Syntax for suggesting alternative ingredients

[tobei]

Some ingredients can be hard to find or unsuitable for some diet (maybe two separate usecases). Having a syntax to mark an ingredient as optional or suggesting alternative ingredient that can be substitued because they have similar taste, or vegan alternative, or not so important in the recipe could be useful.

That way the original recipe could feature all the original ingredients (e.g. Tabasco), but could feature a more general alternative as Spicy Sauce if Tabasco can't be found, or for baking 10g fresh yeast could have a 5g dry yeast alternative if fresh yeast isn't available.

[dubadub]

Thanks for idea @tobei. This will be definitely good addition to the language.

[jakeanq]

I think this would be very useful - I really like recipes that can be cooked with a range of different ingredients, for example a fruit pudding recipe that can be made with blackberries, blueberries or apples.

A syntax I think could work for this is separating the ingredients with a pipe symbol in a similar way to bitwise-OR operators in many languages etc and also very similar to what has been proposed here #50 (comment) :

Add @fresh yeast{10g}|@dry yeast{5g}.

Optionally a quick shorthand could also be added - useful when the quantities etc are the same for each option:

Add @tabasco sauce|spicy sauce{} to taste.

If an empty ingredient was used, the ingredient could be marked as optional, which covers #50:

If you like it spicy, add @red chilli{3}|@{}. -- Maybe a bit clunky?
-- and/or
If you like it spicy, add @red chilli|{3}.

For completeness I would suggest the same syntax be added to utensils:

Mix with a #spoon|eggbeater|electric drill{}

In terms of shopping lists, I would suggest that the first ingredient that is found in the shopping list config file be used - this supports the use cases of dietary requirements (specify only the things you can eat in the config file) and store availability.

Stretching further, I think it could become a part of a variants system, where one recipe can be cooked in several ways. I will add a separate discussion for that though.

If you'd like a PR for this, let me know and I'll see what I can do :)

[digital-carver]

One disadvantage of that syntax is that it constrains the ingredients to have to be right next to each other in the text.

Often, as the original post mentions, you want there to be an original suggested ingredient and alternates for specific cases eg. vegan diet, availability, etc. With the pipe syntax, you'd have to write them all together and then explain the why and when of the alternatives after the fact:

Add @Tabasco sauce|spicy sauce{} to taste (Tabasco sauce is preferred, use 
Spicy sauce in case Tabasco isn't available)  

which overall reads a bit awkward. And as a general rule, requiring the user to change the grammar/style of their writing for the sake of syntax seems like something to be avoided.

A labeling system seems like a better way to go about it, allowing the writer to be free and flexible with their writing while allowing ingredients to be marked as alternatives for the same thing. Eg.

Add @|sauce| Tabasco sauce{} to taste (in case Tabasco isn't available, 
use @|sauce| Spicy sauce{} instead". 

Pour @|milk| milk{1/2 % cup} into the mixture (as a vegan alternative, 
@|milk| almond milk{} can be used).

Writing those down gives me another idea:

Add @Tabasco sauce{} to taste (in case Tabasco isn't available, 
use @/Tobasco sauce/ Spicy sauce{} instead". 

Pour @milk{1/2 % cup} into the mixture (as a vegan alternative, 
@/milk/ almond milk{1/2 % cup} can be used).

i.e. the main ingredient (the first alternative) is written as usual, and the later alternatives use the name of the main ingredient itself as the label. I've used slashes here as the delimiter for the label because that makes it resemble the text substitution syntax in Vim/perl/etc. (s/old text/new text/), which seems appropriate since the syntax denotes that the original ingredient is substituted by the alternative.