Designing Cooking for millenials

Before, I talked about how cooking is not designed for millenials.

1. Cooking for one every night is inefficient.
2. Recipes assume you have ingredients and equipment. They also aren’t visual.
3. Cooking education relies on recipes and not techniques.

What’s the answer?

 

Cooking for one

Cooking every night takes up a lot of time and effort. If you cook every night, it’ll take about 1 hour each night. The answer is cooking many meals at once. I like to cook six on Sunday nights.

Solutions

1. Containers. I’d tried cooking larger portions before, but that didn’t work well because I didn’t have any way to store it. The key is buying containers and preassembling the meals into containers on the day you cook so that you all you need to do is heat it up when you want to eat.
2. Variety. People get sick of eating the same thing all week. That’s why I cook three different meals for the week and I only eat them for dinner. That way you can still buy lunch and get a wide variety of food.

 

Recipes are broken for millenials

Recipes are not designed with the needs of a millenial in mind. They don’t realized that millenials don’t have a full pantry, a lot of kitchen equipment or a lot of time. They are heavily text based.

Solutions

1. A simple solution would be to include more data on the recipe about the number of ingredients, dishes, cooking techniques used and type of equipment it needs.
2. We can also communicate recipes in pictures or videos instead.
3. Recipes should be organized to maximize the amount of reusable pieces. For example, recipes that share a common set of ingredient or techniques should be grouped together.
4. Recipes should be designed in a modular way to show what parts can be substituted.

 

Cooking education relies on recipes and not techniques

Cooking is something passed down from parents to children, but more and more, parents are not cooking, so where will children learn to cook?

People cook now by looking on Google for recipes. This leads to learning to cook by trying many different recipes. This is a very ineffective way to learn.

What are recipes?

They’re a written way to communicate instructions for making something.

The problem is that each recipe only tries to recreate a special case not communicate how the ingredients were chosen and their purpose in the dish.

Following a recipe for roast pork is like learning for the first time that 3 x 5 = 15. Sure, next time you’re asked what 3 x 5 is, you’ll know it’s 15, but you didn’t learn how to multiply. If I asked you what 4 x 6 is, you won’t have a clue. In the same way, you haven’t learned how to cook meat by learning a recipe, just the answer to a specific problem.

Solution

The answer is teaching methods and using recipes as examples of methods.

The whole point of cooking education should be to teach the 20% of techniques that make up 80% of recipes so that people can reap the benefits of cooking and start experimenting with ingredients on their own.

How does that work? Next, I’ll show the cooking curriculum I’d use to teach cooking.