Take 50,000 recipes and derive 25 amazing facts

November 11, 2013 by
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Before we get to our regularly scheduled content, we wanted to announce a special holiday treat from EYB: Buy 1 EYB Gift Voucher, and Get 1 Free! Plus you’ll be in the drawing to win Nathan Myhrvold’s fabulous new book, The Photography of Modernist Cuisine. 

Check out all the details here.

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Pie chart of pies

Whenever Wired  tackles food-related items, it’s always fascinating, and this recent example is no exception. In 25 Amazing Food Infographics, Drawn From 49,733 Recipes, they received permission from the Food Network to mine their data base, and then got to work: “First, we hired a world-class data-miner, Dylan Fried. He employed tools that are fairly common on the web, if you know where to look. In particular, he used a bunch of Python web-scraping scripts, to crawl all 49,733 Recipes and 906,539 Ratings on Foodnetwork.com, then he dumped those into Mongo, a non-relational database that let us do all kinds of crazy queries.”

We first reported on this project in our blog, The math proves that bacon is the single greatest ingredient but Wired recently reported a number of additional results. Among other revelations:

  • The most reviled review? Pastel Puertoriqueño.
  • The top three chefs for total chicken recipes were Giada De Laurentiis, Rachael Ray, and Ina Garten.
  • The most favorable recipe ratings for current Food TV chefs, in decreasing order, were earned by:  Jeff Mauro, Ina Garten, Alton Brown, Guy Fieri, Bobby Flay, Giada De Laurentiis, and Rachael Ray (Note: chefs like Mario Batalli or Emeril Lagasse were not included as they’re not currently on the network and including them would violate some contract law).
  • The two top cities submitting reviews were Chicago and Brooklyn. However, the top three cities for submitting chili reviews were El Paso, Texas; Planto, Texas; and Louisville, KY.
  • By number of recipes, the most popular pie fillings for recipes are apple, pumpkin, pecan, sweet potato, and banana cream.
  • The three “hottest” ingredients, based on an increased percentage of reviews, were quinoa, salted caramel, and sriracha.

Feel free to check out all of the conclusions but, in the meantime, we’re awarding extra bonus points to anyone who can develop a recipe using quinoa, salted caramel, and sriracha together. 

Category: Antipasto, Book News

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6 Comments

  • FuzzyChef  on  November 12, 2013

    Salted caramel, puffed quinoa and siracha gelee truffles. So, what do I win?

  • ae.bell  on  November 12, 2013

    Holy crap, that actually sounds delicious. You can have my bonus points!

  • robm  on  November 13, 2013

    FuzzyChef, we must have been mind-reading, because that's what I was thinking, more or less. I didn't think of using puffed quinoa, but either puffed or just plain cooked until dry and grainy it could be mixed with the salted caramel and a dash or two of sriracha for a vairly adult version of rice crispy treats! Now on to the next challenge!

  • robm  on  November 13, 2013

    FuzzyChef, we must have been mind-reading, because that's what I was thinking, more or less. I didn't think of using puffed quinoa, but either puffed or just plain cooked until dry and grainy it could be mixed with the salted caramel and a dash or two of sriracha for a fairly adult version of rice crispy treats! Now on to the next challenge!

  • boardingace  on  November 22, 2013

    I totally agree about the salted caramel trend! I have no recipes in my older cookbooks for salted caramel, but it's everywhere new now. I can't wait to try David Lebovit's Salted Butter Caramel Ice Cream Recipe (recipe here: http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2007/04/salted-butter-c/) or the corresponding sauce from his ice-cream book (http://www.amazon.com/The-Perfect-Scoop-Granitas-Accompaniments/dp/158008219X).

    I even bookmarked a recipe for salted caramel rice crispy treats! There really is no limit – LOL!! The link is here if you're interested: http://www.redbookmag.com/recipes-home/tips-advice/rice-crispy-treat-recipe#slide-3

  • boardingace  on  November 22, 2013

    Cook's Country also has an awesome Sriracha-Lime Popcorn recipe in their October/November 2013 issue – I highly recommend it if you like homemade popcorn!!!

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