We love it when you share ideas with us for fixes and features that make your lives easier. We also like making our own lives easier, and sometimes that leads to features we want to share with you. Our ingredient list options is one of those extras that actually came about because of an internal project.

Ingredient List Requirements

Any ingredient that's made up of more than a single ingredient has to have its subingredients shown in the list for the entire product. When you set up a custom ingredient, there's a field where you can specify a default ingredient statement for that entry. You can also always change that or add a list of sub-ingredients for an ingredient inside your recipe on the Ingredient Statement page.

But we wanted to make things easier by adding ingredient lists for common ingredients that already existed in our database. We've gone through many of those entries to make sure a default ingredient statement is in place. So if you add the USDA entry for "Salted Butter" to a recipe, for example, the ingredient list shows up as "Butter (Cream, Salt)".

Setting the Right Ingredient Statement

Every once in a while we also go through the database to see which ingredients are being used a lot and, if they don't have default ingredient statements set up, we add those. For some ingredients it's easy, but for others it takes a bit of work to find the information and input the right ingredient statement as a default. There might be a lot of conflicting information or the exact manufacturer might be unclear.

So we made a page for each ingredient that doesn't have a default ingredient statement where you can see what ingredient statements are already being used. It's a quick reference for you and us for setting up ingredient statements when you're not sure what it should be!

Clicking on the link will bring up the different ingredient lists people have used for that ingredient.

And here's the page with the options.

Be aware that these ingredient statements are not necessarily "correct" or appropriate but are rather a sampling of what existing users have done which you can use as a reference in case you don't already know what to put for an ingredient statement. Here's another simple reference: Always remember to include sub-ingredients and use "common names" for ingredients in your statements.

Let us know what you think!