Recipe making is a hard topic. You got to find a way in your tool to be able to specify easily and represent cleanly the tree of dependencies between the steps.

The tool I choose really depends on what I want to achieve. You've mainly listed tools that are used to automate building software, but recipe making isn't limited to software, you can have a recipe to place files in your blog, or to help you rearrange a directory, or to run a series of test units. Jenkins could be a solution to this in a CI environment.

When it comes to building software, you normally have to add more complexity, some language twist to it, some ways to check if libraries are present on the system, to find out on which system you are running, to download the libraries and packages, and more.

Personally, I tend to use Make for C based languages, and otherwise I rely on shell or perl scripts. That is because most often, I don't have to face this problem because the language I rely on already has a way to handle building itself into a package via a file that describes the dependency and environment. Otherwise, if I ever need to set a test environment I'll rely on docker or vagrant or write a small install script which would consist of moving files to certain places.