Why Cooking Chart exists

Cooking Chart starts from something that caught my attention while cooking: a recipe is a directed graph. Each step turns some inputs into a result, some steps can run in parallel while others wait for something to be ready, and everything ends up flowing into the plate. Even so, recipes are still written as free-text lists, with no structure that allows analyzing them or drawing them in a common way. I had been working with graphs in other contexts for a while, such as the conditional flows of telephone surveys (CATI), and using tools like PlantUML or Mermaid, where a diagram is written as text and always rendered the same way. Cooking Chart is my attempt to bring that approach to cooking, with three pieces:

• a text language (CCL) to declare ingredients, processes and dependencies;
• a scheduler that works out times, parallelism and the critical path, with optional resources such as cooks or burners;
• a visual notation that draws the result with no manual work.

I publish it as an open standard, hoping it is useful to people who write recipes and to anyone who wants to build something on top of it.

David Clothier