HowToCook

HowToCook (programmer's guide about how to cook at home) is a community-built collection of Chinese recipes written in a precise, structured style aimed at programmers cooking for themselves at home. The description and README make clear it is a Simplified Chinese cookbook. The author explains they often searched online for recipes but found the writing inconsistent and full of unclear ingredient names; as a programmer used to formal-language descriptions, they wanted clearer descriptions, so they started this project to gather and standardize how common dishes are made.

How it is organized: the README links a difficulty index from 1 to 5 stars, plus category sections such as vegetable dishes and meat dishes. Each dish has its own markdown file under a dishes directory, written from a template the project provides. There are also "kitchen environment" guides under a tips directory covering kitchen preparation, choosing what to eat now, food pairings and taboos, pressure cooker, air fryer, removing fishy odors, food safety, microwave, and primers on techniques like boiling, stir-frying and pan-frying, cold mixing, pickling, steaming, and stewing.

You can read recipes on GitHub, build a local web service from the README's Docker image, or download a generated PDF version. Contributors add or fix recipes by submitting pull requests.

You would use this when you want a structured, reproducible, programmer-friendly reference for everyday Chinese home cooking rather than browsing inconsistent recipe blogs. The repository's primary listed language is JavaScript, since the recipes are tooled and published as a static site, and the full README is much longer than what was provided.