MILLIONS Of People Are Rethinking The Way They Cook After Discovering This Viral Recipe Hack Developed By An Engineer 22 Years Ago
by Arsheen Kaur Sahni · BuzzFeedPosted 54 minutes ago
I love cooking, but that doesn't exactly make me an expert. I manage to mess up at least one step every single time I cook, and I'm convinced I'm far from the only one. Recipes can be surprisingly confusing, which is why it's kind of wild that an engineer who took up cooking as a hobby solved one of our biggest kitchen frustrations all the way back in 2004... and it took us 22 years to truly appreciate it. If you have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about, don't worry. Let me explain.
On June 28, X (formerly Twitter) user Juan Buis tweeted, "I can't believe someone solved recipe design decades ago and everyone just decided to ignore it," alongside a recipe laid out in a simple table format.
i can’t believe someone solved recipe design decades ago and everyone just decided to ignore it pic.twitter.com/drnU7Sj7kr
— juan (@juanbuis) July 28, 2026
juan / Via x.com
The tweet quickly went viral, racking up more than 15 million views as people couldn't stop raving about the recipe's surprisingly brilliant tabular format. One user said, "Love this. In a previous life, I was a project manager. This makes total sense, like a Gantt chart for cooks."
Love this. In a previous life, I was a project manager. This makes total sense, like a Gantt chart for cooks.
— Roger Dooley (@rogerdooley) July 30, 2026
Roger Dooley / Via x.com
Another wrote, "I love this. Someone should make a cookbook of common recipes in this format."
I love this. Someone should make a cookbook of common recipes in this format. https://t.co/PiYQFRL9iE
— Dee (@mosdeedee) July 30, 2026
Dee / Via x.com
But not everyone was sold. While many hailed it as genius, others—including chefs—were quick to draw their swords.
A pastry chef tweeted, "I work with hundreds of recipes. Recipes need details. You say "mix," well there's about 45 different ways to do said mixing."
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…
— Danielle Potter (@mellowyelli) July 30, 2026
Danielle Potter / Via x.com
Then came the skeptics. One person wrote, "Indeed this is readable, but is it efficient? Is it helpful? Doubt it."
indeed this is readable, but is it efficient? is it helpful? doubt it. https://t.co/eTYbwFeNhr
— —n✿ps (@indomyphobe) July 30, 2026
—n✿ps / Via x.com
While the internet argued over whether the format was actually useful, very few people were asking the obvious question: Who came up with it in the first place? The answer is Michael Chu, an engineer.
Former Silicon Valley engineer, Michael founded the recipe website Cooking For Engineers in 2004. What began as a way to permanently store his recipes eventually became home to the easy-to-follow recipe cards that are now going viral.
When BuzzFeed spoke to Michael about its sudden resurgence, he admitted that he never actually set out to reinvent recipes.
Instead, the idea came from the notes he already made for himself before cooking. "I would take a conventional recipe, copy down the ingredients while scaling them as needed... I drew curly braces to show which groups of ingredients would be combined and wrote a word or two beside each group describing the action I needed to take," he told me. When he launched Cooking For Engineers, he simply recreated that handwritten system using HTML tables.
Like everyone else, Michael was surprised when the format suddenly went viral. "I did not expect it to be rediscovered and discussed as though it were a new idea," he said, adding that it's been exciting to watch people build on it and create their own versions. "Cooking For Engineers, and particularly the Tabular Recipe Notation, is one of the things I'm especially proud to show my daughter and say, 'Look, I did that.'" AWWW.
As for the chefs who argue that cooking is too intuitive to fit neatly into a table, Michael doesn't see it that way. "I do not see structure and intuition as opposites," he explained. "A clearly organized recipe can help someone build that understanding more quickly."
His goal, he said, was never just to tell people what to do, but to help them understand why each step works. That also explains why he never intended the format to replace traditional recipes. Instead, he sees it as another way of presenting the same information, with photos and written explanations still playing an important role alongside the table.
If he were building it today, Michael says the concept would stay exactly the same, but the technology behind it would be completely different. Rather than relying on hand-built HTML tables, he'd separate the recipe data from its presentation so the same recipe could be displayed in tabular, traditional, step-by-step, or mobile-friendly formats while improving accessibility and responsiveness.
One mystery the viral attention also cleared up was the "Patent Pending" notice that still appears on the website. Michael revealed that the patent application ultimately never went through and joked that the notice is only still there because he forgot to remove it.
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.
And while Michael was enjoying watching people rediscover his idea, Juan was already thinking one step ahead. After seeing the overwhelming response to his original tweet, he dropped what many people considered even bigger news: he'd built a website that could transform almost any recipe into the viral tabular format.
ok fine, i built it
paste any recipe link, get the table, skip the life story https://t.co/AIoYEALkKc pic.twitter.com/8Mq7rOPuRq
— juan (@juanbuis) July 29, 2026
juan / Via x.com
And safe to say, the internet collectively lost its mind once again. One X user wrote, "HOLY SHIT. Twitter did something useful!! 10/10" I feel you brother.
HOLY SHIT. Twitter did something useful!! 10/10
— Gooney Bird Drone (@GB_Drone) July 30, 2026
Gooney Bird Drone / Via x.com
Naturally, my first thought was, "There's no way it's that good," so I gave it a try myself. And I have to say, I'd give it an 8/10. Not because of the table itself—that's genuinely fantastic—but because of the conversion. It does a great job overall, though it still needs a bit of polishing in places.
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.