eggs are a good thing to learn for a beginner, and maybe the app does try to teach you the real "hard" part of them: Heat control. If you understand the heat of your stove and your pan, you can make scrambled eggs.

You can learn it by getting a carton of eggs, a stick of butter, and a frying pan. You'll learn how butter burns and gets too hot, and you'll learn when you jump the gun and put the egg in too cold of a pan.

People want steps and skills and tricks. But the real way to learn how to cook is to look at & listen to your pan, taste your food, and then repeat and learn from your mistakes.

This is very astute and I think things like this app are probably actually counterproductive for this reason--if we imply learning to cook is comparable to learning a _language_ in its complexity you're only going to make people more wary. Really all you need to do is buy ingredients and follow a recipe; now you're cooking! It isn't that hard.

As you say, the real learning process of cooking involves making things, getting a sense for what works, what you like, and iterating, and you can't really get this from an app, or videos, or whatever.

Let's take your other comment: "just buy ingredients and follow a recipe". This makes no sense to me. Sure, I could just make the 10-20 guesses required to buy ingredients & get to the end of the recipe, it would probably result in something edible but bad. At that point, I'll have learned how to make it better next time, but not necessarily how to make it half-decent.

So, as OP describes elsewhere, whenever I'm trying to follow a new recipe, I end up looking up an average of 5 vids on prep or technique that I'm unsure about. It gets me something half-decent in the end, but it's a lot of work, and I never feel like I really "get it".

Also, your overall tone is so weird to me. You're talking about cooking like it has no fundamentals and it's just loosey-goosey & based on people's preferences, but there are DEFINITELY wrong ways to cook things, and lots of them. I learn more about those wrong ways every time I try cooking.

If you want a recommendation, I highly recommend Laura Vitale's YouTube channel. She helped us get brave enough to do it. I use her recipes all the time (take your pick - it'll be good. The recent "one pan orzo chicken" is already a staple around here), and her videos really show her making the meal. So when you're making it yourself, you really feel like you've seen everything before :)

good luck on your cooking journey!

The wording used was 'a wok is unwieldy and uncommon in a lot of home kitchens'.

As one of the two Asian writers who this got past, we believed that this statement was true enough for North American beginners looking to learn how to make scrambled eggs.

I have changed the copy there and endeavour to make sure that we are more culturally sensitive in the future.

So your target users are North Americans? That's a pity. When reading your linked websites I got hope that Europeans were also included, because you are saying 'A giant opportunity in making cooking easier for a billion people' and 'Because a billion home cooks is good for people and great for the planet'.

You did nothing wrong. As a European I didn’t even have a clue what a wok might be for most of my life. Buying one would make no sense.

They didn't "teach" a "lesson" on racism, they said an entire 15 words in an edit and gave a range of "sheltered" to "at worst, practically racist". A bit hyperbolic? Sure. A lesson? No.

Things like a red lion or a red tractor being printed on an egg. They mean a lot in the UK, but don't mean anything to anybody in any other country.

If you consider that we're trying to start with levels 1, 2, and 3 of cooking before moving on to the far more advanced topics, do you still think it's useless? Or does your perspective change?

Thanks for the note about the questions that are potentially culturally insulting. I actually have a wok at home so I'm gonna look into that one personally!

I didn't do the eggs one, but that's hilarious. Also from the UK, also own a wok, and also agree that scrambled eggs are best in a wok.

Basic cooking skills are easy enough to find on youtube.

FALSE. Even the most irrationally minded human being who deliberately tries to intepret things in the worst possible manner would have gotten racism out of a declarative sentence like "most people don't have woks at home", which is likely an accurate assessment given the North American demographic they seem to be targeting. Unbelievable

The thing that makes Duolingo great is that right away you learn words in a new language. It hooks you. Within 1 lesson you know several words or a phrase with a few variations.

This is more just random trivia about food that no one cares about. I started with the cheeseburger recipe (apparently an advanced lesson or something). Right away it's asking me a bunch of questions about ground meat but teaching me nothing. Where's the hook? I want to see a recipe and learn to make it, not feel like I'm taking a test about a bunch of stuff I was never taught with no obvious path to simply making the thing I want to make. In the 5 minutes I spent on it I feel like I was just getting grilled (metaphorically). The first 5 minutes of Duolingo I actually learned something.

