Show HN: Search 1M recipes by their ingredients

I wanted to find an average recipe for “no-bake” cookie. This is complicated to Google because the “no-bake” cookie goes by many names (read on to learn them all). My search was also complicated by a need to find a recipe without peanut butter and with coconut.

This can be done with a Google advanced search that identifies the ingredients to include and the ingredients to exclude which returns a search results list that are pretty good matches [1]. However, I wanted to find the average recipe so I wanted a quick way of scrolling through all the recipes (instead of opening 20 tabs). To solve this, I made a tool [2] which you can use to quickly search and compare recipes that include a certain set and exclude a certain set of ingredients.

Using this ingredient search I found 69 recipes that had the ingredient set for “no-bake” cookie. [3] The results helped me find an average recipe. As suspected, I found that “no-bake” cookies go by quite a few different names (cow pattie cookies, saucepan kisses, fiddle diddles, frogs, chocolate tidbits, chocolate yummies, chatters, oaties, cow pies, bon bon jovi’s, snowballs, haystack cookies, barynard cookies, mud pies, reindeer poop, and hot rod cookies) thus strengthening the case for having a recipe search by ingredient and not by name.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?as_q=recipe+cocoa+sugar+milk+c...

[2]: https://timetomakefood.com/find

[3]: https://timetomakefood.com/find?include=cocoa+sugar+milk+coc...