About The Dish Lab
The Dish Lab works out what is actually in the food people look up — the restaurant items, the discontinued menu things, the jarred sauces that are out of stock.
Two kinds of page, and every one says which it is
Reconstructions. A home version of something a restaurant or manufacturer sells. It is not their recipe. Where a company publishes an ingredient list or a menu description, we say so and work from it.
Published recipes. Where a recipe already exists in a cookbook or on a company's own site, we say where it came from and point at the source rather than pretending to have cracked a secret.
Why there are no star ratings
Nobody has cooked these dishes and nobody has rated them, so any number of stars on this site would be invented. Review counts and aggregate scores are the easiest thing on the internet to fabricate, which is exactly why we do not, and why none of them appear in this site’s structured data either.
What is in that space instead is checkable: the time, the calorie estimate, the ingredient count, and the difficulty rule above.
What we do not do
We do not claim to have cooked things we have not cooked. There is no invented chef here and no invented backstory. We publish no star ratings and no review counts, because we have none.
Where something is an approximation, the page says so.
How the difficulty label is worked out
It is a fixed rule applied to every recipe, not an opinion about how hard anyone found it. Nobody here has cooked these dishes, so a judgement would be worth nothing.
A recipe earns points for having ten or more steps, for having ten or more ingredients, for taking over two hours, and for using a technique that commonly fails — deep frying, emulsifying, kneading and proving, tempering, reducing to a set point. One point or none is Easy, two or three is Moderate, four or more is Involved.
The reason for spelling this out is that you can check it. Count the steps and the ingredients on any page and you will get the same answer we did. A figure nobody can reproduce from the page in front of them is a rating wearing a lab coat.
Across the 100 recipes it lands at 55 easy, 34 moderate, 11 involved.
How the calorie estimates are worked out
Where a recipe shows a calorie figure, it is the sum of its ingredients divided by the stated yield, using standard per-100 g energy values for the generic form of each food.
Treat it as a good estimate, not a measurement. Checked against published figures for the real products, this method lands within about 5–20%. A batch of cookies came out at 390 against a published 370. Fried food is the least reliable, because how much oil a coating absorbs varies with temperature, batter and timing more than any table can capture.
Where a figure is missing, that is deliberate. If even one ingredient in a recipe could not be resolved to a weight, no number is shown at all — rather than a partial total that looks complete. About a quarter of the recipes have no figure for this reason.
The estimates are not published as structured data, because search engines present that as fact and this method is not precise enough to be presented that way.
Sauces and dressings are given per tablespoon rather than per serving, since that is how anyone actually uses them.
Corrections
If a page is wrong, tell us and we will fix it or remove it. The contact page has the address.