Kombucha and Tabular Recipe Notation

Tabular Recipe Notation

Before getting to Kombucha I want to describe my favorite recipe design: tabular recipe notation or TRN. TRN is from Cooking for Engineers and is a layout of a recipe in HTML that, in my opinion, makes the recipe incredibly easy to follow.

You can imagine that there’s a directed acyclic graph underlying the recipe, and that HTML table is derived from it. At some point I’d love to write a converter from YAML directions, or something of the like, into a tabular recipe notation HTML table. I have a basic version that works on very simple recipes, but it doesn’t work on anything complex.

Kombucha TRN

Here’s my current Kombucha TRN recipe, largely informed by Sandor Katz’s The Art of Fermentation.

You can see that even this isn’t quite right, as there’s the dotted line that shouldn’t be there. I’ll figure it out, but this little card is more than useable when I’m clicking whipping up kombucha.

All credit for Tabular Recipe Notation goes to Michael Chu.

Kombucha as a Sankey

Here’s an alternative, experimental version as a Sankey diagram that I thought might be interesting.

It’s missing the visual succinctness of the table approach. There’s a lot of unused space and pixels and the relationships between the tiers doesn’t reflect the steps adequately.

Raw Data

This is the Kombucha Recipe acyclic graph as a JSON object for experimentation:

{
  "nodes": [
    { "node": 0, "name": "1 C hot water" },
    { "node": 1, "name": "2 tea bags" },
    { "node": 2, "name": "1/3 C Sugar" },
    { "node": 3, "name": "2 C room temp water" },
    { "node": 4, "name": "SCOBY and starter" },
    { "node": 5, "name": "Brew tea concentrate" },
    { "node": 6, "name": "Dissolve in sugar" },
    { "node": 7, "name": "Incorporate it all together" }
  ],
  "links": [
    { "source": 0, "target": 5, "value": 2 },
    { "source": 1, "target": 5, "value": 2 },
    { "source": 2, "target": 6, "value": 2 },
    { "source": 5, "target": 6, "value": 2 },
    { "source": 3, "target": 7, "value": 2 },
    { "source": 4, "target": 7, "value": 2 },
    { "source": 6, "target": 7, "value": 2 }
  ]
}