A Visual Comparison of Ingredient Composition in Recipes

Today’s recipe search websites, which simply present a list of recipes to click through, do not provide efficient ways to compare recipes and understand the differences between them. Our visualization captures the variation in ingredient composition by graphing the amount of the most common ingredients in related recipes, allowing users to sort and explore their options. We created an ingredient database by pulling and parsing data from allrecipes.com. Using public code libraries for data visualization, we created ingredient distribution graphs that illustrate the amount of each ingredient in each recipe and implemented data brushing to allows users to filter their search results. Links to the actual recipes allows users to compare how different ratios of ingredients can lead to different variations on a dish. The feedback from test users was that the visual comparison showed surprising variance in recipes and that the visualization would be useful for finding recipes to make with a limited amount of ingredients. Future work would include making the displayed ratios more meaningful through data normalization and the attachment of ratings and review keywords to the distributions to show how the taste of a dish can change as its composition changes. INTRODUCTION Cooking is a creative endeavor, based on principles of flavor matching, chemistry, and technique. It is also a flexible art, with infinite variation covering a vast range of ingredients and taste. However, cooking is dominated by recipes, which fail to capture the richness of this landscape. In their standard form, recipes do not tell the reader anything about which measurements are critical and which can be adjusted, or how changes in ingredient or technique will affect the final result. In fact, English speakers occasionally use the term “cookbook” as an adjective to describe something presented in an ordered sequence with little room for nuance or creativity. Recipes are like navigation directions from one address to another, which provide a clear sequence of steps but do not help us if we get off track or want to take a slight detour. What we really need is a map. The Internet has added another layer to the problem. There are dozens of recipe-sharing websites, plus countless food blogs and cooking columns. When a would-be cook searches for a recipe, they’re confronted with a paralyzing number of choices, and are left to pick one based on what title sounds most appetizing or whichever page has the most appealing picture. Yet the vast troves of recipes online might also provide a solution. If individual recipes are points in a large foodlandscape, then by aggregating thousands of recipes we may be able to uncover the shape of the underlying terrain. This project aims to create a new tool to help novice and intermediate cooks explore the recipe space, both to find recipes they are interested in and to give them an intuition for the key ratios and dimensions of variance. Popular books such as Ratio1 [10] describe how mastery of a handful of fundamental ratios enables a cook to make a great variety of meals and experiment with confidence. Our objective is to enable users to explore and discover such ratios on their own.