Anyhow, suggestion would be to start right away with the thing people actually want... How to cook the food and make the recipe.

I explain how this works at https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope

The unintuitive observation for beginners is that their pain doesn't seem to be cooking the food and making the recipe. It's "I don't know where to start", and building up confidence, and not being intimidated by that literal fire on your stove.

Like, I can definitely see a market for something that teaches skills versus recipes. I've thought about doing it myself. But if someone wants to learn to cook an egg, it's because there's an egg in their fridge and they're hungry. So start with actually cooking that thing. Like, getting a suitable frying pan, setting the right temperature, throwing some butter in and then cracking and flipping the egg, learning to recognise when it's cooked to the desired doneness. No one cares about how to buy eggs... And if they're scared to buy eggs it's not because they don't know ABOUT eggs, it's because they don't know how to cook them.

Anyhow no need to take my advice, I just don't see the 'hook' or value versus a blog that teaches cooking, the millions of books geared towards beginners, TikTokers and YouTubers that teach cooking, etc... In a past career I was a chef (worked in restaurants up to a place that was top 100 in the world) and for beginnners who never cooked the first step was always to put food in their hand and have them cut it, season it, cook it and taste it. Extra information was always on a strict need to know basis mainly because it's overwhelming. The very first time you make a burger you don't care about lean versus fatty meat, you just want to not get e-coli and have something edible.

Also, just want to compare some food apps that are successful.

- Cookpad works because it skips a ton of BS involved in reading recipes and simply gives you the recipe.

- TikTok (IMO the best food app there is) works because you see the entire recipe start to finish in one minute or less. It grabs you, then you can usually go to a link or something to get the actual recipe.

I like your goal and the methodology is sound enough, just seems like there's not a ton of experience with actually teaching cooking...

This is exactly it. I desperately need to learn to cook and I came across this post while hungry. I was so excited. But after 5 minutes of giving this app my full undivided attention I was just learning about how to store potatoes and I’m still hungry. And I was meeting friends in an hour. So I closed the app and made my 4th Peanut-Butter-Nutella Sandwich this week.

But the idea of a skill-tree for cooking sounds amazing. To start with simply scrambling an egg, then learning how to make an omelette, and then getting a bunch of toppings recommendations and whatnot— I would LOVE if this product existed and definitely pay for it, because I know cooking more could save me $400/month.

But, I think we can get you there after a few weeks of using Parsnip on a regular basis, with some basic dishes.

If you have an egg and butter on hand and the mental and physical capacity to tie your shoes you can absolutely learn how to make a basic scrambled egg in 5 minutes. Crack whisk pour flip eat.

If I’m a novice cook and your pitch is that it’ll take me weeks for your app to get me able to make a scrambled egg or avocado toast (mash spread salt done) I’m probably just going to give up.

On TikTok you can see a whole recipe in 1 minute. Sure making it takes a tad longer, but it's definitely possible to learn something in 5 minutes or less. Then build on that.

I like the idea, it's good, but no one's going to wade through random trivia that doesn't matter.

I mean, TikTok and Youtube do this with simple recipes by the thousands.

Good luck with this idea, but I think it might be targeted at a very precise type of user that is interested in food facts and maybe one day learning how to make simple dishes.

I'm more confused about this app now than when I started.

Devil's advocate (and very serious home cook): Food Youtube solves all of these problems in various and (IMO) much more entertaining and informative ways. There's a plethora of content ranging from highly-technical restaurant inspired recipes to "authentic" home cooking traditions passed down through generations. Tracking a progress meter isn't going to make me a better cook: having access to lots of different ideas and styles and trying the ones that speak to me will make me a better cook. Also, our tastes are largely inspired by what we ate growing up and there few universally-loved recipes. That's one of the most beautiful things about cooking: there's a million different ways to do it.

You don't know how to chop an onion? There are a million videos on how to do that. Want to know the history of a certain spice? There's a channel for that.

