I love cooking, yet hate eating leftovers. In a game of rock-paper-scissors, cereal beats leftovers every time. This often leads to an annoying step of scaling a recipe down, usually to serve 2 people, before shopping, organizing, and cooking. I wish online recipes would be posted in a manner that best fits the known profile of a given user.
A device's screen-size can be used to determine the best presentation for an app or website when launched from my phone. I want to see sites like Serious Eats take similar steps to best render their content aka recipes. With a login, I should be able to set the default number of servings I want to make with any given recipe.
We need this kind of foresight in recipe distribution as well.
When I request a recipe, I want the page to see my session cookie, read my servings preference, and serve me the recipe instructions scaled to my liking. While ingredients by weight or volume should be easy to scale, things like eggs or vanilla beans will need to be handled more delicately. A recipe designed to serve 3 that requires 1 egg will need the egg's contents converted to weight, then proportioned. Different regions have different average chicken egg sizes, so knowing where the recipe came from and where you are currently browsing would also be helpful in a more accurate scaling-down. Buying a dozen eggs, whisking them together and storing in a jar in the fridge seems like the biggest friction point to liberate recipe sizes.
Serious Eats allows you to alter how a recipe is presented with images, but not its yield.
With support for scaling, a recipe website should also support easy ways for users to provide feedback on their scaled recipe attempt and ways they felt it needed to be modified. Things like cooking-time for a pot roast can depend significantly on a minimum surface to volume ratio that just may not work in smaller portions. Frontier recipe testers could encounter this and report back with warning or appraisals for particular recipes at particular serving sizes.
I may not have enough friends for this recipe as is
I have to make 12 cinnamon rolls in order to get the 2 I actually want to eat. Maybe we can fix that.