#1 would be huge for me. I'm vegetarian, and hate green peppers, which means some 80% (made up stat) of all vegetarian recipes are no go for me.
My wife, in turn, is vegetarian and a very picky eater (she has "texture" issues with food). These sorts of features would be very useful for me to cook for her.
General appeal to the universe: If feeding a group, particularly vegetarians, DON'T go for a "use everything" strategy. That's like ordering Supreme pizzas for a group - if everyone dislikes one ingredient (but different for each), all you've done is made everyone unhappy.
> If feeding a group, particularly vegetarians, DON'T go for a "use everything" strategy.
Mind fleshing out that idea a bit more? I don't entirely understand what you're getting at, given that most people don't try to include as many ingredients in a dish as possible just for the sake thereof.
> given that most people don't try to include as many ingredients in a dish as possible just for the sake thereof
You would think so, but my experience says differently when it comes to being a vegetarian.
Take an random "average" (i.e. off the top of my head) US meal: some sort of noodles with a beef-based sauce, green beans, and biscuits. But the green beans have ham in them, and the biscuits are made with lard (I spent some time in the South, where ham is a seasoning and not a meat, it shows).
You'd think "well, gee, if we just make the green beans w/o ham, and the biscuits without lard, we can serve portobello mushrooms or a second vegetable or a vegetarian sauce on the noodles and the vegetarians will be happy!". And for me, at least, you'd be right, and I suspect in general.
But instead, what happens is that they make a second, distinct meal, into which they throw as many vegetarian things as they can find. Say, green peppers stuffed with quinoa, tomatoes, and artichoke bits. Or a kale salad with cooked eggplant and red peppers. etc.
When they order pizza, they get pepperoni for the meat eaters, but they get the olive/green pepper/onion/spinach/tomato chunks/mushroom for the vegetarians. Why not just cheese? The cheese pizza almost always runs out at gatherings I've been at that were lucky enough to have it as an option. (Note: I'm not addressing the vegans here, because I'm not a vegan so I have no real experience, and it's much harder to do "like the meat eater version, but vegan")
Okay, "as many vegetarian things as they can find" is hyperbole. But I'm faced with, instead of getting the same thing the meat eaters get, minus meat, is a conglomeration of things, at least one of which I'm likely not to like.
I think it's because people think simple vegetable options are "boring", and they need to spice it up. (and rather than use actual spices to do so, they try for variety in the same dish) That's my theory, anyway.
Hope that addressed your question...I sort of rant-vented a bit. I'll also add that I don't generally expect people to accommodate my desires, I just find it sad when they try and mess it up.
I was a meat eater for a long time. The above sounds perfectly tasty, but of course everyone eats differently.
That said, I did say I spent time in the US South, and I'm originally from Pennsylvania (Home of Scrapple!), so my food expectations might be a little off :)
as I said, I don't expect people to accommodate my needs - but I feel bad when they try and fail. And I'm talking about needs in generals, not just mine.
If you serve a dish with 10 things in it, it's much more likely than more people will dislike it than if you serve a dish with 1 thing in it (thus why pepperoni pizza is popular as a party item, vs a Supreme pizza). I only mentioned it because it seems to be a poorly understood truth when it comes to vegetarians. (as in, people know not to get overly complex meat dishes, but somehow think the opposite when it comes to non-meat dishes)
As an omnivore, I find those “throw all the veggies on” pizzas to be much more satisfying than ones with 1–2 toppings. (I also don’t much like pizzas with just cheese or pepperoni.) Maybe other people similarly prefer them? I often find the veggie pizzas running out first at big gatherings, with extra cheese and meat slices left over. YMMV, etc.
I agree with you. I think most people think that more ingredients the dish has, the better it must be - while it is usually the opposite. Maybe it gets down to how sensitive one's taste is?
Different food cultures have different preferences. For instance, in some parts of China, the dishes are mainly 1–2 ingredients each, and a meal has many dishes.
Other places prefer big stews with everything mixed together.
I like this, but: The recipes are from food.com (linking there once you have chosen your two ingredients). What's the difference from simply entering your two ingredients into the search box of food.com? (I tried it and got relatively similar results).
You're right, most of the recipes are from food.com (they have one of the biggest databases). There is also data from epicurious, nytimes cooking, allrecipes and a few others.
Googling "ingredients X Y" will also produce recipes.
