Cornbread Lab250 recipes

Cornbread Lab

No clear styles in 250 cornbread recipes

Leave the recipe names aside and group the 250 recipes by their 7 ingredient ratios alone, so that recipes built alike land together. Each group is named only by the numbers: the ingredients where its recipes sit furthest from the middle of all 250.

The best split found, into two groups, has a silhouette of 0.17, on a scale where 0 is no separation and 1 is complete. That is too low to call them styles: these recipes form one continuous spread. The groups below are its two ends, shown for reference.

The recipes on one map

Every recipe, placed on the two directions along which the ratios vary most (a principal component projection). Close dots are recipes built alike. The lettered rings mark the middle of each group.

AB
Across →
More sugar and fat, less cornmeal share to the right; 27% of the variation.
Up ↑
More buttermilk, leavening and egg upward; 22% of the variation.

The two ends of the spread

ALess sugar and fat

143 recipes · 57% of all 250 · median oven 400°F (205°C), 25 min

Where it differs from all recipes

  • Sugarmedian 14% vs 21% for all

    average rank: 31st percentile of all recipes

  • Fatmedian 23% vs 29% for all

    average rank: 36th percentile of all recipes

  • Cornmeal sharemedian 54% vs 53% for all

    average rank: 60th percentile of all recipes

Its median recipe, at 250 g flour

Median recipe of group A in grams, against the median of all recipes
IngredientGroup AAll
Cornmeal share135 g130 g
Buttermilk255 g230 g
Fat60 g75 g
Sugar34 g55 g
Egg75 g85 g
Leavening10 g10 g
Salt3.5 g3.5 g

Each line is the group's median for that ingredient, scaled to 250 g of flour.

Closest to the middle of the group

BMore sugar and fat

107 recipes · 43% of all 250 · median oven 375°F (190°C), 25 min

Where it differs from all recipes

  • Sugarmedian 45% vs 21% for all

    average rank: 75th percentile of all recipes

  • Fatmedian 43% vs 29% for all

    average rank: 69th percentile of all recipes

  • Cornmeal sharemedian 53% vs 53% for all

    average rank: 37th percentile of all recipes

Its median recipe, at 250 g flour

Median recipe of group B in grams, against the median of all recipes
IngredientGroup BAll
Cornmeal share130 g130 g
Buttermilk230 g230 g
Fat110 g75 g
Sugar110 g55 g
Egg95 g85 g
Leavening11 g10 g
Salt3 g3.5 g

Each line is the group's median for that ingredient, scaled to 250 g of flour.

Closest to the middle of the group

How the groups are found

Each ratio is converted to a z-score (how many standard deviations a recipe sits from the mean), capped at 3 so one extreme recipe cannot claim a group, and k-means sorts the recipes into k groups, trying k from 2 to 4. Each k runs from 16 fixed starting points and keeps the tightest result, so the page is the same on every build. No group may hold fewer than 25 recipes.

The number of groups is the one with the best silhouette, which compares how close each recipe is to its own group with how close it is to the next one. By number of groups: 2 groups 0.17 · 3 groups 0.16 · 4 groups 0.15. At 0.25 or more the page calls the groups separate; from 0.18 to 0.25, overlapping; under 0.18, no clear styles.

A group's name lists the one to three ingredients where its recipes rank furthest from the middle of all 250, on average. “More” and “less” are relative to the whole dataset, and the names say nothing about texture or taste, which the ratios alone do not show. The median recipe of a group is, like the typical recipe on the overview, the middle of each ingredient separately, not one real recipe. The recipes listed under each group are the ones nearest its center, at most two from any one site.