Guide
Turn an ingredient label into a recipe you can cook
Ingredients are listed by weight. That order is the skeleton of a reconstruction — more useful than the marketing name on the front of the box.
The first three ingredients
By US labeling rules, ingredients appear in descending order by weight. The first three usually are the food. Water, oil, tomato, milk, sugar, wheat — that is the reconstruction target. Everything after that is seasoning, function, or shelf life.
Parentheses are recipes inside recipes
“Chocolate chips (sugar, chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, soy lecithin, vanilla)” is a sub-formula. Recipe Solver keeps those nested ingredients. A homemade version may swap in real chocolate chips instead of rebuilding the chip factory.
What to photograph
The barcode identifies the product. The ingredient panel is the evidence. A nutrition panel helps quantities (salt, sugar, fat) but does not name flavors. If the print is glossy or cropped, retake the photo. A blurry label is worse than no label — it invites a confident wrong recipe.
What Recipe Solver will not do
It will not skip from the product name to a generic internet recipe. If the label is missing, it asks for the label. Substitutions come after the original functions are understood — not before.
Next: how reconstruction works · scan a barcode · xanthan gum.
Scan a packaged food
Recipe Solver rebuilds from the package — not a generic recipe from the name.