I Derived a Pancake
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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.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.My particular favorite are the yeast-raised lemon ricotta kefir pancakes - the best I've ever had.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.I'm not a chemist, so if something is off, tell me and I will fix it!
HN · launched Jun 5, 2026 · 340 upvotes (top 2%) · 0 views
Niche: recipe and cooking apps · 178 launches, 24 in the last 7 days ▼ -4% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 178 launches in recipe and cooking apps →
Could you build this?
Yes An interactive pancake calculator that adjusts ingredient ratios based on stoichiometry formulas is pure frontend logic and a simple recipe UI easily vibe-coded.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Acorn (macOS image editor with parametric pizza dough calculator), Box pancake mixes
Concerns raised: AI prose in tool content feels inauthentic and depressing, Tool only lets you specify dairy/wet ingredients, not all ingredients you have
Feature requests: Support baking soda as alternative to baking powder, Support bottled lemon juice instead of zested lemon, List heavy cream as an ingredient option, Allow specifying exact ingredients available, not just dairy/wet ingredients
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 131 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #3 of 132 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 198 days after the earliest competitor.
- I Derived a Steak · hn · 2026-06-26 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.62
- iDoughMath · ph · 2026-10-23 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- I made a website to clean up recipe websites · hn · 2026-04-27 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Macro Dessert Lab · ph · 2026-09-11 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- LoafCoach: Sourdough Bread · ph · 2026-11-11 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- deepseek-recipe · github · 2026-09-10 · 329 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- FreeWWW Ingredient Substitution Finder · ph · 2026-09-29 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- cookimg · ph · 2026-11-03 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
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