Processing and analysis of Macedonian cuisine and its flavours by using online recipes

Abstract

Culinary data that are available online can be analysed from many different aspects. In this paper we provide methods for portraying the Macedonian cuisine, as a representative of the South-European cuisine, but highly influenced from the Middle-Eastern and Eastern-European cuisine. By performing different analyses on the Macedonian recipe dataset, we look into the food dietary habits in our country, identify its specific ingredients, their combinations, characterise the flavour trait and depict the Macedonian flavour network. We propose a metric that will address the contribution of a specific ingredient in a recipe by combining the extracted recipes data with existing flavour data. This metric reflects the difference of shared flavours in a recipe when a specific ingredient is present or not, and thus allows us to identify the positive and negative contributing ingredients in a cuisine, providing essential information while comparing two different cuisines. The methods provided in this work can be easily applied for analysis of any cuisine of interest.