Chefs share recipes in 140 Twitter characters

R Twttrd recips a gr8 new thing 4 bkg & ckng or r the dirctns 2 confusng for most peeps?

Within the endless streams of bite-size personal updates and random thoughts that populate the Twitter-sphere, now chefs are posting “recips” online, including pros such as Martha Stewart (marthastewart) and Chicago chef Rick Bayless (Rick_Bayless).

But there’s a catch.

Twittered cooking instructions are so compressed they often read like trigonometric expressions. Consider “Heat 3Tdashi, 1/2C miso, 4C H2O” or “Simmer 6 sm leeks w/2T but &1t salt & 1Cwater 10 min.”

The recipes conform to Twitter’s ironclad 140-character limit, meaning directions that might fill a page in an old-school cookbook get seriously scrunched.

Critics say the micro-recipes – sometimes called Twecipes – are often confusing and half-baked. But aficionados call it a modern way to bring cooking to the masses, and besides, puzzling out the instructions is part of the fun.

“Definitely it’s a code. It’s a hieroglyphic that people have to get over time,” said Karen Solomon, a San Francisco-based cookbook author and recipe tweeter.

Solomon tweets super-short recipes running the gamut from sunchokes to strawberry shortcake as chef140.

The recipes are as diverse as the cooks, but the style is the same: extreme brevity. Recipe tweeters ruthlessly exclude all but essential ingredients and basic steps.

They rely on the same character-saving shortcuts familiar to cell phone texters. Vowels are trimmed and symbols are common. Tablespoons become “T” and teaspoons “t.”

A recent tweet for salsa from Bayless, a James Beard award-winning chef, reads in full: Simple Guajillo Salsa:toast 2 clnd guajillos n med-ht oil 4 20-30 sec. Blend w 4 rstd tomatillos, 3 rstd garlic, 1/2c H20. Salt.

Other cooks hitting Twitter with recipes include food columnist Lucy Waverman (lucywaverman).

“It is something about bringing recipes down to their bare bones. I hate to use the word intellectual, but it’s an intellectual challenge,” said Waverman, author of four cookbooks.

She’ll often post “Twitterized” versions of her recipes in the belief that they’re less intimidating.

But even proponents admit the form has limits.

Solomon doesn’t tweet complicated dishes like ravioli. Waverman steers clear of baking recipes because she can’t give instructions such as “bake until center is still wriggly.”

It’s still not clear whether Twitter is an evolutionary step in culinary communication or a passing novelty.

Though thousands of people receive recipe tweets, most who answered queries by The Associated Press said they had yet to cook one. Others doubt a recipe that looks like a haiku is of much use.

“The fact that you can do it on Twitter doesn’t mean that you should do it on Twitter,” said Cook’s Illustrated magazine publisher Christopher Kimball.

Of course, the stuff that’s left out is part of the charm. Dilys Tosteson Garcia of Los Angeles was struck by the haiku-like quality of Evans’ recipes, but understands why some cooks don’t like all the missing bits.

“It depends on whether you’re an artist cook or a scientist cook,” she said.