Alton Brown, host of the Food Network’s cooking show Good Eats, came up with the best chocolate chip cookies ever. However, to achieve chewy nirvana, you have to slog through a recipe whose failure to even make an attempt at user empathy or to follow common sense is almost impressive.
The first problem is common to almost every recipe I’ve ever seen, at least in the US: it lists the quantity before the ingredient name. This makes absolutely no sense to me: whether you’re looking at the list to see what ingredient you need next, or you’re already holding it and need to know how much to measure out, the ingredient name is what you’re going to be looking for. Putting the quantity first is effectively indexing key/value pairs by value rather than key, which makes searching the list much slower and more annoying. It makes about as much sense as indexing a dictionary by definition or the phone book by phone number. Additionally, the keys and values aren’t separated into columns, so the text of each ingredient name starts at a different place, slowing things down even more.
Yes, quantity first is the standard format in America, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one. We also use an arcane and convoluted system of measurement instead of the elegantly simple metric system, and we measure our dry ingredients by volume instead of weight. Lots of people also run Windows and like Paris Hilton. Go figure.
Here’s the recipe with its formatting intact (and here it is in its original context on FoodNetwork.com):
2 sticks unsalted butter
2 1/4 cups bread flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/4 cups brown sugar
1 egg
1 egg yolk
2 tablespoons milk
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
Hardware:
Ice cream scooper (#20 disher, to be exact)
Parchment paper
Baking sheets
MixerHeat oven to 375 degrees F.
Melt the butter in a heavy-bottom medium saucepan over low heat. Sift together the flour, salt, and baking soda and set aside.
Pour the melted butter in the mixer’s work bowl. Add the sugar and brown sugar. Cream the butter and sugars on medium speed. Add the egg, yolk, 2 tablespoons milk and vanilla extract and mix until well combined. Slowly incorporate the flour mixture until thoroughly combined. Stir in the chocolate chips.
Chill the dough, then scoop onto parchment-lined baking sheets, 6 cookies per sheet. Bake for 14 minutes or until golden brown, checking the cookies after 5 minutes. Rotate the baking sheet for even browning. Cool completely and store in an airtight container.
The real problems specific to this recipe start with the ingredient list: a list of instructions to do something is assumed to be in sequence. But when you read them, you soon realize that the ingredients are out of order. The first three things you need are butter, sugar, and brown sugar. But the dry ingredients—the things you need second to last—are listed between them. The directions do tell you to measure that stuff out while the butter is melting, but it seems like a big assumption, and an arbitrary optimization that should be left to the cook. Some people like to measure everything out before they start assembling anything at all. Others like to measure as they go… and what if they use a microwave to melt the butter, or are in a hurry and do it on a stove, but on high heat instead of low? It’ll melt faster, and they’ll have the dry ingredients ready—which they won’t need yet—and won’t have the sugars, which they will.
The Hardware section is blended into the ingredients. A heading, or at least a line break, would be helpful here.
Speaking of the Hardware section, it asks for an ice cream scooper. Since they vary considerably in size, more info is required. And they give it to you: you need a #20 disher, to be exact. Great! But what if I don’t have one? WTF does that actually mean in terms of what I can measure with standard home kitchen equipment? I grew up in a commercial restaurant kitchen, went to cooking school for desserts, and was a pastry chef for a while, and I don’t know, so how can a home cook be expected to? This is kind of like posting a speed limit in cubits rather than miles or kilometers per hour: a precise quantity has technically been specified, but it’s useless because it’s not in a unit that the user is likely to understand or be able to measure.
Listing something so specific and the use of the word “exact” suggest that the size of the dough balls is important (and it is). So just tell me. Don’t make me search the web to find out that a #20 disher is 1.6 ounces by volume, or 1/20th of a quart. Don’t make me dig further for a conversion utility to give me the info I actually need, which is that if I don’t have a #20 disher, I should spoon out the dough in 3.2 tablespoon (or 51.2 ml) sized pieces.
A “stick” of butter in America is pretty clear, but it might not be in rest of the world (and your audience on the web is the whole world). Granted, it’s an American show with an America audience trying to draw American viewers for American advertising dollars, but it could be unambiguously written as 1/2 pound.
When you’re talking about baking with butter and sugar, the verb “cream” has a very specific meaning: beat butter and sugar together until it becomes paler and fluffy. This only works with butter in its solid state, and the instructions tell you to cream melted butter with sugar and brown sugar, which is physically impossible.
The first time I made these cookies, I stood there staring at the mixer while the ingredients didn’t really come together, wondering what was supposed to happen. When I stopped the mixer, they started to separate, and looked nothing like what creamed butter and sugar are supposed to look like. Knowing that the lecithin in egg yolks is a powerful emulsifier, I tossed them in, and it came out fine. While that’s not common knowledge for a home cook, the results of “creaming” are. Looking at an outcome so different from what I was told to expect, I might have given up and/or formed an unfavorable opinion about the recipe’s author and his cooking show (which, for the record, I think is generally excellent) had I not known about the eggs.
That brings me to a side-point: this seems obvious, but bad information (and user interface & industrial) design is not only against the user’s best interest, it’s against the supplier’s. Assuming that the ultimate goal of the show and the network is to make money, and that the point of putting recipes from the show online is to keep people interested and watching to provide eyeballs for advertisers, frustrating your viewers and getting them pissed off at your brand(s) with confusing information are counter-productive.