- read a lot of cookbooks and understand them

- go watch a ton of YouTube videos and triangulate the best way to do it

- go get a job in a kitchen (essentially, apprentice)

I learn the way you do and I totally get where you're coming from. But this only works for serious autodidacts. For everyone else, doing any of the above is a pain in the butt. So that's the problem we're trying to solve.

The magic of the tech tree is that it addresses the issue of "you can't type what you don't know into Google."

I really don't believe that these are all your options for learning to cook. You can be taught by a friend or a parent. You can just read a recipe online and try to follow along. You can take classes - you don't have to apprentice in a professional kitchen.

Beyond that everyone has to eat. So they know what they like to eat. So for me, the argument that 'you can't type what you don't know' doesn't really hold for me. You're googling for something you do know and then from there if you don't know one of the steps (dicing an onion) you can pretty trivially look that up.

I don't understand this, you can watch one video of someone just cooking a thing you think sounds tasty.

Just to clarify, I'm not defending their app, I'm defending the problem statement.

Something like this https://youtu.be/p53xab3c3tg

Btw, your response implies that you deny this point, but I don't understand why that would be. Most activities are this way. People aren't born knowing how to play sports or use computers or make art, whatever. Cooking is no exception.

Anyway, thanks for the rec, I'll definitely check out Adam's recipe vids (I'm more familiar with his non-recipe vids)

Doing it from an app like this is just the first step. New products need a wedge.

I've heard from the grapevine that this application is one of the huge efforts in Facebook's metaverse effort. Let's see if we can do it better...

My options as a beginner are 'greek salad', 'spaghetti & meatballs', 'cheeseburger', 'deli sandwich', 'avocado toast'. Even on advanced it only added 'scrambled eggs', and 'tomato bisque'

To put it another way I found it very non-inclusive.

Not that I expect one app to teach me all the world's cuisine but it would be nice to at least acknowledge up front the bias of the app in its description?

There's nothing wrong with teaching these things but they are not the "beginning" things for a great many cultures including cultures in the USA itself. I doubt the kids of most parents of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Mexican, descent would start with these items.

Sorry if I'm not making any sense. I'm not trying to be negative. I'm just pointing out that the selection offered clearly shows a bias.

We'll be adding more ethnic foods in soon, which is very exciting to me.

I don't understand why so many people consider anything part of US culinary tradition to be bad while seemingly giving a pass to everyone else like it isn't a different arrangement of meat, dairy, carbs, salt, and acid.

I personally don't think any particular dish is good or bad, but how well it's cooked.

First question received: "The best indicator of freshness for ground beef is: a) smell, b) whether it was frozen, c) the manufacture date, d) color.

The answer "a" smell was marked incorrect, "c" manufacture date was the "correct one". Uh... maybe... unless it wasn't stored properly.

Other questions: Is all ground beef the same? How long can fresh ground beef can be kept in the refrigerator for?

It really isn't helpful to guess my way through some quizzes to get access to a recipe.

So out of the Pareto principle, we skipped the lessons for the MVP. Definitely plan to add them in later.

I assume I'm like the other commenters that love cooking, but are trying to find a nice way of saying that guessing food trivia doesn't seem fun.

If you buy it from a supermarket in plastic packaging then sure. But I usually get my mince in a bag from the butcher, it's cheaper and fresher. Smell and colour is all I can go off.

> We may collect the following information from you in order to provide our Services:

> ....

> Your child’s first name;

> Your child’s age or birthday;

Why?

EDIT: lynndotpy was right; it's required by law under COPPA if we have users under 13. It's the same reason that sites ask people for their age/birthday to check if they're under 13.

We want kids to be able to learn to cook too!

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-C...

I'd love a clarification, say, that they don't somehow do this for adult users of the app.

This. The average age of people who watch cooking shows is ~11.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/228950/cable-tv-networks...

https://www.marketingcharts.com/television-13719

https://brandongaille.com/40-captivating-food-network-demogr...

https://corporate.discovery.com/discovery-newsroom/food-netw...

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/video/m...

- On a question that was supposed to load gifs as the answers, only one gif loaded. And it wasn't the correct one, so I had to pick blind.

