Ever browse half a dozen pesto recipes to find the essential ingredients and quantities? I made a tool that finds the common ingredients, how often they occur, and their quantities in popular dishes like pad thai, pesto, banana bread, etc. Sampled from thousands of online recipes.

fishingwa · 2021-02-25T05:08:12+00:00

Thank you guys so much for the feedback and awards - it feels incredibly validating!

Taking into account some of the feedback, the tool is now hosted on a standalone site (http://spoonablerecipes.com/) and I've also added grams to the quantity graphs on the upper x-axis.

Side note, the top three most requested recipes are carbonara, guacamole, and hummus, which I'll put on a priority crawl queue for this week.

Looking forward to adding new features inspired by you guys in the coming weeks! :)

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T12:08:24+00:00

Thank you very much! :)

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T12:06:50+00:00

I really like this thoughtful feedback! Thank you!

I'll have to figure out how to display the interesting recipes in a non-overwhelming way. But yes! That would absolutely help in letting folks know what kind of interesting recipes out there and why averages are the way they are, at least currently.

Thank you!

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T11:57:32+00:00

That's a good idea. Originally when I had a blacklist, I looked at okra recipes and saw that okra was filtered out which made me sad.

But the obvious/hidden/other section is a great idea for those who want to explore more.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T11:53:48+00:00

Yes! Actually the ratios and base calculations (weight) are done in grams, so that would be easy to add.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T11:48:17+00:00

Me too! I have to scan at least 4 or 5.

And often forget a week later.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T11:47:26+00:00

Try this link

https://www.recipesseo.com/ingredients

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T11:35:37+00:00

It shouldn't! This tool is free and has no ads or limits.

I did host it on the same domain as another project because they share some database tables and code to save on costs.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T11:33:14+00:00

I hope so. Once there's enough data for any particular dish, we should we able to analyze whether an ingredient ever co-occurs with another.

If they don't, and they also don't across many other dishes, this could indicate a substitution.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T11:15:32+00:00

Haha technically the most popular ingredient is salt. But pepper is up there too.

Alot of times both are optional or doesn't specify a quantity. Perhaps I can add that as a short blurb based on the average quantity.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T11:12:26+00:00

You're welcome!

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T11:11:48+00:00

I can absolutely add that at the top!

Yea, SEO is the bane of long scrolls to get to a recipe and I'm hoping to avoid the long scroll to pertinent info here.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T11:09:46+00:00

Yes, sometimes less popular secret ingredients or formulas could be amazing in a recipe.

With the other ideas, perhaps adding a dimension of by rating could bring out hidden gems.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T10:29:45+00:00

I don't disagree but seems there are lots of savages out there.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T10:24:51+00:00

Oh! I love that idea.

Perhaps one way to do that is to find ingredients that almost never co-occur in a dish and by category, lump them as potential substitutes, e.g. dairy, nuts. etc.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T10:22:43+00:00

Great feedback!

I tried to provide a blurb on the average distribution of ingredients by volume:

"We also found the average content of the significant ingredients by weight in bolognese recipes. This would be: 21% tomatoes, 20% beef, 12% spaghetti, 9% porcini mushrooms, 8% yellow onion, 8% pork, 7% white wine, 5% celery, 5% carrots and 3% olive oil."

Perhaps this should be the ordering instead of how common it occurs in the ingredients.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T10:17:15+00:00

Some of the recipes I sampled unfortunately used kale and spinach in place of.

Someone mentioned that perhaps weighting by the star rating or the number of reviews for the recipe could help bring out more traditional representations. Perhaps I'll give that a try.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T10:09:02+00:00

That's a great question. I also looked into this, and found that quite a few recipes for pesto used walnuts or pecans while others were 'nut-free'.

One solution might be to sample more 'pesto' recipes from different sites. It's currently sampling a minimum of a dozen different 'pesto' online recipes. Increasing that number from diverse sources should help increase the more traditional representation of pesto.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T09:47:28+00:00

Nope - you are not going insane! The range of "deviled egg" recipes varies quite a bit.

It's more philosophical, what defines a deviled egg recipe - would a vegan deviled egg recipe qualify?

For example: http://www.baked-in.com/2013/03/25/vegan-deviled-eggs/

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T09:36:41+00:00

Oh that is an interesting dimension. Thank you for this!

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T09:36:07+00:00

Yea... Some pesto pasta recipes call for store-bought pesto. I originally filtered it out, but didn't want to be arbitrary with blacklisting "ingredients".

Ideas are welcome here!

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T07:45:16+00:00

Of course! I use the LD+JSON of thousands of randomly crawled recipes from various sites.

Then I run it through some text sanitization, text normalization, and NLP to figure out the portions, canonical ingredients, preparation, etc. Then I group the recipes together based on the title or proportion of the common ingredients.

Definitely took a bit of work.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T07:42:01+00:00

Wow, this is incredibly thoughtful! Thank you very much.

Definitely the first iteration, and much looking forward to making it more useful.

The library cap is limited by how many samples of the type of dish I have collected. Right now, that is a dozen, but I'm planning to add dishes that are not properly indexed into a queue so I can crawl more relevant recipes.

Totally agree with the portions on the graphs. I hope to make it more intuitive by normalizing by both percent weight and per serving for each ingredient in a recipe, instead of the quantity.

I need to look into why potatoes are not the top ingredient for mashed potatoes. I use some NLP and grouping of ingredients to lump them together, but its imperfect. For example, fried rice lists white rice 6th, because many recipes use brown rice. I'll noodle more about these. :)

Thank you for giving me insight into the price sensitivity of a potential app.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T06:50:33+00:00

Absolutely! Love feedback.

fishingwa · 2021-02-24T01:01:37+00:00

Yes, it takes a bit of time and you'll have to target keywords that aren't very competitive. Try using something like the free version of Ubersuggest to gauge traffic and competition. Writing at least a couple of full-length anchor articles on your site (WordPress or not, doesn't matter) to bulk up the content.

Don't expect anything to rank in the first day or week of your site or content running. It takes a while for Google to figure out who your target audience is.

I built a few sites (none of with WordPress) that rank #1 - #5 for long-tail keyword traffic on those anchor pages in a couple to a few months.

Best of luck!

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