Imagine you want to prepare a food recipe, but you’re unsure which one to choose. You decide to search the web and find yourself overwhelmed with numerous options, particularly for famous recipes. In this situation, I suggest utilizing the power of R and the incredible “treemapify” package to visually represent the most commonly used ingredients. Specifically, we can analyze the frequency of ingredients in highly rated recipes on food.com.

This analysis not only assists in selecting recipes but also helps identify people’s tastes and current trends.

Tiramisù

To ensure a focused analysis, for the tiramisù recipes I filtered out ingredients with a count of less than 20 (out of 682 total observations). Additionally, some ingredients have been grouped together, such as “mascarpone” with “mascarpone cheese” and “cocoa” with “cocoa powder,” to provide a more comprehensive view.”

Here are the most popular tiramisù ingredients

Carbonara

Similarly to the previous recipe, for carbonara, I filtered out ingredients with a count of less than 20 out of a total of 615 observations. Some ingredients have been grouped together too. I am a bit surprised about garlic.

Here are the most popular carbonara ingredients

Pizza

Given that the pizza dataset contained 14,599 observations, I filtered out ingredients with a count lower than 200 for the purpose of creating this heatmap. It’s worth noting that certain ingredients, like “mushrooms” and “tomatoes,” have been grouped together for clarity and informative purposes. However, to provide a more comprehensive analysis of people’s tastes and trends, I plan to publish another article focused specifically on these ingredient categories (I noticed a lot of different varieties such as fresh mushrooms, Shiitake, baby portabella mushrooms, button mushrooms, chestnut mushrooms, etc…)

Here are the most popular pizza ingredients

Apart from traditional ingredients such as mozzarella cheese, oregano, and tomatoes, some very appreciated ingredients are garlic, onions, parmesan cheese, pepperoni, mushrooms, ground beef, Italian seasoning, Barbecue sauce, celery (?), eggs, and pepper. The presence of lemon juice is due to some “sweet” pizza recipes topped with fruits.