When does it go in?
A recipe is a sequence. This is where each ingredient falls in it, measured across 14,362 steps in 2,345 recipes — 0 is a recipe’s first step, 1 is its last.
The chart that went around showed twelve ingredients pooled together. The two questions people asked were “what about mine” and “surely that differs between baking and a stew”. Both are fair. Pick any of the 161 ingredients that clear the floor, and split it by the kind of dish.
Pick an ingredient
garlic, by kind of dish
garlic sits at a mean position of 0.28 across 1,302 recipes — 56% of its mentions fall in the first third of a recipe and 6% in the last. onion sits at 0.35.
What the split is for
Pooling hides things. Cinnamon has a mean of 0.28 in mains and 0.48 in desserts — early in a savory pot, where it is bloomed in fat, and later in a sweet one. Butter runs 0.25 in desserts, where it is creamed at the very start, and 0.47 in mains, where it is often the finish. Egg has the widest spread of any ingredient here, 0.21 to 0.80 depending on what you are making.
One honest caution about the garlic-and-onion argument, since that is the one people wanted settled. This tool shows when each ingredient is mentioned, pooled over recipes that may contain only one of them. That is a different question from which goes in first when a recipe uses both — for that, see the order of operations, where of 785 recipes naming both, 38.5% add garlic after onion, 39.4% add them together and 22.2% start with garlic.
Honest limitations
- A mention is not an addition. “Remove the bay leaf” counts as a bay-leaf mention, and a step that says “season to taste” without naming salt does not count as salt. Step text is a proxy for practice.
- Matching is by word, not by understanding. Terms are drawn from the corpus’s own ingredient names and matched with a plural-tolerant word-boundary search, so “pepper” catches both the spice and the vegetable, and “oil” catches every kind at once. Where a more specific term exists (“olive oil”), prefer it.
- Floors are enforced, not faded. An ingredient needs 25 recipes to appear at all, and a kind of dish needs 15 to get its own curve. Anything below is omitted rather than drawn faint — a curve from nine recipes is noise wearing a shape.
- Position is by step count, not by the clock. Step 3 of 4 might be “simmer for three hours”. Under half of steps state a duration, so the count is what there is.
- ~40% of the corpus was written for this project and may state sequence more explicitly than recipes in the wild.
Reproduce this
Deterministic, offline, no model calls. Every number on this page is read from the script’s results file — the page cannot state a number the script didn’t produce.
python analysis/instrument_room/scripts/piece11_ingredient_timing.py
Inputs: data/recipe_corpus/recipe_steps_v3.json + prototype/web/src/data/sample_corpus_v17.json (both read-only). Every number on this page is in analysis/instrument_room/results/piece11_ingredient_timing.json.