Developer builds chemistry-based pancake recipe calculator that adapts to available dairy, acids, and leavening ingredients

A Hacker News user shared a pancake recipe tool that computes formulas from ingredient chemistry rather than fixed instructions. Users select ingredients such as ricotta, kefir, yogurt, lemon, or cream of tartar, and the tool targets acid, fat, salt, sugar, and CO2 levels to generate a recipe.

The project shows how small consumer tools can turn domain knowledge into practical personalization, even for everyday cooking. It also reflects a broader trend toward computational recipes, where software models ingredients and constraints instead of simply storing static instructions.

After 25 years of making other people's pancake recipes - always yearning for more tang, more fluff, and more predictability - I decided to derive the pancake recipe from the chemistry.<p>You mark checkboxes for what you have on hand (ricotta, sour cream, kefir, buttermilk, yogurt, cottage cheese, lemon, cream of tartar, etc.) and it computes the best recipe based on targets for acid, fat, salt, sugar, and CO2.<p>My particular favorite are the yeast-raised lemon ricotta kefir pancakes - the best I've ever had.<p>The math is done in a small pure-ESM library: ingredient composition to component masses and acid moles, a stoichiometry layer, and a bisection solver for the target deficits.<p>I'm not a chemist, so if something is off, tell me and I will fix it!