Just curious, what would you do different, or modify in the tools?
Sharlene,
I think the main change would have been to add a few more ingredients to some of the calculators. At the time of the original design, we scoured quite a few dough recipes to identify the most prominent ingredients used. Later, I found a few others that might have been included but weren't. Had we thought of it at the time, it might also have been possible to include a few blank entries in the tools for members to add their own ingredients that were not already in the list of ingredients. The tools would only provide weights. For users without scales to weigh those ingredients, they would have to do the weight to volume conversions using their own conversion data.
A few members also complained that some of the volume measurements were oddball. For example, if a tool said to use 0.43 teaspoon of an ingredient, they were not able to round that off to say, a bit more than 3/8 teaspoon (or a bit less than 1/2 teaspoon). I discovered that there are quite a few people who cannot handle simple fractions as were taught to them in schools when they were children. I once had a member send me a PM asking me to convert all of the volume measurements in a given recipe to standard measuring spoon sizes since he said that he couldn't do it. So, if it had been possible from a programming standpoint, it might have been useful to round volume measurements to the nearest 1/8th teaspoon or something like that.
Another member complained that the deep-dish dough calculating tool did not allow one to select a different thickness factor for the part of the dough that goes up the side of the pan. We did not know at the time that that was a concern. We were aware that there were some pizza operators, like Giordano's, that used dough rollers to form skins of uniform thickness, but we did not know that there skins that were thinner at the sides of the pan than at the bottom. Had we known of that concern, maybe it would have been possible to program that feature into the deep-dish dough calculating tool.
Finally, there were a couple of errors that it would have been nice to be able to correct.
The above notwithstanding, Mike (my collaborator who did all of the programming) and I were happy with the dough calculating tools we created. I consider them to be my most significant contribution to the forum. They were a major tipping point for the forum for the better and made life easier for large numbers of our members. One member went so far as to say that the tools were like TurboTax for pizza.
Peter
