I never expected a recipe format to blow my mind, but here we are.

I work as a Writer at BuzzFeed, creating and curating quizzes, listicles, and articles that cover everything from pop culture chaos to food trends I immediately want to try and fashion moments I can’t stop talking about.

i can’t believe someone solved recipe design decades ago and everyone just decided to ignore it pic.twitter.com/drnU7Sj7kr

Love this. In a previous life, I was a project manager. This makes total sense, like a Gantt chart for cooks.

I love this. Someone should make a cookbook of common recipes in this format. https://t.co/PiYQFRL9iE

Yes thank you! This is so much worse. I’m a pastry chef and I work with hundreds of recipes. Recipes need details. You say “mix,” well there’s about 45 different ways to do said mixing 😂 Maybe for the home cook with very, very simple recipes it would work okay. But for anything…

indeed this is readable, but is it efficient? is it helpful? doubt it. https://t.co/eTYbwFeNhr

The English toffee recipe from Michael's website, following his original method!

Despite the renewed interest, he has no plans to pursue patent protection again. Instead, he's simply enjoying watching people rediscover the format and give credit to its original source.

These days, Michael is based in Austin, Texas, where he's continued building a career in technology, from working at Intel to co-founding an AI-focused biotechnology company and now working on AI applications. Even after all these years, though, one thing hasn't changed: he still organizes recipes using the same handwritten grouping system that sparked the idea behind the Tabular Recipe Notation more than two decades ago.

ok fine, i built itpaste any recipe link, get the table, skip the life story https://t.co/AIoYEALkKc pic.twitter.com/8Mq7rOPuRq

HOLY SHIT. Twitter did something useful!! 10/10

One of the steps told me to "mix in the dry ingredients" even though that section also included eggs. Small hiccups like that aside, it's an impressive tool and one I'd happily use again.