- You should try some localisation, e.g. 'grilling' is 'barbecuing' in the UK. What you'd call a broiler, we'd call a grill. Could cause some confusion. There's a lot of localisation issues from what I've seen, it's very USA-centric.

- I answered a question about cheese storage, it told me I got it wrong and that modern refrigerators were the way to go. So I clicked the only answer that mentioned a fridge, and I got told it was wrong again.

- I don't understand how I'm supposed to be learning anything? It just feels like I'm doing a Buzzfeed quiz

- 'Burger sauce' is just ketchup and mayo, with any other mix-ins you want. There's a lot of variety in burger sauces. The app describes it as "creamy, tangy, onion-y and with little chunks of pickle". The next question says that the 'five main components of burger suace' are mustard, ketchup, pickle relish, onion powder, mayo. Only 2/5 are essential. You can argue for mustard.

- Q: 'Why make burger sauce' - A: 'It's convenient' - what? You're making a new sauce because you want the taste of all the sauces combined, you presumably wouldn't just be putting all of the ingredients on your burger individually as an alternative?

I think it'd be worth looking at actual culinary school curricula rather than making a short buzzfeed-style quiz for each individual ingredient in a dish, there's potential here but I don't think it's going to be a great learning tool in its current form

Do you have an idea of the distribution of cooking skills in the world / western world? How many people need to develop basic skills?

These countries (USA, Canada, UK, Aus, NZ) have similar food cultures, a high reliance on processed foods (especially US), and relatively higher cost of labor and food vs. the rest of the world, so have a higher demand for learning to cook. The best way to see the trend and these countries is on Google Trends:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to...

Fun game: try putting something (or someone) popular on the right side of that graph and see if you can find a higher trendline

It was fun, actually

Learning to cook and searches for poop seem highly correlated

Please don't lead with this stuff. Teach me how to make tasty things!

The questions on types of cheeses or how to cut an onion were weird and felt wrong. (What about the easy root method for cutting?!)

Well done for not enforcing account registration and letting me actually try the app.

Re: MacOS app: is that the same toolchain as iOS, or totally different? Our iOS app is built in Swift but I'm not an iOS developer, so actually not super familiar with the ecosystem.

What framework does it use?

Is there any chance of a web version at some point?

https://question-page-test.web.app/question/0CRyWWs1MBLonFho...

http://apps.apple.com/us/app/parsnip-level-up-your-cooking/i...

Warning: this is not a great user experience; it's somewhat helpful for experienced cooks but useless for beginners and product adoption was terrible.

the engineering effort would have been better spent making web technology better rather than two vastly different custom sdks with poor respect for user privacy and security.

One bit of feedback I want to give is: when I'm answering questions on the iPhone app, there's a dialog that shoots up from the bottom... this is too much motion and I don't like it. Especially since there are multiple questions back-to-back, it feels a bit nauseating to see that dialog shoot up over and over.

I think a quick fade in (or no transition at all) may be better suited for that part of the app.

1) Cooking skills are physical acts of dexterity and timing that can be explained and modeled by text and videos, but not mastered. This is a good place for the use of spaced repetition; every time someone makes a recipe that uses that technique, ask them how they did (and give them the criteria e.g "was the sauce shiny?") Make practicing fading or weak skills, or taking advantage of mastered skills, a criteria for suggesting recipes to the user. i.e. "do you want an Easy, Challenging, or Difficult recipe?" and select based on their current skill level at the techniques involved (and the ingredients at hand.) Choosing Easy would be biased towards recipes utilizing techniques and ingredients that they have mastered, Challenging would be for techniques that they are learning, and Difficult would be for introducing new techniques.

2. Organize learning more around techniques than ingredients. Some techniques only apply to a single ingredient, but most apply to many ingredients. If techniques are verbs, ingredients are conjugations - many irregular, but most regular. Some ingredients require a higher level of a particular technique than others. Figure out what ingredients they like by asking what meals they like, and use those to help suggest future techniques to learn.

