Forum

It would be lovely to have a way of restricting recipe search by number of ingredients.  Using five as the example number, I'd like to be able to restrict a search to:

"only five ingredients"

"only five-plus ingredients" where the "plus" means plus store-cupboard ingredients

"five ingredients at most"

"five-plus ingredients at most"

Since these can be generated automatically from the ingredient lists, I have high hopes that they will be easy to code up.

[I apologize if somebody else has already suggested this -- as soon as the forums get search, I promise to search diligently for other posts on some topic I want to raise.]

xxx, mcvl

No-one else has made this request yet.  It sounds interesting - I will need to pass it to the developers to see how feasible it is.  We do still have a huge long to-do list waiting their attention - some are small bug fixes and some are major new features planned for EYB.  So it may be a while before this would happen, if it is feasible.

Just curious - how would you use this? I cannot imagine any use for a general ingedients counting feature, but maybe I'm just not imaginative enough ;-)

Those 4-ingredient cookbooks are not just recipes with few ingredients - they are cookbooks especially for people who feel other cookbooks are too complicated. In other cookbooks, the link between number of ingredients and simplicity or fastness is not quite as straightforward.

I took a look at the Zuni Café cookbook to illustrate. Beef carpaccio with lemon and olive oil has only 3 ingedients, but is pretty complicated. The poleta dishes all have 2 to 4 ingredients, but are quite time consuming. On the other hand, when searching by number of ingredients, you would miss the pasta alla carbonara, as that has 6 ingredients. And that one is quite easy and fast to make.

Also, things like spices can increase the number of ingredients significantly without increasing the complexity at all. As a matter of fact, not all recipes in x-ingredient cookbooks have x ingredients on EYB, because they might leave out the "suppoting cast" when counting ingredients.