Show HN: Discover Recipes by Ingredients | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Discover Recipes by Ingredients

skipthepizza.com

55 pointskrakaukiosk47 comments

Seems like your search uses OR, not AND. So adding more ingredients broadens the search rather than narrowing it. That seems kind of useless... adding just a handful of ingredients would end up matching basically all recipes.

If you click the star next to the ingredient name, it tags that ingredient as "recipe must include this ingredient", so you can click all of the stars to do an AND.

Edit: And if you click the star a second time it tags it as "this recipe must not include this ingredient", which would be helpful for people with allergies (or picky eaters).

>>> And if you click the star a second time it tags it as "this recipe must not include this ingredient"

And this is a prime example why icons without labels (in this app, there are no tooltips either which is even worse) are useless.

Star as in... favourite ingredient? save ingredient to some list? wut...?

This is compounded by the fact that it says "recipes with X and Y", when it is searching for "X or Y".

Very simple compared to other apps I've seen do this, which is much appreciated.

Worked well on desktop but unusable on my iPhone5 in either safari or chrome. There seems to be a polling script or something that's causing a page refresh every half second or something? Safari continuously shows the loading bar preventing you from selecting the ingredients bar and Chrome just flashes the page continuously.

Great work though!

OP here. Thanks for all the feedback so far!

I just disabled the navigation via pushState as it seems to be buggy on iOS devices. I'll put some more time on this and test it properly.

Regarding the questions with the OR/AND search. Yes, it's an OR by default but you can either force or remove ingredients by clicking on the star icon. In case you are just searching by OR, recipes with a higher "match rate" should appear on top. I clearly need to rework this part as it doesn't seem to be intuitive.

Again, thanks for the feedback!

I see two distinct use cases. One is "these are things I like, show me ways to combine them" and the other is "This is a list of stuff I happen to have in the kitchen, what can I make". Ask the user which of the two they are trying to do and the AND/OR question basically answers itself.

Came here to look for responses about the AND/OR issue - was wonder why searching for "goat meat" and "flour" suggested that I should make shortbread cookies. :)

It is doing OR search which doesn't make much sense to me.

try to search lime and cilantro http://skipthepizza.com/recipes/cilantro+lime

recipes either have lime or cilantro and there is no guacamole

Where did you get the recipes from? I used http://openrecip.es as the database for http://openrecipesearch.com, but the results were so bad I had to just turn it into a disgusting content farm, since I couldn't reasonably expect anyone to use it.

You only have to use the app for a minute to answer that question. It seems that all the recipes are on recipes.wikia.com

I've looked for recipes with Beef, Caviar, Coffee, Eggs, Ham, jalapeno, Lemon Juice, Sugar, Tomato Sauce,Vodka and it still finds me a dozen of recipes...

I understand that you can take ingredients replacements in account (as jalapeno, still keeping paprika recipes) but here it doesn't make sense anymore.

It would be nice if it was tolerant of misspelling (e.g. "mozarella") and also handled commas as a tokenizer. (I typed in "tomato, mozarella, basil" before realizing I had to hit enter after each ingredient.)

Also, adding ingredients to the list (hitting enter) is dog slow on my machine.

I'm actually working on something similar, but we're spending quite a lot of time on the algorithm - it's quite hard to get it perfect.

One note is that your search isn't working for me, it seems to just be rapidly refreshing the page. Latest build of Chrome on Mac OS X Mavericks.

Would love to chat, also working on something. Profile.

How is this different than Gojee? http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/21/recipe-finding-app-gojee-qu...

After actually going to the site, I find that this is an app into which one enters ingredients in order to search for recipes that use those ingredients. Gojee, however, appears to be some sort of social network that wants to show me pictures of food until I give them my Facebook particulars. No thanks!

I actually use these sites (mostly Yummly, but I always try new ones), and I have a comment that applies to all of them. It has to do with the variability of the underlying data.

Do I have "parmesan" or "parmesan cheese" or "parmegiano reggiano" or "parmegiano-reggiano"? Also, there is an implied hierarchy to some ingredients. For example, if I have fresh lemons, then I have "lemon juice" and "lemon zest" and "lemon peel".

I don't really know how this site or any others like it handle those types of things. Maybe its fixed behind the scenes, but a visual indicator would be great.

The other problem is substitutions. If for example I have Parmesan, feel free to show me recipes calling for Grana Padano or even Pecorino.

Yep, agreed.

It's probably a lot of work to build these relationships up front.

It's probably easier to allow the user to make their own relationships. In other words, when I search for "lemon", give me the ability to easily roll up "lemon juice" and "lemon peel" and "lemon zest". Make this a one time activity and have it save to a profile (also, easy incentive for users to create an account).

