To perhaps be a bit more constructive, and to suggest a way forward...

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.

> 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".

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.

Not only do I not know how to make a bechamel, this is the first time I've heard this word or the expression "mother sauces". (Maybe because I'm only a quarter Italian?)

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."

This really isn't gatekeeping! But if you're learning to cook there are fundamental things you need to learn. This is like the simplest sentences of learning a new language on Duolingo here, it's not some crazy term. Literally week 1 in many cooking schools, maybe week 2 after stocks. If you're trying to teach people cooking, you want to be taught the fundamental key steps to follow recipes no? How many start with butter, thicken with flour, loosen with milk? That's bechamel :)

Mother sauces is absolutely gatekeeping. You can get pretty far, and even know how to turn a roux into a béchamel without ever knowing it’s a mother sauce or that there are others.

It's not gatekeeping. I wish I had someone teach me the mother sauces (or the base sauces of the French cuisine) because:

- 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 of them are required for most food

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

Most Western foods! I mentioned in another thread that recently I started learning Creole cooking which starts with a dark roux followed by stopping the cooking process with the holy trinity. This is very similar to espagnole mother sauce and a modified mirepoix (peppers instead of carrots). If you take a cooking course in almost any Western country it'll start with traditional French and Italian methods as a lot of cooking styles evolved from that. Certainly a lot of cooks in the 18th and 19th centuries trained in France (and Italy) taking their skills back home, not to speak of colonization by the French and Spanish.

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!

> If you take a cooking course in almost any Western country it'll start with traditional French and Italian methods as a lot of cooking styles evolved from that.

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

As the sibling comment said, most Western food will include some variation on the mother sauces.

"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.

It's more gate-opening than gatekeeping.

"Mother sauces" is not gatekeeping lol, its an industry term. It's no more gatekeeping than "data structure."

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.

I’ve flagged your comment because it’s essentially inviting a flame war, on top of being utterly irrelevant to the topic.

10 seconds on Wikipedia would have answered your question by the way. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_mother_sauces

The reason is that “sauce” is feminine in French. Une sauce. C’est tout.

You want to talk about pointlessly gendered, as a French native I agree that the French language, as most other Romance languages, Slavic languages and several Germanic ones, are all pointlessly gendered. I am envious of English natives that don’t have to deal with knowing that a chair is feminine but a stool is masculine, a bank is feminine but a shop is masculine. Or that a book is masculine in French but feminine in Russian, and it’s the other way around for the unknown gender of a domesticated animal!!!

Still I would invite you to learn more languages.

I'm a male, and I cook far more than any of my friends - male or female. I've no problem with a "mother sauce" and in fact the thought never crossed my mind.

It's because they're the very basic sauces that "give birth" to all the others. It's not because it's a sauce your mother used to make.

Which is not what GP was suggesting...

Though personally it seems a silly thing to get hung up on. I'd be more worried about the fact that for many the archetypical professional cook/chef is a man, and in fact men make up something like 75% of those who choose such a career, when it's abundantly clear that there are zero biological advantages to being male as a chef.

"Ancestor sauce" works fine for that and is less pointlessly gendered.

wouldn't that make it pointlessly ungendered? do you feel that gender is inherently bad?

We're talking about a course on cooking here, how is it gatekeeping to talk about cooking 101 subjects?

It's not cooking 101, it's at least cooking 102 or 103. I know you didn't do it intentionally, but when newbies get into a new subject they are often turned off by comments like yours which boil down to "oh noo you can't do it that way, you simply must do insert term of art or else insert negative hyperbole" - it's precisely what's meant by "gatekeeping". If I told my girlfriend a million Italians were crying because she made lasagna wrong she'd probably slap me.

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!"

I do like Salt Fat Acid Heat too :)

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 :)

You're doing a great job. Talking about mother sauces is definitely not gatekeeping, more like dropping knowledge on the uninitiated. It's the gateway to a vast (and in many ways overwhelming) beautiful world of classical cuisine.

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

Honestly I don't know how using the phrase 'mother sauces' is gatekeeping, I think it's just really basic cooking. Might not know the term, but an app trying to teach you to cook should absolutely be teaching it to you. A big part of learning a new skill is learning the vocabulary to navigate that skill. It's weird to shy away from it.