That said, there's some food related statistical analysis here that may be different from what Google does {i.e. Google's analysis might be generic -- but they have been returning recipes for a long time}.
Google tends to return results from allrecipes.com, and I've had good experience with it.
Terrific book, we use it often when trying to come up with new ways to use what we have. There's a lot of value added by the chef interviews and recipes, but the core of the book just cries out to be a database and an app; they basically have a schema for how ingredients pair and group.
I do something similar on cookingspace.com - I use 100K public domain recipes to correlate food ingredients that frequently appear together in recipes. I also use the USDA nutrition database. My site is just a hobby site.
Congrats to foodpairing ninja - hacking on food stuff is fun!
I run this on a free Heroku plan, so it probably timed out for the day. This site is just a hobby for me but I should upgrade it to a paid for always on plan.
This is really cool, thanks for sharing it! I've been looking for tools that do things like this, however most things I've found end up being thrown together crap whose only goal is to serve as click-bait.
My suggestion is to spend some time thinking about the pitch - because right now it seems really complicated for how simple it is to use the tool. For instance, to me as a user, it isn't immediately clear to me what this tool is - are we pairing ingredients for a single recipe? Is it meal planning - multiple dishes that go together?
Allow me to brainstorm some ideas. Take them or leave them as you may!
make "Pick an ingredient to Start" smaller and somewhere where it's viewed more as an instruction than a title (maybe right above the table in bold & medium gray (#696969 or so)
Make the title explicitly state the problem / solution (rather than instructions)... something like "Find the Best Recipe by Ingredient" - I'm sure you can wordsmith it better.
Try to express it simply and clearly enough that you feel comfortable deleting the two paragraphs at the top starting with "Go ahead and search [...]"
As it happens, I find the hacker news post more informative than the site itself about what this tool does. I would replace "food" with "ingredient" in the title of this post, though, since "food" is too vague and gets back to the whole "is this for meal planning?" question.
Thanks! You're right, I should refine the idea a little more. Initially the idea was based around a question: "what are the best pairs of ingredients?" since I couldn't find many resources to answer it. Now it has evolved a bit since then to be more of a site to find recipes based on ingredients. From the comments here it seems like that might be a good route to follow. Really appreciate your brainstorming ideas!
It was not quite what I expected, I fed it olive oil and potato to see what happens because there's a lot of things you can do with fried potato... instead I got all kinds of random stuff that do well with potatos as more or less a side dish. Needs "two main ingredients" not just two things happening to be on the list in a dish that tastes good.
I greatly enjoyed the "Worst Pairings" and recommend people click that. Red pepper ginger ale, LOL.
Splay and place the poussin in a little oil to braise (if garlic is available, slice thinly and insert between skin and meat), skin side down, just enough oil to cover the skin surface exposed to the heating side of the pot. Until skin turns slightly brownish.
Turn.
Season - salt & peppa, and if they have thyme
Turn again, leave until skin is crispy.
Warm plate.
Turn again, add 'half empty can of Doctor Pepper' to deglaze pot, leading to the syrup to stick to the chicken underside.
Plate.
Peas served freshly boiled, assuming fresh and sweet peas. Plate.
There is a book called What To Cook When You Think There's Nothing in the House To Eat that is an attempt to solve this problem. I've never read it though, so I can't really say if it works or not.
They'd be a lot more useful if recipe sites would just let you flag reviewers who didn't follow the recipe though.
I swear 75% of negative recipe reviews I've read go something like this:
> I substituted the flour for corn starch, the butter for applesauce (watching my figure!) and the pasta for some awesome butternut squash. Since my SO can't tolerate dairy I smartly replaced the cream with mayonnaise and the parmesan with my own special mixture of bread-crumbs crisco and salt. THIS FETTUCCINE ALFREDO RECIPE IS DISGUSTING! WORST I'VE EVER HAD!!!"
And then of course somewhere near the top you'll always have an actual review that leads with a note about people who post reviews of their own concoctions instead of the recipe at hand.
I can't remember if it's How to Cook Everything or Flavor Bible, but those make it incredibly easy to find a recipe given one core ingredient. For example, look up porkchops and it will give you a list of ingredients that pair well. I can then google porkchops+selected ingredients and get a simple recipe to use as a basis for the night's meal.
I tried to write something like that as my first programming project, but then it got difficult, then I found http://www.supercook.com/
It got difficult because I was at the same time thinking about a way to store the recipes so that they could be searched by ingredients and that isn't trivial (worse that ingredients could be super or sub-specified -- wheat/raw wheat). I was also scraping all recipe blogs I could find to get the recipes, this is also way too complicated for a total beginner.
