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- Hacker News
- I would love to see the gluten and dairy free pancake recipe incorporated into this one for additional customizability. For example, what if I’m gluten free but not dairy free? Or happen to only have soy milk on the day but I’ve got plenty of butter?
- Protip: you don't need buttermilk, you need milk and acid. 1 cup milk and 1tbsp vinegar do the same job and are already in your kitchen.
Source: Frank Proto's pancakes
- For sure - if you check "milk" and "lemon" and select maximum tang, you'll get nice tangy pancakes. I opted away from vinegar due to taste but would be curious to hear if someone tests vinegar vs lemon!by bkazez
- Sometimes. Note that both your ingredients are liquids, however.
I use buttermilk powder for quite a few recipes so that I can control the liquid content independently of the acid and fat content.
by bsder - This works with dairy-free milk too. My daughter has a dairy allergy and figuring out we could turn pea milk into pea buttermilk with a tbsp of white vinegar upped her pancake experience significantly.by jebarker
- You've covered dairy and acid ingredients, but I honestly have no idea what "Unrendered Berkshire pork fat" is or where I would get it. Is that bacon grease? Saltpork? Lard is common but rendered.by saxonww
- Probably suet, which is raw and found around kidneys and loins.by NopIdoN
- For us vegetarians/vegans, butter (preferably clarified) or coconut oil.by telesilla
- Thanks! It's entire chunks of fat from a Berkshire pig. Lard works too and is what you get when you render pork fat, but the rendering removes some flavor. I'll update the recipe.by bkazez
- Yes! The world needs more Parametric-driven recipes. This is fantastic. Love it.by sastra
- I saw here on HN maybe a couple of months ago a post where someone had basically created a "color space" for breakfast foods... oh sweet, I found it:
The Hunt for Dark Breakfast
https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/the-hunt-for-dark-...
by m3047 - Awesome work. I'm really interested in the parametric-driven recipe card. I wanted to do something like this for bread recipes where you can tweak the hydration / salt levels to alter the recipe but still get a traditional recipe card. I would be really curious to hear about the approach in more detail.by chrysoprace
- Thanks a lot! Good idea re bread - can you link me to your favorite more general recipes that show all the extremes/variables? I've skimmed some bread textbooks re enriched doughs and have made some Italian breads with sourdough starters, enriched doughs like challah, and once tried the NYT Dutch oven bread, but I don't make bread as often as I make pancakes.by bkazez
- There's a whole lot of "I" in this post for something you didn't do. Why are you taking credit for Claude's work? What makes you feel entitled to say "I did this thing" when Claude did the thing?
- Claude is a tool in the hands of the person using it. If you built a cabinet using power tools would you say the drill and saw built the cabinet? Or that you did?
I find it irritating when people send me a code review and say that Claude wrote the code. No, you wrote the code, you are responsible for the code. You can't blame Claude if it's crap and you don't have to credit Claude if it's genius. Claude is not a person.
- I want to like this but it reads like Claude output, how much scrutiny did this get for accuracy?by hedgehog
- We’re using vastly different models, then, because it doesn’t read like any generated text I’ve seen before.by kstrauser
- > it reads like Claude output
Yep. From the site's about page:
> This site is produced with substantial help from large language models: they assist with the literature search, the drafting, and the arithmetic.
https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/about/
> how much scrutiny did this get for accuracy?
The inclusion of references without hyperlinks suggests it wasn't thoroughly checked: they were probably put there by Claude, and as they aren't links the author probably hasn't read them (they could possibly have read them in hard-copy at a library, but given the rate at which articles were produced this seems very unlikely).
(One such reference is 17 - "Weijers, M. et al. “Heat-induced denaturation and aggregation of ovalbumin at neutral pH described by irreversible first-order kinetics.” Protein Science 12(12): 2693–2703, 2003")
by jamessb - This was my immediate thought too. The same website has at least a dozen similar articles written over the past week, all with this same AI tone.
In the same week:
https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/grilled-meats/ http://absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/brisket/ https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/french-fries/ https://www.absurdlyoptimized.com/recipes/miso-salmon/
Parametric recipes are fun idea. I almost want to try them, but the sheer volume of content by one author gives me no reason to trust this will be any good.
Did the author actually try these recipes? Unless the author was cooking and writing 24/7 or just had a massive backlog of publishing, it's hard to trust anything here (although I'm sure most people will.)
by ike_a - Actually, the whole website is fire. There are articles on the same level on how to select T-shirts and pants.
This is the second time I see a reviewer online doing the thing that was common a couple decades ago: actually doing the research.
- What was the other time?by maxweylandt
- Well I have a new favorite website. I don’t know the last time that I read something that was so thoroughly and multidimensionally my shit.
Not actually measuring crispness when you self report having the perfect equipment to do so is a cruel, cruel tease though.
by sohex - Hahaha, glad you're enjoying it as much as I did! I will have to add a crispness slider and then validate it with expensive audio equipment.by bkazez
- Perhaps you could add a classic Swedish take on pancakes/crepes - whisk a moderate numbers of eggs with milk (4 eggs for every litre of milk is a good starting point, but dealers choice), flour until a nice consistency, fry in a pan until they're your chosen colour of done. Serve with strawberry jam, or any sweet condiment of your choice.
Edit: Also, what in the name of all that's holy - looking beyond the generator, this entire article is amazing. Absurd level of detail for pancakes, yes, but amazing.
- Crepes / pannekoeken are tough because they are almost always a “you know it when you see it” amount of flour and milk to get the batter right.by sailfast
- My goto is a crepe recipe from an old Betty Crocker cookbook. eggs, flour, bit of sugar, vanilla extract and butter I think. Toppings I like are home made berry compote, blueberry being my favorite along with raspberry and blackberry, and maple syrup. I've also made blintz by adding farmers cheese with compote to sweeten.by MisterTea
- Love it, thanks! I used to have a "fluffiness" slider that I could bring back to power this. I haven't researched Swedish pancakes yet but are they leavened at all?by bkazez
- A ten hour wait doesn't really strike me as a pancake? You should have a "it's 730am, there's four screaming girls, only two of which are related to me, the dogs are begging for scraps, and the demand for pancakes has crossed into Veblen goods territory."by thechao
- Man, at the rate I can generate pancakes I fear four children would murder me and just drink the batter raw. Though maybe I'd buy a second pan in advance xDby Ntrails
- If you know the kids are going to want pancakes in the morning you just prepare it at night? You can ask them to confirm over dinner...
While I can confirm sourdough pancakes are quite nice, I am satisfied with Krusteaze :)
by esafak