At least in my case I do not think cooking jargon like "mother sauces" is gatekeeping. These discussions are a great way to learn about new things and I appreciate when people share their knowledge.

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.

Yes, that WAS the joke. The easy recipe isn’t “real” Italian food. Italian people are often very prideful about their cuisine.

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

Jokes are hard nowadays.

It's true, jokes are hard. I've come to the conclusion that it's simpler to take jokes in discussions like these at face value. Sometimes statements seem to be framed as jokes as much for plausible deniability as humor. And as Gilda Radner says: "Humor is the truth, only faster!"

For what it's worth, you're the only one talking about a cooking course in this thread.

I wish more were! That's what I was hoping parsnip.ai was. I was really excited actually.

OP here. a16z has a thesis that education will go from

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.

Can't wait! I cook pretty often and I'd love to up my game and work towards some more fine dining type dishes. I'd pay for an app that did that.

Mother sauces are "French cuisine 101", but not "cooking 101." A very large number of "regular" American home cooks have never made a Béchamel sauce.

I'd say it definitely is cooking 101. They're the basis for a tremendous number of recipes over the last hundred years. Americans being ignorant isn't really an argument.

It's basis for a tremendous number of recipes in French cuisine, which is only one form of cooking.

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

It's the basis for a tremendous number of recipes in all Western cuisine.

>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.

> Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying. Because of you.

Is this cooking 101?

It might be intimidating for a second (it's got an accented vowel!), but the concept actually seems welcoming.

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.

It’s one of the first chapters in Julia Childs’s book for a reason. It’s fundamental technique, that’s really not gatekeeping. And some recipes do it but don’t tell you that’s what you’re making.

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

Saying that béchamel is a fundamental thing you need to learn is quite specific to a range of European recipes and traditions. You can make lots of fantastic things, from scratch, even involving Italian food, without any mother sauces.

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.

I think we may be coming at this from different perspectives.

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.

You can write programs and never know what an algorithm is. That’s roughly the equivalent. Someone with formal training in cooking will know the mother sauces, almost certainly, just like someone with formal training in CS will almost certainly know big-O notation.

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

Fair. Just follow https://www.reddit.com/r/GifRecipes/ for recipes so you dont have to think.

I find those much more difficult and frustrating than a traditional recipe. I don’t like having to pause or scrub through videos to figure out what the steps are. I like having a list of ingredients, so I can do some basic mise en place and figure out if I need to go to the grocery store or choose a different recipe.

Mother sauces are a French thing. They're béchamel, velouté, espagnole, tomate, and mayonnaise.

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.

Yes! But that's something you can teach! Ricotta isn't traditional at all, but that's a trade-off you can choose to make. I think telling people that, presenting the options and trade-offs, and teaching each level, makes it all so much more accessible while still helping people appreciate the traditional side!

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.

Haha this is very true :) Like bolognese, some of the cooking corners of YouTube contain chefs arguing about adding or not adding pancetta similar to vim vs emacs.

Since this topic is learning how to cook, let me plug my favorite Youtube chef, Alex (FrenchGuyCooking). He has a whole series on mother sauces (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLURsDaOr8hWX1T2WSXhPw...), which is how I learned about them. He does a great job of making deep dives interesting and approachable.

He's amazing!

> Can you hear that noise? That's the noise of a million Italians crying.

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

If you take a beginner cooking course you'd normally learn bechamel very early on - it's the base of so many great meals. I mean, it's a white roux and milk. While I was half joking in my previous comment I'd expect the way an app would work is to start with easier meals (maybe a mac & cheese, as this uses a bechamel as the base of the cheese sauce) rather than adapt more difficult meals for simplicity. I thought I'd get away with this joke because the original commenter seems to know his stuff around the kitchen and would appreciate a classic comment about Italians and their sometimes intense beliefs in sticking to traditional cooking :P

A beginner cooking course of a specific cuisine.

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

Okay I concede this is Western, yes. But they're used all over, even if they get slightly adapted over time to the local area. I was learning Creole cooking the other month making a gumbo and it starts very similar to the espagnole mother sauce (a dark roux) with a modified sofrito (red peppers instead of carrots).

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).