You can monitor all of your users' custom relationships and curate the good ones. Automate this for common relationships, i.e., if 50 people build the same lemon relationship, push it out to all users. You could make it opt out as an advanced setting for the purists I suppose.

In my university (Manchester, UK) there's a whole year course in the first year when you are assigned to a group of people and you have to make a website, anything you can come up with.

Every year, someone makes a web site for searching recipes by ingredients :)

To be more on topic, I like the idea but I think implementation (i.e. manual work required) is a bit too... demanding, involved? We are in the world of 1 click. I would like an app which would allow easy input (scan bar codes?) combined with machine learning to discover new meals (taste, effort required). Google Now for food?

The dreaded group project. So in your typical group of six you have a project manager, someone writing the functional specification, someone writing the technical specification, someone that does testing, someone that writes the manual, someone that parties rather than show up and nobody that codes!

I remember it well, five people waiting for someone to write some code before they could do their bit. Of course that code had to be in Ada rather than a vaguely useful language. Under such doomed-to-failure circumstances it is irrelevant what the project is, it might as well be 'Hello World'. So if some group does actually hand in code that allows for recipes to be searched for then I think that course is doing jolly well!

'Google Now' for food exists to a certain extent, if you do want to order pizza or get some other fast food in. I would like 'Google Now' for food that would factor in the fridge, the corner shop, the local super markets, their inventory levels and opening hours. It would be particularly cool if you could rustle up something amazing using just the local corner shop, perhaps someone should write one for the cash and carry company that all the corner shops use.

Exactly. I've been pitched this same idea literally hundreds of times over more than a decade, most recently about a month ago.

And yes, it is a great idea, if the implementation were great.

I stupidly spent a while trying to type all the substrings leading up to "Avacado" hoping that autocomplete would kick in. Perhaps I've got used to Google correcting my terrible spelling.

Infinite refresh in Safari 7.0.3 OS X

I see the same problem on iPhone Safari with iOS 7.1.1. Just keeps refreshing.

Same here with Chrome 33 on Mavericks.

The first thing I searched for was lemon, but I noticed that it differentiated between lemon, lemon juice, lemon zest, etc. If I have a lemon, I have all of the above. I'm sure there is a lot of work to know that lemon zest is derived from a lemon, but that would make this stand out against other similar ideas.

There's no pictures next to the recipes? I pick recipes based on whether it looks appetizing. Just having a name there isn't helpful.

This site does a better job with pictures (but has other problems)

http://www.supercook.com

This looks great! I like the slick and simple interface. Nice to see another Laravel site too!

I have been working on something recently that I think would complement your site really well, please feel free to shoot me a mail: me AT codemonkey.io to discuss.

I think ANDing should be on by default, since that's likely the most common use case - especially since that's what the left side of the UI implies. Ingredients are usually combined, else it's not really a recipe.

You can also use google: https://www.google.com/webhp?tbs=rcp:1

Search, then use 'Search Tools' to narrow by ingredient

This is a clever idea, makes it simple to get ideas for things you already have in your cupboard. Although its in a simple form currently, you could do so much with this concept.

Feedback:

- The lack of an option to search only vegetarian recipes makes this pretty much useless for me.

- Adding ingredients has a fairly large delay. I suspect some optimizations could be done there.

I'm unsure if having a 'vegetarian' option is the best way to go since there are about 40 different forms of vegetarian (I have been one for 15+ years). Maybe a better approach would be the ability to exclude ingredients and groups of ingredients. To me that solves a much bigger problem that I frequently have...I have three ingredients, but don't have the one that is generally required to go along with them (ie, I have olive oil, lemon, and garlic, but am out of basil).

If I can put in that I need a recipe without basil and without a category of meat or animal products (however, honey and egg are fine), that makes this infinitely more useful. If I can save that preference, that's even better.

Nice, but please don't break the "back" button.

Just saw this bug, thanks for letting me know. Will fix it asap.

Firefox 29.0.1: Can't type into the text field to put in an ingredient. EDIT: Typing is there, can't see the text. (White on white?)

Same here with Firefox 30.0, can type but can't read what I'm typing.

Thanks for letting me know and sorry for that. I just pushed a fix online

Nightly Firefox here (32.0a1, linux). Same issue.

Could you add an option for recipes which include only these ingredients/expands the search if it doesn't find very many?

Were you thinking about a more visual approach? Because other food related startups tend to show off the beauty of the culinary

A version of this which focused on drink ingredients could be a (perhaps more easily manageable) implementation of this idea.

Brilliant. I love the idea and I have always wondered why such a thing doesn't exist already.

Now give me an app :)

No garlic scapes in the database? Seems like it's a bit limited.

Seriously… that's the first thing I searched.

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