There comes a time of day, usually in the late afternoon, when thoughts drift to the imagined delights of that evening's dinner table. Questions are tweeted, inspiration sought from desk mates and strangers, buck-passing phone calls are made to partners, wheedling tone at the ready, "any ideas for tea tonight?" (or is that just me?). But sometimes inventive colleagues, patient friends and long-suffering partners are not to hand and we're left juggling the contents of our fridges around our imaginations by ourselves. Inevitably, in these moments, many of us turn to the internet.
We've spent some time browsing the many great recipe searches you recommended, thought about how we all search for inspiration at tea time, and today we are pleased to be adding our own ingredient-led recipe search to the mix.
A word about the search. It's been built thanks to our Open Platform initiative (you can read more on how the relationship works over on the Open Platform blog) by a developer called Daniel Levitt, who also runs the recipe search website WhatCouldICook.com, accessing user recipes as well as some of the Guardian and Observer's content.
And what content it is. We're lucky enough to have some of Britain's best-loved chefs, cooks and recipe writers in our midst, meaning you will have improved access to the archive of wonderful recipes from Nigel Slater, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Allegra McEvedy, Dan Lepard, Yotam Ottolenghi, and many more.
Our archive is a treasure trove of recipes. We've accumulated thousands of them over the last decade from the Observer, the Guardian, their associated magazines and from guardian.co.uk. While the content is undoubtedly rich, this variety of editorial styles has made for a frankly troublesome archive and developing a search hasn't been easy, but a great deal of hard work and patience from Daniel has paid off - the search he has designed makes our recipes about 100% more findable than they were before.
There are two main searches on offer, one by ingredients, the other by dish name. Unlike other searches that restrict the number of ingredients you can look for our search is limitless - just separate ingredients with a comma. You can use the field with the red cross below the main search to exclude ingredients you don't like, and we have also included a vegetarian search and an option for fish, which you'll see on the right hand side of the page. You can also see all the ingredients in a recipe at a glance without having to click through to the recipe page itself by hovering over the box to the right, as in the screenshot above.
It's important to say that this is just the start of the story. The search will constantly evolve as Daniel continues to develop and improve it with more filter options and other innovations. It will also become more efficient with use and feedback so we're extraordinarily keen to hear about the results you're getting.
Of course, you can post general comments below, but if you have the time we would appreciate emails with specifics, telling us if you get results that don't match your expectations and why, anything you do and don't like about the search and things you'd like to see added in future - ratings systems, the ability to upload your own recipes, or entirely new functions you haven't seen elsewhere. The email address to use (and which you can also find on the search home page) is recipes@guardian.co.uk. Oh, and thanks very much to all those who roadtested the search in its embryonic form and gave us some excellent feedback - please continue to talk to us. Get searching, people!
Comments in chronological order (Total 79 comments)
23 June 2010 11:57AM
This is great and seems to work well, what would be nice is a feature where you can save your personal store cupboard staples (and evil ingredients that you would never use). Ratings would be good and a comments section to let people give feedback on recipes they've tried and any variations they suggest.
23 June 2010 12:00PM
Outrageous! No recipe with red cabbage, mushrooms, aubergine AND courgette??! What about red cabbage, mushroom, aubergine AND courgette fritters?
I guess we cant blame the search engine on the quality of recipes...
Anyway, I think its a great tool for ideas from random fridge contents and in fact beats Google which requires a bit of selectivity to get any meaningful or useable results. Also I searched quickly for one lentil recipe I remembered from a long time ago whose name I barely remembered and found it fairly promptly so overall a good start.
Would be good to be able to specify the freshness of my ingredients. I dont think this cabbage should be eaten raw, if at all to be honest
23 June 2010 12:06PM
hi, maybe itd be a good idea if you suggested people add a + sign for things such as braising steak (braising+steak). i just tried a 'braising steak' search and got 42 dishes, though only one containing actual braising steak. 41 completely insignificant recipes to traipse through.
23 June 2010 12:23PM
@addem123
The problem with braising+steak should in fact find only braising steak. This is probably just a small bug, I'll have a look under the hood and get that working ...
23 June 2010 12:28PM
It's looking promising...
Two problems: the links to other pages at the bottom of the page don't work... I can only see the first page of results...
