Cooking for Engineers is a food site started in 2004 by Michael Chu, an engineer
who wrote recipes the way he read schematics. Its signature — and the reason it is being
searched for again two decades later — is the tabular recipe: a single
table in which ingredients run down the left edge and every cooking step is a merged cell
to the right. Nothing else on the internet looked like it, and nothing else since has
explained a recipe so quickly.
GridRecipe is an independent project inspired by the format. We are not affiliated with
Cooking for Engineers or Michael Chu; this page exists to credit the original and explain
it properly.
What the tabular recipe looks like
Here is a brownie recipe in the format, redrawn in GridRecipe's renderer (the original
tables were hand-coded HTML):
How to read one
- Left column: ingredients with amounts, top to bottom in the order they are used.
- Move right: the first cell an ingredient touches is what happens to it. Butter meets "melt"; flour runs all the way to "fold in".
- Tall cells combine: a cell spanning several rows merges everything to its left — including the results of earlier steps.
- The rightmost cell spans every row. That is the final step: bake, simmer, chill, serve.
- Full-width rows on top are setup you do once: preheat the oven, grease the pan.
Why engineers, and why a table
A recipe is a dependency graph: things combine into intermediate results, which combine
again, until one thing comes out of the oven. Prose forces that graph into a line of text,
so you rebuild it in your head every time you cook. Chu's insight was that the graph is
small enough to draw — as a table, because HTML in 2004 could merge table cells and little
else. The table shows grouping (wet vs dry is literally its shape), order (left to right),
and parallel work (two cells in the same column happen at the same time) without a single
sentence.
The site also became known for methodical equipment tests and for explaining the
why behind techniques — but it is the table that people remember and copy.
The 2026 revival
In the summer of 2026 a photo of a brownie recipe in this format went viral on social
media — millions of views and thousands of replies asking why every recipe is not written
this way. Searches for "grid recipe", "recipe grid format" and "Michael Chu recipe format"
appeared overnight. The original site, running on twenty-year-old infrastructure, struggled
under the traffic; the
Internet Archive copy
is the reliable way to read the originals today.
Where the format falls short — and what we changed
The original tables were built by hand in HTML, which is why almost nobody else adopted
them: they are tedious to write and impossible to edit on a phone. GridRecipe exists to
remove that cost. You describe the recipe as a tree — ingredients and the steps that
combine them — and the table draws itself, correctly, every time. It prints, it exports as
an image for sharing, and it renders as an accessible HTML table rather than a screenshot.
We also added what a 2004 website could not: point a phone camera at a handwritten recipe
card, a cookbook page, or a screenshot, and get the tabular version back in seconds. Paste
a link to a recipe page and the same thing happens to the recipe buried under the story.
Make your own tabular recipe
Convert a recipe you already have
(the first one is free, no account), build
one from scratch in the free builder, or
print a blank template and
fill it in by hand. For the longer history of the format, read
about the grid recipe, or
browse recipes already in the format.