>I think it would be a miracle if any product could teach you how to cook and get you food in 5 minutes.
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 really do think a lot of recipes are unnecessarily onerous in some way
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.
>> It helps me to avoid recipes and instead come up with ideas based on my tastes and the things I have available.
I've been trying to learn how to cook ever since I moved roughly 3 months ago. My early attempts at replicating others' recipes had paid off decently so I attempted the hack-stuff-together approach on a couple of occasions. It did _not_ go well. :-/
I ended up with a ton of wasted ingredients not to mention the significant amount to time spent in prepping and later, cleaning up.
That said, I agree that (with a bit of experience) this approach to cooking is a lot more fun. As a comment elsewhere on the page says, cooking for yourself could sometimes be a pain (especially after you get home from work) and thinking of it as a side project really helps.
> Not everybody has 5 hours a day or a stay-at-home wife to cook their Whole Foods organic produce into a masterpiece of nutrition.
I'm guessing from this that you've never cooked in your life?
(Hint: Pretty much nobody cooks five hours a day unless it is their job. I mostly cook for myself, and I don't think I've ever really spent more than 30 minutes of active work on it).
Things like this make me wish I had a more rural lifestyle and had the space for stuff like this. Cooking is great and all, you can do an awful lot with just tools you can store in a kitchen. But experimenting with ingredients, and man, tools is a whole 'nother level.
YouTube channels like Alex French Guy Cooking where he makes his own mozzarella, worked with other YouTube makers to create the best pasta roller ever made, a massive, amazing meat tenderizing mallet, and just the YouTube makers in general almost have me wanting to rent my one bedroom condo out so I can go live out in the sticks and buy cheap tools like a small 5# process cheese cooker, tear off my shirt and Hulk-transform into a mad scientist.
>you could have GPT vision interpret it and offer you recipes or what is missing
What is missing and what I should buy are different things. If my fridge has yogurt, bacon and some hamburgers, you might say "well, you are missing eggs". Except maybe I don't want eggs. I may be even allergic. Or maybe I like eggs but I'm in some low-protein diet for whatever reason.
The goal of a fridge is not to have literally everything, is to store everything you think you need for some days.
As for recipes, yes, that's more creative, but I guess I would just actively Google that (or even use an old fashioned recipe book!) if I were looking for original recipes. Of course, you can also ChatGPT it, but the direct fridge -> ChatGPT interaction is a bit weird because maybe I don't want original recipes or maybe I'm going to eat out.
So a hypothetical (?) app that sends me notifications about what recipes ChatGPT suggests by looking at my fridge wouldn't be very appealing unless you're always looking for new recipes. If you're mostly cooking ordinary things, continuous "You could cook X" would count as spam, much like a lot of people skip (or try to skip) ads on Youtube and ignore random "buy this at 70% discount" emails. And if you're that passionate about new recipes I guess you're probably interested in cooking and don't need the fridge to tell you what's missing.
> Appealing to people who "want to cook", but doing so by turning yourself into a production-line assembler.
That's because you ignore the true reason why it's interesting. I got 800 games on Steam but when goes time to play, god it's awful. Never had this issue before having that many games. Recipes suffer from the choice overload.
Personally I also love it to try new ingredients. When it's part of a full meal, some ingredients "scare" me less.
> Like saying your want to learn carpentry, by buying some Ikea flat-pack.
No holes were predrilled in the yu choy I got in my recipes yesterday. It would be closer to get a few boards that you have to cut/trim/drill yourself, which as far as I know, seems to be a great way to learn.
> I'd quite enjoy one that let you browse recipes and would stick all the ingredients in your basket - but then added some intelligence.
It's weird but I don't trust my supermarket to offer me great recipes. I trust them to offer me food, but not great recipes. Even more so considering their goals is to sell food, not sell recipes.
> Or asks "what's in your fridge"
I agree but this always come down to the laziness out of me. Lazy me can easily click on an image that seems like a great meal, but way less on a adding every single things I may have in my fridge.
> Blue Apron and the rest seem to be trying to solve a real problem, completely the wrong way.
I personally think you just don't really understands whats the real problem.
> Maybe they make new recipes on a regular basis, so they're doing it once per recipe but still fairly often.
Then memorize the conversions. It’s not that hard. Or you know, plan ahead and convert before cooking. Or simply just own up to the fact that the only reason an Alexa is a “insane QOL improvement” for this use case is SOLELY because you’ve rationalized it as such. This horse is now more than sufficiently beaten, so I’m backing away.