When the instructions list ingredients to combine, they do so by ingredient name. It’s understood that this means to add the entire quantity of the ingredient, and is in my opinion a sound convention: it doesn’t unnecessarily repeat the quantities, which makes for easy parsing and reduces the potential for transcription errors. Normally, quantities are only listed when you need to use the same ingredient in more than one place (i.e. mix two eggs in here and another there). This recipe follows that practice, except in the case of the milk. It says, “Add the egg, yolk, 2 tablespoons milk and vanilla extract…”, which falsely implies that the indicated quantity is a fraction of the total. This is inconsistent with both general and its own standards, and is unnecessarily confusing.
Lastly, the individual instruction steps are clearly written and in order (save the “cream” thing), but are grouped somewhat randomly. For example, step 2, “Melt the butter in a heavy-bottom medium saucepan over low heat. Sift together the flour, salt, and baking soda and set aside.”, are two unrelated things and should be separated. Lumping them together falsely implies a connection, which can be confusing.
It’s easy enough to complain. What would I do to fix it? I’d re-write and re-format it as follows:
Ingredients
| unsalted butter | ½ | pound |
| sugar | ¼ | cup |
| brown sugar | 1 ¼ | cups |
| egg | 1 | |
| egg yolk | 1 | |
| milk | 2 | tablespoons |
| vanilla extract | 1 ½ | teaspoons |
| bread flour | 2 ¼ | cups |
| kosher salt | 1 | teaspoon |
| baking soda | 1 | teaspoon |
| semisweet chocolate chips | 2 | cups |
Special Equipment
Ice cream scooper (#20 disher), optional
Parchment paper
Baking sheets
Mixer
Instructions
- Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees F.
- Sift together the flour, salt, and baking soda and set aside.
- Melt the butter in a heavy-bottom medium saucepan over low heat.
- Pour the melted butter in the mixer’s work bowl. Add the sugar and brown sugar and mix on medium speed until combined. Butter and sugars will separate when mixer stops, this is normal.
- Add the egg, yolk, milk, and vanilla extract and mix until well combined.
- Slowly mix in the flour, salt, and baking soda mixture until thoroughly combined.
- Remove bowl from mixer and stir in the chocolate chips with a large spoon.
- Refrigerate the dough for at least (?) minutes.
- Scoop chilled dough onto parchment-lined baking sheets, 6 cookies per sheet. If using a #20 disher, fill the bowl of the scoop and scrape off any excess dough. Otherwise, form dough into 3.2 tablespoon-sized balls.
- Bake for 14 minutes or until golden brown, checking the cookies after 5 minutes. Rotate the baking sheet for even browning.
- Cool completely and store in an airtight container.
Visual changes: ingredient names and quantities were aligned into columns, the sections were separated into clearly labeled groups, and the instruction steps were numbered for easier scanning.
Text-wise, the ingredients were put in order of use and indexed by name rather than quantity. “Hardware” was renamed “Special Equipment”, because it doesn’t list the normal hardware requirements like measuring cups and spoons, bowls, a sieve, a mixing spoon, and an oven. The ambiguous “2 sticks” butter measurement has been fully defined. The “cream” directive was changed to something that can actually be done, and since the results of the instruction look unusual, an explanation of what to expect was added. Instructions were separated into discrete steps. The extraneous milk quantity was removed and an equivalent measure for the #20 disher was added. The chocolate chip step was expanded upon, but based on a possibly incorrect assumption: the original text switched from “mix” (implying the continued use of the mixer) to “stir”, which implies a different process (to me, mixing by hand).
Hopefully, we’ve ended up with a recipe that’s much easier to visually parse, is easier to follow, doesn’t tell the user to do the impossible, and—here’s the “value proposition”—gives the user what they want, which is clear information that’s easy to use, instead of pissing them off and making an enemy.
Now that the logical stuff is done, I think it’s important in general to take another step back and look at the possible underlying user goals, and what they mean for information providers. In this case, yes, the immediate goal is to make cookies like the ones the saw on the show. But what’s behind the desire to do that? In my experience, people rarely bake cookies, particularly from scratch, solely for their own enjoyment. They do it to do something nice for or to impress others, or to fulfill an obligation. Certainly nobody bakes cookies because they have to, because as much as I’d like to argue otherwise, they’re not actually a required food for survival. That means that people are baking them because they want to: they’re looking for gratitude, approval, or participation in a social protocol. The common denominator for these things, whether in the context of a romantic relationship or a funeral, seems to be that reputation is at stake: the cookie isn’t just a nutrient pellet for sustenance, it can also act as a proxy for the baker’s forethought, consideration, and care—or lack thereof. These are things in which the user is likely to be emotionally invested with, um, a capital EMOTIONALLY INVESTED. If you make it easy for them, they’re more likely to make a damn good cookie, and enjoy doing it, you’ll have their gratitude for helping them please who they want to please. This will probably make them more likely to come to your various media outlets and deliver more advertising revenue, because you helped make them look good. On the other hand, if you frustrate them, or confuse them to the point where they’re more likely to screw up, you can get associated with a tempest of issues that have nothing to do with you and earn their ire forever. In my opinion, this is well worth thinking about, both when designing, and considering the potential costs of not designing.