Analysis: Recipe effort vs Popularity Map
Find recipes that have the highest ROI from data
To test the common home-cooking debate that "croquettes aren't worth the effort because they disappear in seconds," I gathered and visualized recipe data from the web.
By crawling online recipe sites, I plotted each dish on a scatter plot mapping "Popularity" (number of posted recipes) against "Effort" (average number of preparation steps).
Quantifying the ROI of Home Cooking
The visualization highlights where each dish stands in concrete numbers:
- Across the board, "popularity" and "effort" are inversely correlated: more popular dishes tend to require less work. Staples like Hamburg steak and miso soup fall into this category.
- On the other hand, some dishes demand massive effort despite lower popularity. "Hiroshima-style Okonomiyaki," for instance, has relatively few recipes while averaging a grueling 20 steps.
- Comparing dishes within the same popularity tier confirms the suspicion: "Potato Croquettes" require noticeably more effort than their peers.
A quick data-scraping experiment testing everyday kitchen hunches through visualization.