> they already have most of these ingredients sitting in their fridge
That's exactly the issue - I don't have ingredients sitting in my fridge. I don't conveniently live near a large supermarket. I don't own a car. I cook mostly for myself, and very occasionally a few friends. When I come home from work late, the last thing I want to think about is spending almost an hour going to the store, browsing and buying stuff, coming back.
To do that, first I also have to decide what exactly to cook, which is a big enough ordeal. I don't want to cook something fancy, because that means I have to get many ingredients that I'll half-use and never touch again until they go bad. Usually the simple stuff is OK but gets repetitive after a while, and leftover ingredients are still a problem.
Meal delivery fixes all that - healthy, fresh and tasty meals by default, no thought or effort required.
I guess if there was an app that decided on a meal schedule and pre-filled an instacart order, I'd do that, but again it's hard to optimize leftover ingredients and costs per meal.
Rant: the solution is to learn how to read a recipe and cook without a paint by numbers erector set that has an unreasonable packaging:food ratio.
I’m fine with these services as a ‘gateway drug’ to independently cooking for yourself, but they’re insane as a long term thing.
(Not to mention that I have no idea how they stay viable in the long term, given their customer acquisition costs. If anyone makes it work in the long term it will be Amazon/Whole Foods.)
> I wish it was possible to buy decent home cooked food for a reasonable fee :(
I mean that’s pretty much what supermarkets sell right? Ready meals that can be heated, which are effectively cooked the same way as at the home but just on an industrial scale. Or pasta that’s pre-made and pre-filled and you just have to heat and add some sauce that’s already pre-made.
Im in the UK where we have services like Cook that are good quality meals you can heat up.
>> So best case scenario net one hour a day every day to eat high quality home cooked meals. That’s 6% of your waking life that’s not available for work, exercise, dating, playing with your kids, calling your parents, reading a book, etc, etc, etc.
For me cooking (generally, making stuff to eat) is a hobby. I don't have kids but that just makes it a little less enjoyable because I don't have a large family to share my cooking with. Otherwise I'm happy for the chance to get away from a screen and have some me-time doing something that satisfies my senses (I especially like adding each spice separately to the pan and taking a biig sniff as it cooks - I'm a food hedonist). In any case I really don't experience it as wasted time. If I'm tired from work or I'm late at home, I just cook something simple or make sure I have left overs.
And it doesn't need to be a hobby. Any way you see it, cooking a good meal is just a great way to care about yourself and your loved ones and make them happy. Uber Eats can't do that.
As a non-cook myself, I can fry some eggs in 3 minutes or so, and a steak a bit longer. Sometimes I'll dump a bowl of frozen veggies into a bowl, put a pat of butter on top, microwave for a couple minutes, and it's ready to eat. A can of beans takes a couple minutes.
The idea that to eat decent food requires much prep time in the kitchen isn't true.
> Of course this requires that you learn to cook, and have the time to do it.
True, although personally I think cooking is one of life's greatest joys! Making things from scratch that taste good and make people (i.e. your family) happy is worth the time, imo, and I try to do a couple good meals a week :)
> I can make a rare steak with sea salt and a big fresh spinach+tomato+olive oil+vinegar salad in 3 minutes
Not really. You spend additional time shopping for it, taking a break from other things, cleaning after, washing up, etc. That was one of the points of creating the product in the first place - dealing with food every day is boring for some people, so let's try to eliminate it.
> It takes out the entire creativity process of cooking, and for people who actually like cooking on a higher level also the process of selecting the right ingredients.
Did you ever try one of these services? Because that's the opposite of our experience. My wife is the cook in our family, and she loved it. She learned by example...seeing the quantities, getting an understanding of how to handle ingredients, practicing different cooking techniques, different variations, different flavors, etc., etc., etc...
Not only that, but we didn't get every meal from the service...she used what she learned to really branch out and make all kinds of things she never would have attempted in the past.
We always knew we were paying a premium for the convenience and variety, but it's a trade-off a lot of busy families are willing to make. It allowed us to prepare something at home instead of getting fast food or going to a restaurant, which would have been even more expensive.
>> I'd argue that one area of invention that has continued is essentially outsourcing home tasks in areas like food prep rather than creating new appliances to do them in the house.
Actually if you do it right, it can take around 2-2.5 hours each week to freeze meals for the whole week
On the other hand, while there are some tasty ,high quality frozen foods(like the french chain Picard) , they're more expensive , so people still make their own.
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.
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