3. Many people want to become vegetarian, or vegan, or paleo/Mediterranean/whatever, but don't like the food yet. If a program like this suggests logical progressions to train the palate towards a user's goal, it could help them switch to these diets (clinically picky eaters, or people who have discovered they are pre-diabetic, diabetic, celiac, or that they have fatty liver disease, have a serious problem with this.)

This could be amenable to a machine learning recommendation approach if you ask what meals people enjoyed, you know the techniques they're good at, and you know their diet goals. You could say "buy avocados on your next shopping trip and you can try X, Y, or Z, which people who like what you like also seem to like."

Not sure I agree - I actually get a lot of value out of videos for cooking techniques and they can often nip bad habits in the bud.

For instance, I recently discovered a new method for matchsticking carrots from a video that i really like.

2) this is a really interesting idea, but I'm not sure it's really a conjugation, but just different nodes on the knowledge graph. What do you think is the benefit of a noun-verb relationship?

We believe there's some incredible fruit in a serious computer science approach to cooking and food. Here's a preview: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/vision-part-one

I am able to select both "Cheeseburger" and "Greek Salad" but not "Greek Salad" and "Spaghetti & Meatballs". If I tap "Greek Salad" after first tapping "Spaghetti & Meatballs" then it deselects the "Spaghetti & Meatballs" and selects "Greek Salad" (even with only 1 item selected).

Anyway, cool concept.

You are supposed to be able to only select one dish at a time. In RPG gaming terms, that is your "quest" and the levels are basically what you need to complete the quest.

If you can select multiple dishes then there's a bug we need to fix, please let us know!

E.g. One of the questions is "Which part of an upright blender is the most dangerous?". My initial reaction was the blades but apparently the answer was steam. In this case, I'd suggest rephrasing the question to "Which part of an upright blender is the most dangerous with hot liquid in is most dangerous".

My last suggestion is a big one, as it changes the app a bit, but why not start with the recipe? Others have mentioned the lack of a hook, and it gives something for the questions to refer to.

Good luck, I sincerely hope you're successful, there's an odd shortage of cooking apps.

FWIW, any disruptive consumer product has to be met with dichotomous love/hate reactions when it first comes out — it's never indifference / no one cares. So I'm loving what I see here: if this thread is any indication, we're definitely on to something.

And it would also fill a niche that no recipe site seems to fill right now. It's almost impossible to find a recipe that actually explains why you're doing everything, why this ingredient works, etc. Knowing why an ingredient works opens the doors to substitution and recipe modification by the 'student', which is a great pathway to learning. And it would be a hell of a lot more engaging.

Turns out it was a bad idea and we had to pivot, here's why: https://parsnip.substack.com/p/a-new-hope

Hence the product that you see now.

If you change the css of .slider.homepage to:

.slider.homepage { bottom: 115px; overflow-x: hidden; }

It will be fixed.

One of the reasons I cook is because it's possible to taste food you'd never taste before. I can't get a good halal spaghetti bolognese. Sure, there are restaurants, but they tend to be way overpriced for something that's an everyday recipe. I think it would be interesting to teach people about more exotic ingredients as well.

Also I've been cooking for decades, and even did a recipe startup. And yet I've learned a lot from the beginner tier alone. Big fan of this.

Is that what you mean by recipes tied to skills, or something else?

That would be a pity.

The recipes we have right now are pretty easy for any English speaker to use. Our main content creator is from Australia, lives in Canada, and makes fun of the Imperial system all the time :)

Learning to "eyeball things" is actually one of the most important skills I think you can have in the kitchen (not for baking of course), but when I see that I need 200g of an ingredient for a recipe, my first thought isn't "I can't believe the person writing this is from Europe!"

OTOH, it would literally take a few lines of code for the app to have conversions ready to go for you.

Something that generates weekly meal plans taking into consideration food preferences, nutrition, time, availability of ingredients, etc and then tells me what to buy or orders it for me.

It'll take us a few years to get there, though.

I haven't seen this asked or answered anywhere and am curious - how do you guys plan to make this profitable? Charging for more "advanced" features? Ads?

I already have the Duolingo owl chasing after me for money (and more time).

We're building in the open at https://parsnip.substack.com/ and you can subscribe if you'd like to follow along with how we figure out the business model!