And I would have used the feedback email if it worked! Apparently I don't have permission to post to the recipes group.
HTH
23 June 2010 12:28PM
I can't seem to get past the first page of search results - anyone else having this problem?
Error message is:
Sorry - we haven't been able to serve the page you asked for
You may have followed a broken link, an outdated search result, or there may be an error on our site. If you typed in a URL, please make sure you have typed it in correctly. In particular, make sure that the URL you typed is all in lower case.
23 June 2010 12:30PM
Looks good to me!
Like Storm suggested above, would it be possible though for individual users to keep a personal recipe stash which could be linked into? Also, how about if someone wishes to add a personal recipe to the database itself for others to try and enjoy, would that be possible?
23 June 2010 12:35PM
It's not very good for browsing - I wanted to look through general cake recipes but typing in "cake" gives me salmon cakes and potato cakes as well as regular cakes. It would be great if you could combine the ingredients AND recipe names to get the results you want - ingredients "sugar" recipe name "cake" etc etc
It does look lovely though. A very nice make over for your recipe section so two thumbs up for that.
23 June 2010 12:38PM
@bristler
Whoops sorry this was my clumsy mistake, the page links are working now.
Dromiceiomimus
That might be a very temporary problem for a small amount of users, it should be working for everyone now
@ElegantChaos
That is a great idea, you can use some of these features over at whatcouldicook.com but we are discussing what the next project for Guardian food is.
Keep the ideas coming!
23 June 2010 12:43PM
I just searched for my favourite ingredient feta....4 pages of imaginative recipes.
Great work!
23 June 2010 1:01PM
Great idea, something that looks extremely useful.
One thing, when it says "There is 1 recipe with all the ingredients you asked for and there are 109 recipes containing at least one of the ingredients" I would quite like to see the 1 recipe that includes my ingredients highlighted, or separated in some way.
Or maybe it is and I just can't see it?
Thanks
23 June 2010 1:06PM
@stillWondering
Thank you!
There is a little bit of green text and a nice green tick if a recipe has all the ingredients you asked for. Perhaps we should make it a little obvious
23 June 2010 1:10PM
What about adding a recipe type tag cloud to allow search results to be further narrowed (e.g. soups, sandwiches, salads etc)?
Alternatively, maybe just the ability to "Narrow results by recipe type" (e.g. I search for "chicken" but want to exclude recipes that are soups.
Would require some (inevitably subjective) tagging work for the recipes, but maybe that could be crowdsourced too?
23 June 2010 1:10PM
Well done guys, this is flippin' sweet, especially as the Beeb's recipe site is dead in the water now.
23 June 2010 1:12PM
Also, why is Nigel Slater's Chicken w/Verjuice recipe shouting? It's in CAPS in my search results -
CHICKEN WITH VERJUICE, CELERY AND CREAM!!!!!!!!!
23 June 2010 1:16PM
@sammouth - the shouty caps problem is one of the stylistic issues Suse refers to in her post. We'll be working through these in due course.
23 June 2010 1:20PM
Good start.
I would suggest at least a broader filter, such as starter/main/dessert/snack although many could, of course, fit more than one.
Some of the parsing for split word ingredients appears confused. For instance, I have some red currents, ready to pick and I'm genuinely looking for a recipe. Searching for red currents the first page of 788 results appears with ingredients featuring something red: wine, chilli or cabbage. They may or may not include dried currents. red+currents returns nothing, red + currents returns one recipe featuring white currents. The text features red currents as an alternative which is a good result but it cannot be the only one. I suspect split word ingredients are very difficult to get right without a lot of manual tagging of the recipes.
23 June 2010 1:21PM
Any chance of an option to sort by date?
I was looking for a Nigel Slater recipe I knew I'd seen in the last few weeks (13 June, as it turns out), but a search for "chicken, butter," (which were the only ingredients I could remember, but tend to appear in a lot of dishes!) threw up a lot of options and I had to trawl through a bunch of others before I found the one I wanted.
If I'd been able to sort by date I could have found it much easier.
Otherwise it's great - well done!
23 June 2010 1:22PM
It helps if you can spell
23 June 2010 1:22PM
leadballoon
Thanks for the feedback, it should actually pick up on the fact your looking for red currants and give you back only red currants
23 June 2010 1:26PM
@leadballoon I've had that problem myself. :) About your filter point, yes, definitely, that's the kind of thing we hope to build in soon.
