An Engineer’s Old Cooking Trick Is Going Viral, Divides The Internet

I used to get one of those meal delivery kits sent to my house, the kind that comes with a new recipe card every week. It ended up being a great way to learn how to cook, different techniques, little tips, methods I never would’ve picked up just winging it on my own. What none of those recipe cards ever really nailed though was the format itself, long blocks of text you had to read start to finish just to figure out when to add the eggs. Turns out someone solved that problem decades ago. Software engineer Michael Chu built a column-based recipe format built for cookingforengineers.com that lays out every ingredient and step visually, no scrolling through a life story to get to the actual instructions. When @juanbuis posted about it on X, the tweet exploded, tens of thousands of people had never seen anything like it, even though the system had existed the whole time. 1. The Tweet That Started It All via twitter 2. He Followed It Up With Another Example via twitter 3. The Original Creator Gets His Credit via twitter 4. Now There’s a Tool That Builds These For You via twitter Michael Chu, the person behind the original recipe format, talked to BuzzFeed about how the whole thing came together. He explained that it actually started with his own personal cooking notes, where he’d take a standard recipe, jot down the ingredients, and adjust portions as needed. From there, he’d sketch curly braces connecting whichever ingredients got combined together, then add a short note next to each grouping describing what step came next. That system eventually became the foundation for his site, Cooking For Engineers, where he first built it out using HTML tables. The response from the internet caught Chu completely off guard. He later described his approach as a mix of two different mindsets, the structured, problem solving instincts common in his field, paired with the more intuitive style chefs tend to rely on. According to Chu, structure and intuition aren’t really opposites at all. A well organized recipe, he said, can actually help someone build real understanding of cooking a lot faster. 5.