Guides

The Cooking for Engineers recipe format

Chu's layout as a system: the four rules, a template to copy, and how to make your own.

Recipes as Gantt charts

The comparison everyone reaches for, taken seriously — where it fits and where it breaks.

A recipe table template you can copy

The grid, the rules that fill it, and a worked example to copy.

How to read a recipe table

Rows, merging columns, and why the shape of the table is the recipe.

How to digitize a cookbook recipe

From a photo of the page to a table you can cook from — and how to shoot it.

How to scale a recipe

What actually scales when you double a recipe — and the four numbers that don't.

How to get the recipe without the story

Why the life story is there, whose fault it isn't, and four ways past it.

How to format a recipe as a table

Build one by hand — ingredients as rows, steps as merged cells, one rule.

Recipe summary tables

Michael Chu's 2004 format, its real name, and where to find the originals.

Tabular recipes

What the term means, what doesn't count as one, and where it came from.

How to organize your recipes

Why bookmarks and screenshots fail, and what the people who solved it did instead.

Cups to grams

Four different cups, the 25% flour problem, and a conversion table worth trusting.

How to halve a recipe

Half an egg, the odd fractions worked out, and what not to halve.