Professional Photo

[snousle]

It took all morning, but I got one that is at least acceptable:



"Excessively squinty" is the smallest problem I could come up with out of 150+ shots. Better luck tomorrow? I hope to have a non-embarrassing web page by then. It's so much more difficult than I had expected.

Comments

Great Pic & request for assistance

[chef2b.livejournal.com]

Greetings,

I'm Sky's partner and he's raved about your cooking and programming skills.

Riddle me this Batman.

I don't think that there's a program out there that already does this. I need a better way to maintain my recipes. I'm a baker/pastry guy. Some are in Imperial weight, some metric weight, and some in volume. Ideally, I'd be able to have all three and a quick conversion from one to another. This would entail utilizing the book of yields for those items that are used for regular baking.

I also want to be able to list baker's percentages.

FYI Baker's percentage expresses the ingredients in a recipe as a percentage of the total amount of flour in the recipe by weight or if their is no flour by the primary ingredient (again determined by weight)].

I'm moving into a more experimental phase of baking and want to be able to tweak recipes to make them my own. Baker's percentages would be extremely helpful.

Do you know of anything already out there? Is this something simple to create or a horrid pain in the ass (as opposed to a delightful pain in the ass)?

Thanks.

Re: Great Pic & request for assistance

[snousle.livejournal.com]

Hm, well, there are several issues here. If you had all the relevant numbers and conversion factors for your recipes in a uniform format (say, a spreadsheet with consistent meanings for each column) it is not terribly hard to use a database such as Access to do a mass conversion to consistent units. I could potentially help with that.

Getting to that uniform format can be a real pain, though. And I'm not sure I would trust the book of yields to give you the right conversion factors for your particular kind of flour, eggs, etc.

Personally, I keep things in a database of my own design, where EVERYTHING is measured in grams. If I use a recipe that is volumetric, I weigh it as I cook it and record it in gram weight. I started with recipes that are intended to be constant and are merely added to each event, but now I am moving to a representation where recipes are copied from event to event and potentially tweaked each time.

Also, because my portion sizes vary a lot from one event to another, I now record the recipes at the scale at which they were tested, so I know when to watch out for scaling issues. Eventually I want to be able to get the right total amount by summarizing the nutritional data (carbs, fat, protein) for the whole meal as a fraction of RDA rather than guessing at things.

But it's not like my own system is anywhere near where I want it to be yet. It's not in any way easy!