Thanks so much for all this feedback people, keep it coming.
23 June 2010 1:28PM
@ithaca99 - Thanks for the suggestion. This should help in the short term - you can refine your results by writer using the links on the right hand side of the page.
23 June 2010 1:28PM
@leadballoon
The 'red + currents' problem is now fixed, it should be a lot smarter now!
23 June 2010 1:29PM
Yes, spelling! Can it be made to compensate for bad spelling? Like Google - give suggestions?
Eg A search for hollondaise sauce got nothing.
23 June 2010 1:29PM
I've got an idea I've got an idea!
Is there any way of having a cooking method selection filter (maybe a drop-down)? So you can choose oven / grill / hob / barbeque - or - roasted / fried / steamed etc? Is this too ambitious?
I've not seen this option on other cookery sites, but that's all the more reason for doing it. It'd be great for those who don't have access to an oven (these people do still exist, I assure you), good for selecting healthy options ('steamed', please), useful for finding BBQ recipes, and useful for those in a hurry.
Of course, just coming up with the different categories could be a pain, but hey ho.
23 June 2010 1:39PM
Doh.
I little more searching finds 46 'redcurrants' mostly in the form of jelly, 'red currants' returns 780, some redcurrant jelly, others something red plus dried currants. Include redcurrant, exclude jelly gets 16. Include red currant, exclude jelly gets a different 4. Currant gets the same result as currants, which is good. I guess it's difficult to cope with individual author's formatting of the words.
23 June 2010 1:41PM
The ingredient I wanted was 'leeks'. The ingredient I didn't want was 'meat'. Your search engine is currently only set up to reject specific words, so while 'meat' didn't appear in any recipes, many types of meat did. Can you set up some generics so that, for instance, the word 'meat' typed into either of your fields would include all meats in the 'wanted' field and exclude them all in the 'didn't want' field.
23 June 2010 1:46PM
The vegetarian search doesn't seem to be working very well. If I search for Cabbage and then select Vegetarian I get such veggie delights as "Savoy cabbage and lardons", "Chicken livers with bacon, red cabbage and cider vinegar" and "Butternut squash soup with shredded cabbage and diced gammon"!
23 June 2010 1:51PM
Also if I search for an ingredient, using Patsky's example of Leeks, I get 172 results. I only want Vegetarian recipes so I filter by Veggie - 55 results, 20 per page. But as soon as I move to the 2nd page of results it forgets my vegetarian filter!
23 June 2010 1:51PM
I like it, have had the same problems with search filters (can't believe there is only one dish containing mince and onions on your whole database) but what I would like is a user feedback option on each recipes so we can see ratings and comments from people who have made these recipes
23 June 2010 1:54PM
oh and something about seasonality would be good - maybe a special feature of recipes with ingredients that are currently in season on the front page
23 June 2010 2:00PM
This looks really useful but one quite amusing thing is the way it betrays how many times the same recipes have been recycled in the Guardian (or how certain cooks have published the same ones!)
For example a random search using the ingredients bacon and chilli shows that a certain Mr Slater has given us his - no doubt delicious - recipe for "Spiced pumpkin soup with bacon" no less than four times: in 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2006!!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/recipe-search/search?include=chilli%2C+bacon&exclude=Ingredients+you+don%27t+want+...&type=ing&Go=Go
23 June 2010 2:30PM
Recipe Search; sounds like a good idea and I am always looking to expand my repertoire but I have to say I draw the line at small children and tomatoes; some sort of Ragu presumably.
23 June 2010 2:31PM
I second @petapops - I searched for chimmichurri but I had to check how to spell it - could you introduce predictive text somehow. Didn't find any chimmichurri recipes anyway :(
But it's a visually very pleasing and look forward to using it!
23 June 2010 2:37PM
KelDarkNight; Nigel is a past master at repeating recipes. I have most of his books and many of the recipes are much the same or variations on a theme.
I guess like a good joke or a good story there is a limit to the number of original ideas out there. Italian inspired, French inspired and so on. Take a chicken... Jane Grigson was an original with great insight and above all she wasnt a snob. Elizabeth David could claim to be a bearer of new ideas at the time.