They are core essentials for the Western cooking tradition codified by Escoffier. The Indic tradition is different (and North India is quite different from South). There are at least four major groups of African traditions. I am being profoundly ignorant by referring to the Asian tradition - Northern Chinese is wheat-centered and Southern is rice-centered, and Thai flavors are quire different from Viet not to mention Malay...z

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

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

Not those mother sauces, and not by that particular name, but Indian cuisines do have the same "variations on a theme" structure.

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...

> 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.

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. )

Well, not to brag, but this is exactly how Julia Child did "the way to cook". First few episodes were all fundamentals like how to dice, chop and julienne vegetables, how to quarter a chicken, your mother sauces, how to cook an egg, and so forth. By the end she's doing full on delicious recipes. I highly recommend it, and gamifying that system to me, would be awesome. Go Parsnip

> 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.

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.

Your comment reminds me of this[1] video from sorted food where they make a recipe from an old professional cookbook. Instructions are very high level and without the context of 100 years ago it is difficult to know if they were successful in their creation. More detail recipes or at least pictures alongside might have given some of that context.

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

> Your comment reminds me of this[1] video from sorted food where they make a recipe from an old professional cookbook. Instructions are very high level

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.

We created Parsnip because we believe that even beginners can cook in this way (i.e. making a plate of scrambled eggs), by first understanding what they have to do and then following high-level instructions using those principles.

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

there is one to learn with real chefs. there is even a hardware that you put on top of your cooking station to record. you get back a full review of every step you did. from how to slice perfectly, to keeping your utensils neat.

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

Cool! I took a course with Leiths that's similar (16 weeks of online classes where you record and get feedback from a chef) and Rouxbe for a longer vegan-based cooking course (with good support and reviews by chefs), both during covid. Leiths is pretty affordable as you can pay monthly.

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

For me it's showing up in Japanese... I'm interested, but there's no obvious way to get anything in English.

I don't know why. i know it is a Japanese company but I don't why the English site is not showing up. that's a shame.

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

italians regularly use store bought béchamel for their (our) lasagna. Don't be gatekeepy!

So, we actually built this in an earlier version of the product. Here, you can see 3 variations of shrimp tacos in increasing complexity by famed southwestern chef Mark Miller:

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.

That looks awesome for me as an experienced home cook, but I appreciate what you mean.

This thread went into the weeds, but I think this core idea is great. Usually I skim recipes for three things, the title, picture, and the main ideas, it'd be interesting to have recipes presented at that high level of abstraction.

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).

> J Kenji Lopez-Alt and Chef John

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

I tried the app too and experienced exactly the same thing. I’m surprised the app is getting as much positive reception on here as it is. Sure it is cute and “gamey”, but I don’t particularly think it’s even useful. I’d rather have the knowledge graph displayed to me in a way I can easily find information or navigate it. Why would I EVER want to use this to learn something new when I could just read the information and ingest it.

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.

There's actually a huge amount to learn about cooking with eggs. I don't think this app is going to teach anyone much that's meaningful in its current state, but if you change your mind and want to really learn about the glorious complexity of cooking with eggs I'd recommend the book Ruhlman's Twenty as a great starting point.

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.

As the knowledge graph gets bigger, we're definitely going to have to find better ways to present it. The challenge is that most people don't want to see the whole knowledge graph, they want an extremely simple experience. Do you think your perspective represents something that would appeal to the mass market?

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

I think the knowledge graph in this case is mostly derived from first principles, e.g. understand roasting, searing, broiling etc and you can apply that to any vegetable or meat.

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).

I think you're predicting some interesting future technical problems with Parsnip, which is to build a personalized user-specific knowledge graph that is simultaneously overlaid across generalized common knowledge elements.

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

People have different learning styles. If you can come up with a gentle introduction, while still allowing deep dives in the specific areas, you'll boost your potential customer/referral base.

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.

Bingo! Here's some of that first customer base:

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

> I've done a few quizzes on the app now, and I don't get it. The questions feel very contrived, like someone had a quota to fill so just put whatever looked plausible together.

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.

I'm 99% percent that washing ground beef is a wrong answer -- what we teach NOT to do is just as important as teaching what to do. Same way how it's more important to know the ways a startup fails than to see what the successful ones did.