Seems very western oriented? Tried various ingredients very common in other parts of the world but they aren't in the list. Heck even "shrimp" is not on the list.
Maybe it should be "Find the best recipe from this short list of 2 foods ..."
Seems just very English oriented you mean ? Not even western. Just look at the best pairing list, even if it goes well together, it's clearly not what I would put in the list myself.
A few staple items I eat a lot that are missing: eggplant (aubergine), green onion, asparagus, brussels sprouts, mushrooms (more narrow categories, please), daikon
Do you still make updates for recipe labs? I remember being pretty blown away by how much stuff you managed to cram in there, and it was a big inspiration for me when I started building EatThisMuch. We're still dragging our feet on creating a bunch of features that you've had for years :)
Love the idea. I instantly tried almonds and apple juice and was surprised that they are recipes (and the amount of such) for this pairing! However, my exploration stopped there. Work on finding was to make it easier to explore, I'd rather not paginate.
I like this, are you planning on opening up an API? I could use this feature for http://imadefood.com that I launched a few weeks ago. Might be able to work something mutually beneficial.
I'd also want to know what kinds of certain vegetables to get. For example, the difference between sweet tomatoes and sour tomatoes is the difference between a loved friend and a great cook, and an idiot who shouldn't have been let into the kitchen ; ). Same with the different kinds of onions, and so forth. While, as they are, the 'what to buy' list is moderately useful, it would be 100x more if we had greater details!
Edit: Want to add something else. Haha, it shows ginger ale and red pepper as one of the worst combinations. It feels that someone should experiment, and make something good out of that. It doesn't feel too wrong (as wrong as, say, soft cheese and yogurt).
Is it possible to restrict the number of ingredients to a given maximum? This would be very useful if you choose two very general ingredients - like I just did with 'chicken meat' and 'tomato'
This is very cool. But the number of ingredients needs to be increased (only 240 right now). Mentioned this to my wife, and she chose lotus root, which isn't in there. 600k recipes is very impressive obviously.
Needs to include synonyms for ingredients: no eggplant/aubergine.
Has some glaring omissions: doesn't find capsicum but does have red pepper.
Needs definitions of the ingredients. A cucumber where I am (Norway) means what is known in the US (at least in NC) as an English cucumber. But the site doesn't make the distinction. If I make a cheese and cucumber sandwich I would expect English cucumber to be used.
Nonetheless, an interesting idea and a good start.
This is great. It's one of those totally obvious ideas that everyone else just missed. Stick with it and keep refining and improving. The line of thinking is fantastic.
It would be good to have aliases for some foods. I was trying it on my own cooking, which involved "bok choi" and "onion". I didn't find "bok choi", but I did find "chinese cabbage", which is apparently the same thing?
This is so cool. I am actually planning to start working on something similar but for wet shaving market. Basically, I was trying to setup something where user can choose their after shave pairing based on scent details.
It's neat, but the search itself is tedious, as I have to type the first ingredient, click on it, then type the second ingredient and click on it. Wouldn't it be better (faster at least) to type the two ingredients separated by a space?
Thanks! I used Python to pull everything together. The site itself is statically generated (hence the speed) using homemade templating, and the pages are hosted on Github (the repo for the site is here: https://github.com/schollz/flavor-combos. I don't suggest cloning this as its over 1GB). The code I used for generating the site is not open-source, yet... I can put it out there if folks are interested. An API is something I am planning on doing!
Butter is not a precise enough word in this context. Most US butter I have had was essentially just milk solids whereas most European butter is cultured butter and has a quite different flavour. I introduced one of my US colleagues to European butter and his instant reaction was that he now understood why people put it on bread.
I just ordered 4lbs of coconut flour from amazon. I have a goal for it but it won't take 4lbs... I was hoping for that to be in this database... Nope..
Nope. Sites cost money to run especially if it gets a lot of traffic from HN and other sites. If my budget is $0, then running ads can help me pay the $5 Digital Ocean bill for the month, the $20 CloudFlare bill, domain renewal etc etc. I'd wager a large number of visitors from here are running ad blocking though.
1) Exclude recipe that include particular ingredient(s). (dietary restrictions)
2) Tooltips in the column headings that explain the various ratings and indexes you are using