Parsnip helps you cook with confidence by breaking down complex, cooking expertise into fun, bite-size quizzes. Pick a dish and learn all the fundamentals hidden below the surface of a recipe. Cook like a chef before you know it.
Hello Product Hunt 👋,
I’m Andrew, co-founder and CEO of Parsnip — in short, “Duolingo for cooking”, which we’re excited to share with you today!
A bit of history
When I was growing up, my immigrant family had a diet of soda, TV dinners, and highly processed food — because we didn’t know any better. It took me a couple decades (and more effort than finishing my PhD) to learn that cooking is the fastest, cheapest, easiest, and healthiest way to eat, once you know what you’re doing. But over the last 60 years, it wasn’t just my family, but many others around the world, who have forgotten what we’re doing.
We built Parsnip to solve that problem, and make learning to cook way easier for you than it was for me. And what better time to share than Thanksgiving 🦃, a holiday centered around cooking, family, and food?
How Parsnip works
The challenge of learning to cook isn’t that the information is unavailable — it’s actually all over the Internet. The problem is that if you’re just starting out, you literally can’t search for what you don’t know. And that lack of knowledge & confidence is intimidating for people who deeply desire to cook, but are afraid to waste ingredients, mess up, or serve bad food to a friend 🤮 .
Parsnip lets you pick a dish you want to make and learn all the core cooking skills you didn’t know you needed. We build up your confidence even before you step into the kitchen. And Parsnip includes a tech tree of cooking skills that lets you see the progress you’ve made and what you can learn next — it’s like the fun of leveling up your character in a video game 🎮, applied to a useful real-life skill.
Right now Parsnip is focused on helping beginner/novice cooks, but our goal is to expand the tech tree with more advanced skills and cuisines from all over the world.
In the future, we plan to go beyond just teaching cooking skills to building the best AI meal planner in the world — one that knows what you can cook, your food preferences, and your time constraints. We’re doing this because the two biggest hurdles to cooking regularly at home are also two problems that AI is superbly equipped to help people with: (1) better knowledge acquisition (which we’re working on now) and (2) better decision making (which naturally builds atop of the data from 1).
Our north star is to make cooking the easiest and most convenient way to eat. We're passionate about this because solving this problem at scale is good for people 👨👩👧👦 and good for the planet 🌏, and the world wants this now more than ever.
I’d like to thank our passionate, brilliant, mission-driven team and especially my co-founder @edwardhuang for pouring their hearts into bringing this vision to life ❤️. You all are an inspiration to me and it’s a privilege to work with you.
Please tell us what you think!
Our team will be around for the whole day, and we also have a Discord server where you can talk to us anytime! Parsnip is a work in progress, and we'd love to hear any questions, suggestions, or about your own cooking journey. And if you'd like to see what the future holds, follow us as we build in the open on Substack.
Many thanks 🙏,
Andrew
@edwardhuang@mizzao Go Parsnip Go! Hope as many people get to up their confidence and fun in cooking. This vital lifeskill is waning and, for many reasons, in dire need for a come back of epic proportions.
I absolutely love how this product teaches you about cooking while following a recipe, really cool idea! Am curious, how many recipes do you have available via the app today?
@n_russell We currently have 18 recipes spread across over 100 levels and are always adding more. This is just our first phase as we build out the modular 'building blocks' of our tech tree, but eventually we plan on allowing our users to import any recipe from the internet and have Parsnip provide you with the necessary knowledge to achieve it.
It's always exciting when I fully grasped one dish and also realize that I can apply what I learned to learn other dishes. Hence cooking is getting easier to me!
Parsnip
A bit of history
When I was growing up, my immigrant family had a diet of soda, TV dinners, and highly processed food — because we didn’t know any better. It took me a couple decades (and more effort than finishing my PhD) to learn that cooking is the fastest, cheapest, easiest, and healthiest way to eat, once you know what you’re doing. But over the last 60 years, it wasn’t just my family, but many others around the world, who have forgotten what we’re doing. We built Parsnip to solve that problem, and make learning to cook way easier for you than it was for me. And what better time to share than Thanksgiving 🦃, a holiday centered around cooking, family, and food?How Parsnip works
The challenge of learning to cook isn’t that the information is unavailable — it’s actually all over the Internet. The problem is that if you’re just starting out, you literally can’t search for what you don’t know. And that lack of knowledge & confidence is intimidating for people who deeply desire to cook, but are afraid to waste ingredients, mess up, or serve bad food to a friend 🤮 . Parsnip lets you pick a dish you want to make and learn all the core cooking skills you didn’t know you needed. We build up your confidence even before you step into the kitchen. And Parsnip includes a tech tree of cooking skills that lets you see the progress you’ve made and what you can learn next — it’s like the fun of leveling up your character in a video game 🎮, applied to a useful real-life skill. Right now Parsnip is focused on helping beginner/novice cooks, but our goal is to expand the tech tree with more advanced skills and cuisines from all over the world. In the future, we plan to go beyond just teaching cooking skills to building the best AI meal planner in the world — one that knows what you can cook, your food preferences, and your time constraints. We’re doing this because the two biggest hurdles to cooking regularly at home are also two problems that AI is superbly equipped to help people with: (1) better knowledge acquisition (which we’re working on now) and (2) better decision making (which naturally builds atop of the data from 1). Our north star is to make cooking the easiest and most convenient way to eat. We're passionate about this because solving this problem at scale is good for people 👨👩👧👦 and good for the planet 🌏, and the world wants this now more than ever. I’d like to thank our passionate, brilliant, mission-driven team and especially my co-founder @edwardhuang for pouring their hearts into bringing this vision to life ❤️. You all are an inspiration to me and it’s a privilege to work with you.Please tell us what you think!
Our team will be around for the whole day, and we also have a Discord server where you can talk to us anytime! Parsnip is a work in progress, and we'd love to hear any questions, suggestions, or about your own cooking journey. And if you'd like to see what the future holds, follow us as we build in the open on Substack. Many thanks 🙏, AndrewParsnip
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