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

It wasnt a multiple choice question, it was a put the steps in order question.

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

Oh, that was a version of the question we didn't ship where one or more of the choices was actually wrong, so you would have to leave it out of the final ordering. In that interface you didn't have to select all of the choices.

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.

Washing ground meat? Just no.. There are few cases when it might make sense like when the skin has impurities like feathers or hair, but generally it is not recommended. I would throw instructions right out if they even suggest something going against modern basic foot safety.

It is a thing though, look up 'keema matar' for example. But it has nothing to do with cleaning the meat afaik, just a texture thing. Definitely not for making hamburgers though.

It’s why it’s important to wear close toed shoes in the kitchen

Cooking has become a very weird thing - people both overrate its difficulty and complexity to the point of phobia..and also consume content of people cooking without ever doing it themselves. So many cooking tik tok etcs are so obviously not good food to make compared to normal stuff.

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.

> Cooking has become a very weird thing - people both overrate its difficulty and complexity to the point of phobia

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.

I think the language analogy is apt. Your statement that "cooking isn't that hard!" is similar to someone who speaks English fluently saying English isn't that hard. I fully defend OP's problem statement with the iceberg analogy.

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.

This is almost poetic, thank you. As someone who has a very weird and perhaps phobic relationship with cooking, you made it seem more approachable with a few words.

Thank you for the kind words, and I hope you do approach it! My wife and I recently started cooking together all the time and it's become one of our favorite hobbies. Spending a couple hours building a meal as a team after work is great fun.

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!

Thanks! I did check out her channel and a few videos and this is pretty good and right at my level (i.e. where she assumes the viewer knows things, I know them). I think I'll try one tonight :D

Apologies if the wok explanation came across as insensitive or racist.

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.

It's not racist, but I would consider it an invalid assumption. You should ask what people have available from a tools and ingredients perspective. Take for instance everyone I know owns a wok, I have two.

> we believed that this statement was true enough for North American beginners looking to learn how to make scrambled eggs

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'.

It's not racist. It's just untrue. While the wok is indeed uncommon in NA, as compared with skillets, there's nothing unwieldy about it, in terms of scrambling an egg. You can scramble eggs in a wok in exactly the way as you would a skillet.

I think it'd be a good move to avoid assuming too much about what equipment someone might have. A wok isn't too far out of what even an absolute beginner may have, maybe they got it with some other cookware or as a gift. As others have said here, the writing does come off as kinda condescending. Granted, I'm a somewhat experienced home cook and I haven't tried the app yet, but if I'm learning something, the last thing I want to do is have a tutorial app sound condescending, even if that's not the intention.

Not a racist comment.

How did we get to a point where somebody with an English sounding name is teaching lessons on racism against Asians to an Asian?

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.

>English sounding name is teaching lessons on racism

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.

lol, I read your comment and was like "pfft look at this smug UK-er thinking his best-eggs-in-the-world mean the app sucks" and then the first question I got was ridiculous and suggested I should always buy the cheapest eggs haha. You were absolutely right.

It's not that our eggs are better. It's that there are a lot of food standards here, and eggs have markings and logos printed on them to tell you which standards they follow. And the egg boxes have even more markings and logos printed on them.

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.

Pretty much same experience, I also chose the 3rd level in the beginning, and some of the questions I got are just tedious. I did learn something new, but I feel like overall the questions are not tailored to the level.

They're definitely not tailored to the level. We only have beginner and intermediate content on the app right now. I mean, this is supposed to be a Show HN right? Don't shoot! :)

It sounds like you're a pretty experienced chef and we're targeting beginners (that experience question was more to get a sense of who our users are).

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'm curious if you've actually interviewed users who can't identify a friend vs scrambled egg and how much of this demographic exists. That example seems like something you'd learn from simply ordering breakfast a couple of times.

Or by learning the meaning of the word "scrambled".

Apparently my phone chose "friend" rather than "fried" but hopefully that was pretty clear.

>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 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.

100% agree about this not working unless it’s culture and country specific. It’s also not very interesting to me if i can’t go in and say i want to learn how to cook Venezuelan cuisine today.

Basic cooking skills are easy enough to find on youtube.

"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.

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