Forum

I didn't know this feature existed. How does it work?

@damazinah:  Say you want to search for cookies that don't contain peanuts. You filter for cookies by clicking the plus mark beside Recipe Types, and choose Cookies, Biscuits & Crackers by clicking in the circle to its right.  Then you select Peanuts (Ingredients/Baking ingredients/Nuts/Peanuts). Both filter terms appear up above the recipe search results in green tubular shapes, with a plus on the left end and and an X on the right.

To exclude Peanuts, you click on that plus to its left, and the filter 'tube' turns from green to dark grey (and the plus becomes a minus).  The search results below should be cookies etc. that don't contain peanuts.

To remove a filter altogether, you'd click the X to its right.

This might be a good place to note that using filters to exclude ingredients works less well for store-cupboard ingredients -- things like eggs, milk, flour, garlic, olive oil -- because those ingredients aren't listed if the amounts called for in the recipe don't meet EYB's thresholds:  e.g., fewer than four eggs or cloves of garlic, less than a cup of milk, flour, olive oil. 

See the full list of store-cupboard ingredients and the minimum amounts needed for them to be listed here: Store-Cupboard Ingredients Table

Thanks ellabee for explaining the filters. I would encourage all EYB members, even those who have been with us a long time, to try out our new tutorials, accessed from the Need Help? green button at bottom right (not available on phones yet). They each only take a minute or so to do but you will probably learn about features on the site that you have not been aware of.

Up until recently, I rarely used the filters because it often seemed cumbersome to find the ingredients I wanted to search on, although the search results are more on-target with filters than typed-in search terms.

But I have been trying out some filtered searches, and in a couple of cases have been stumped about where to find an ingredient.  Where is 'tomatoes'?  I expected it to be under Ingredients / Vegetables, but...? 

Oops, scratch the question. It's under 'Salad vegetables'.

The easy way to work out what filter category an ingredient is in is to enter the word in the search box then look for the categories with the largest number of recipes next to it. So if we take the example of tomatoes, when I enter tomatoes in search in the Library I can see there are 208,237 recipes in vegetables, then when I open up the Vegetables filter I can see the highest number is 137.689 next to salad vegetables.

I do enjoy using the filters in order to search both my own recipes as well as the ones in the main library.  Does anyone know of a way to use an "or" filter?  For instance, if I'm looking for Middle Eastern cuisine I've found that recipes can be in both Mediterranean (Lebanese/Syrian) and Middle Eastern categories depending on how they were indexed, and it would be nice to be able to search on both at the same time.  Using a boolean search term in the search box unfortunately only searches on recipe title, not ingredients.

Oh, that's a *very* helpful tip, Jane; thanks so much.  I thought that having done a lot of indexing would be more helpful than it turns out to be in figuring out how ingredients are organized in the filters, but that experience does pay off in the other categories, especially Recipe Type.