Computable culinary info

Hi, all

I've been in touch with the people running the WolframAlpha website (http://www.wolframalpha.com) -- I'm actually interviewing for a job there.

One of the things that have surprised them about people's response is how popular their food info is. They have included a lot of nutritional data from the USDA's published statistics (type in a common food like "apple" and see what happens) and apparently this is getting hits right and left.

So they're looking for ways to expand their food coverage. Any requests?

The guy I talked to was interested in including recipes, not just ingredients. Assuming that they can find a way to handle recipes (as stored data and as input), the first thing that lept to mind when thinking of folks here was the ability to compare regional variations in the recipe for a dish.

Then I pointed out that perhaps the nutrition information for individual ingredients could be combined into nutritional info for the finished dish (if their engine keeps track of which ingredients are cooked, since this changes their nutritional profile).

Another friend suggested that the site could do ingredient conversions (cinnamon sticks to ground cinnamon, for example).

What would you like to see? Your input may help make good culinary (or at least ingredient) data more easily available, and may help me make a better impression on my next round of interviews.

The one conversion that always frustrates me is grated parmesan: how much does 1/2C weigh? If I'm using a box grater or a microplane, if can vary from an ounce to four or more.

A danger of measuring nutrition from the sum of ingredients is that of the fats used for cooking: in many dishes it may be poured off, re-used or just plain thrown away. Poaching a lobster in a pound of butter does not mean you're eating a pound of butter.

The folks at King Arthur once sent me a spreadsheet (on request) that enables me to convert any of their cake recipes to different size pans/volumes. Incredibly useful, and I imagine it could be applied to all sorts of baked goods.

Was just going to ask the same thing; don't know why this isn't out there. Most of these have conversions of (2 cups of batter will fit into so many 8" cake pans) but no help with converting your recipe to end up with that volume of batter.

In that vein, something simple that doesn't seem to be out there: a recipe scaler that converts to actual measurements (is able to round to the nearest real fraction of a teaspoon, is able to convert small fractions of a cup to teaspoons and tablespoons) I'd also like something that converts eggs or other whole ingredients into teaspoon-tablespoon measurements (often when you scale down a recipe, you get it down to the point where you've got an egg, and then you can't go any smaller)

Another thing: something that will convert cut-and-pasted recipes into a standardized format. So, for instance, if you input a Joy of Cooking style recipe which has dialogue interspersed between the ingredients list, it will find all the ingredients, make them into a bulleted list, and move the dialogue to a paragraph-style section at the bottom. It would need to be able to scan for numbers written out in English (for instance, to know that one egg is the same as 1 egg) and would need to judge when something is an ingredient (one hardboiled egg, minced) or when something is a part of the instructions (mince one hardboiled egg, and add it to the mixture.) (Or, I suppose, both, as the case may be)

Right now, I'm using Nutritiondata.com to find out the nutritional information of my food desert recipes (I'm very slowly working on compiling them into some kind of resource) but the process is incredibly long, and I've found that their information isn't always accurate. Maybe some way you can OCR scan a nutrition label into your computer and it recognizes the information, does the math for you according to your ingredients list, and imports it into your recipe?

Terrific project, BTW; I hope you get the job.

Thanks, everyone
for the first day of responses.

@Joel:
Yeah, pouring off fat will cause inaccuracies if not accounted for. And not just fat: discarding a courtbouillon or other cooking liquid will at least knock down the vitamin and mineral count.
I suspect that any volume measurement of a grated ingredient is inherently inaccurate -- depends on how finely you grate, whether you pack it down, etc.

@Aaron & Michelle:
The volume conversion is a nifty idea, and seems like a natural for this technology. Thanks!
We'll need a way to get whole recipes in and out of the interface first, though.

@Michelle:
Yes, being able to import recipes into a standard format would open the door to so many types of data comparison and manipulation. That would be really cool!
However, at the moment there's not only the in/out bottleneck; I believe that WolframAlpha is concentrating exclusively on public domain sources of information. Well, maybe I'll be tasked with finding mother lodes of public domain recipes, or soliciting donations from chefs and cookbook companies. We'll see!

It's not really worth much, but a few weeks ago at a Prairie Fruit Farm's dinner, I sat across from a former UofI professor now working for Wolfram. He seemed very impressed with what they were doing.