Now; well we have Jamie. Gordon, Nigella and so on; too many cooks etc.
23 June 2010 2:38PM
a brilliant resource, though a little sticky on some points - my search for "strawberry, cream, egg" found no matches, and instead gave me a coddled egg salad, so would be good to include a filter for specifying say dessert recipes. removing "egg" from my search found me Eton mess which does in fact include all three.
epicurious.com has a really good recipe search, where you can filter by course, cuisine, season, dietary requirement etc. but the recipes in here are much nicer and don't include packet mix and coolwhip...
23 June 2010 2:40PM
I just typed in halloumi and paprika as a test, to see if Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's recipe from this weekend turned up, and it didn't. Should using spices in the ingredients list work?
However, it did turn up a good Ottolenghi recipe for mince & capers (chosen randomly, as I'd just added half a jar to some leftover ragu).
23 June 2010 2:46PM
I do really like this as I have found the general Guardian search to be infuriating. However, I just searched for polenta chips in the recipe search (as I know they were featured recently) and the first result was smoked polenta chips which is great but then there were 37 results for anything involving polenta or chips. So I tried again with quotation marks hoping it would search for the phrase rather than the words but the same thing happened. So maybe something to fix that would be good.
23 June 2010 3:00PM
as mentioned above, it would be good if you could log in using your cif name and password to save a folder of recipes
23 June 2010 3:15PM
All your comments are really helpful, this is the first version of the recipe search and it will be an ongoing improvement so your feedback really does count.
@salmagundy and others
The first results of any search are the ones that are great and the relevance declines the more you page through them. Every search engine does this, but also we think it encourages spontaneity and randomness which is sometimes very helpful when trying to find something different/new.
@CatherinePhipps
The search will be about a week behind the new recipes in the paper, but the new recipes are easy to find on the Guardian!
@Snowoman
We are going to be introducing a spell check very soon!
23 June 2010 4:31PM
In addition to my earlier (overlooked?) comment, what would also be nice is a feature that allows you to tick a recipie that you cook and that shows what you've cooked and how you (and others) rated it. - this could also feature suggestions based on things you've cooked before.
23 June 2010 4:41PM
@Storm - we're not ignoring you! Good suggestions, thank you for them. The second is definitely the sort of community involvement we'd be keen to have, and as for the first, maybe you could search for your storecupboard ingredients and bookmark the resulting url - ?
23 June 2010 4:58PM
I searched for mushrooms in vegetarian recipes, and it suggested chicken liver pate. Hm.
23 June 2010 5:02PM
Looks fantastic and definitely a really, really useful addition, thank you!
Have had a quick play, haven't spotted any obvious issues yet, but appreciating the good ideas and feedback of others above.
Shall definitely be using this!
23 June 2010 5:07PM
Looks alright so far. I agree with the above posters that the vegetarian option really isn't working at all. The BBC website has the option to select recipes suitable for lots of different diets. I think you'd have to include them in the future if this was to be competitive.
23 June 2010 5:10PM
@AbigailS - could you pls post the url of that search so we can investigate?
23 June 2010 5:15PM
@ Vampyra - would you mind posting the url of the search that didn't work?
Don't forget you can also email recipes@guardian.co.uk with any feedback.
23 June 2010 5:15PM
Someone may have said this already, but would be handy to narrow results by meal type e.g. nibbles/starter/main course/snack/good for children etc
23 June 2010 5:50PM
Don't ask the search engine to exclude anything!?
I sent the comment below to the email address given, but it bounced back, twice! Hope some Guardian staff are reading this!
*****
This site looks interesting and I'll definitely be returning to it. But I've
already noticed one huge problem! If I ask for 'chicken, tomato', but
without 'cream', I get (amazingly!) only four hits. If, however, I omit to
stipulate no cream I get 43 hits -- but when I look at these I discover that
many of them use no cream anyway! The only conclusion I can draw is that
it's an error to ask the search engine to exclude anything.
23 June 2010 5:57PM
Ooo, I love this new service, as I often come to this site to search for recipes despite having had to slog through click after click. No more, yay!
I test-ran "dates" and got 30 entries. Especially appreciated is the unique [so far as I know] feature that lets us "See All ingredients" without opening a new page. One-click recipe shopping. Excellent job, Guardian people. Thank you very much.