Waffles Lab455 recipes

Waffles Lab

Two overlapping styles in 455 waffle recipes

Leave the recipe names aside and group the 455 recipes by their 6 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 455.

The data splits best into two groups, but they overlap: a silhouette of 0.18, on a scale where 0 is no separation and 1 is complete. Read them as tendencies within one broad spread rather than separate kinds of waffle.

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 liquid and salt, less sugar to the right; 27% of the variation.
Up ↑
More fat, leavening and sugar upward; 22% of the variation.

The two groups

AMore liquid and leavening

267 recipes · 59% of all 455

Where it differs from all recipes

  • Liquidmedian 171% vs 150% for all

    average rank: 65th percentile of all recipes

  • Leaveningmedian 5.1% vs 4.1% for all

    average rank: 64th percentile of all recipes

  • Saltmedian 1.2% vs 0.7% for all

    average rank: 64th 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
Liquid425 g375 g
Egg100 g100 g
Fat80 g80 g
Sugar31 g38 g
Leavening13 g10 g
Salt3 g2 g

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

Closest to the middle of the group

BLess liquid and leavening

188 recipes · 41% of all 455

Where it differs from all recipes

  • Liquidmedian 104% vs 150% for all

    average rank: 29th percentile of all recipes

  • Leaveningmedian 2.6% vs 4.1% for all

    average rank: 30th percentile of all recipes

  • Saltmedian 0.1% vs 0.7% for all

    average rank: 30th percentile of all recipes · none in 36% (all recipes 19%)

Its median recipe, at 250 g flour

Median recipe of group B in grams, against the median of all recipes
IngredientGroup BAll
Liquid260 g375 g
Egg120 g100 g
Fat75 g80 g
Sugar50 g38 g
Leavening6 g10 g
Salt0.5 g2 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 46 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 0.18 · 3 groups 0.17 · 4 groups 0.16. 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 455, 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.