Making pizza with Claude

The 15 minutes of baking fame

My recipe for pizzas is a tweaked version of Sandra Mastios “The One”: 12 pieces of dough, 240g each. Easy peasy … but now I’m invited to a restaurant to make pizzas for an event where they will serve 5 different small dishes on their patio. Guests? anything between 50 and 150 people. To top it off the restaurant has a green Michelin star so regular large sloppy pizzas won’t cut it. After a bit of testing and discussiong with the chefs we decide to go for 50g size pizzas.

Now the 12 piece 240g dough recipe has to be scaled down to make 50 gram balls … but also up to serve 150 people. Vad i helvetet?

I’m standing in my kitchen knowing I need to make at least 3 test batches before the event. My plan is to first test size and baking time, then toppings, flavour and estetics. Lastly the third test batch will be a validation that I can repeat the pizzas.

Each batch takes 5 days of fermentation and each has to be identical. So I need at least a month to be sure I can produce a solid recipt for the event.

I think you get the idea. There is no way I can rely on a calculator and manual calculations for this.

Base recepie:

• 1360 g Tipo 00 flour
• 340 g protein high flour
• 1080 g water
• 3 g yeast
• 65 g salt
• 50 g olive oil

Total dough weight: 2898 g

Converting that to 50 g doughballs will give about 57 doughs. To get the right amount of flour for 150 dough balls I need to … (1360/50)x150, and so on, through six ingredients … satan i gatan … we can all see that this won’t work and it will be a huge source of errors.

But, I’m a ux designer. I solve problems for a living. Why am I manually doing this like it’s 1999?

The use-case is bigger then I thought

As I stood there, calculator in hand, I realized this wasn’t just about one recipe. I have dozens of recipes: Japanese milk bread, foccacias, pixel bread, surfer buns, drunken Irishmen loafs. Sometimes I want to make 5 loaves, sometimes just 10 small rolls. Every single time, it’s the same tedious math.

Describing the solution

So I opened Claude and said:

Can you please provide a simple php-based pizza dough calculator.

It should be based on this recipe:

3 gram fresh yeast
1080g cold water
1360g Tipo-00 flower
340g high protein flower
65g salt
50g olive oil

The recipe makes 11 dough balls with a weight of 260g each.

The functionality of the calculator shall be:

- Dropdown with how many dough balls I want to make.
- Desired weight of the dough balls
- Scaled recipe is presented
- Total dough weight is presented

That’s it. No technical specifications, no user stories, no wireframes. Just a clear description of the problem I wanted to solve.

Claude Desktops interface is super simple, chat/conversation to the left. Artifacts to the right. Artifacts is Claudes «browser» browser where apps, visualizations, graphics, games or whatever you build is run.

Within 15 minutes, we had a woking app (pun intended …).

… back to the pizzas!

The app Claude built for me is beautifully simple:

• Each recipe is stored in a separate .json file (human-readable-ish text)
• One php file handles all the logic
• A clean web interface for input and display … well, I did most of this. Not Claude.

The app in action

Since the first version I have added the possibility to comment and add new recepies.

I started with the copy-paste Method 1, but when I needed to add features like recepie-notes and adding new recepies I switched to Method 2: Claude Desktop with fileystem access.

My base recipe looks like this in the .json-file:

«name»: «Sandra Mastio - The One»,
«pieces»: 11,
«weight»: 260,
«ingredients»: {
    «Fresh Yeast»: 3,
    «water»: {
        «Cold Water»: 1080
    },
    «flour»: {
        «Tipo-00 Flour»: 1360,
        «High Protein Flour»: 340
    },
    «Salt»: 65,
    «Olive Oil»: 50
}

From tedious task to time saver

Building and styling this app took less than an hour. Using it saves me time and eliminates the frustration and errors of manual calculation.

But more importantly, it proved a concept: I could identify a real problem in my life and solve it with custom software. Not find a workaround or live with the inconvenience, but actually solve it completely.

That realization was intoxicating.

… and off we go!

This simple baking calculator became my springboard to building custom tools. It showed me that the barrier between «person with problem» and «person with custom solution» was waaaaay much lower than I’d imagined.

If I could solve my weekend baking math in under an hour, what other annoying tasks could I eliminate from my life?

Next up: How I turned the most dreaded part of freelancing – writing proposals – into a 45-minute task instead of an 8-hour ordeal.

But how did the pizza event go?

Well, absolutely fantastic. It was a lot more stressfull than I thought and baking pizzas al’a minute was perhaps not the best of ideas when there were 140 to make.

Here are some pictures from the prepp and the event.