Trinidadian Roti Lab
What moves together in 25 Trinidadian roti recipes
When a recipe uses more of one ingredient, does it tend to use more or less of another? For every pair of the 5 ingredient ratios (grams per 100 g of flour), this page ranks all 25 recipes on each and measures how closely the two rankings agree: Spearman's rho, from −1 (the more of one, always the less of the other) through 0 (unrelated) to 1 (always rise together).
10 pairs in all: 4 rise together at rho 0.20 or more, none move in opposite directions at −0.20 or less, and 3 are close to unrelated (between −0.10 and 0.10). This describes recipes as they are published; it does not say what changing one amount would do to a bake.
Every pair at once
Read a cell by its row and column. Caramel cells rise together, slate cells move in opposite directions, and the deeper the color the stronger the relationship. Pale cells with grey numbers are not distinguishable from no relationship with 25 recipes (p of 0.05 or more).
All 10 pairs as a table
| Pair | Rho | Strength | p |
|---|---|---|---|
| Water and baking powder | 0.44 | moderate | 0.028 |
| Sugar and salt | 0.39 | weak | 0.053 |
| Fat and sugar | 0.30 | weak | 0.15 |
| Fat and salt | 0.25 | weak | 0.23 |
| Baking powder and sugar | −0.18 | very weak | 0.38 |
| Water and fat | 0.18 | very weak | 0.40 |
| Baking powder and fat | −0.15 | very weak | 0.46 |
| Baking powder and salt | −0.09 | negligible | 0.66 |
| Water and sugar | 0.07 | negligible | 0.75 |
| Water and salt | −0.02 | negligible | 0.92 |
No strong relationships
No pair reaches rho 0.20 with a p-value under 0.01, the bar for calling a relationship here. The nearest is water and baking powder (rho 0.44, p 0.028), short of it with 25 recipes.
What moves on its own
Every ingredient moves with at least one other: none has its strongest correlation under 0.15.
The pairs closest to unrelated: water and salt (−0.02), water and sugar (0.07) and baking powder and salt (−0.09).
How the numbers are made
Spearman's rho is the ordinary correlation of the two rankings, so it measures whether one amount tends to rise with the other, in a straight line or not, and a single extreme recipe moves it little. A recipe with none of an ingredient ranks lowest on it. An ingredient fewer than 12 recipes use is left out of the matrix.
The p-value is the chance of a rho at least this far from zero if the two amounts were unrelated. With 10 pairs tested, about 0.5 would pass 0.05 by chance alone even if no ingredient were related to another, which is why the relationships explained above must pass 0.01 and reach 0.20.
Every number is divided by the same flour weight, so a recipe light on flour reads high on every ingredient at once. That nudges every correlation toward positive: part of a positive rho can be flour, not the two ingredients. A negative one holds despite it.
A correlation describes the recipes as published. “Recipes with more water tend to use…” is a statement about what bakers write down together, not a rule that adding one forces the other. Plot any two ingredients to see the recipes behind a number.