What 1,763 Recipes Are Actually Made Of
We counted every ingredient line in 1,763 recipes. Garlic is in 47% of them, the median recipe needs 9 ingredients, and stocking the 30 most common ones still leaves most dinners two items short. Full data.
Garlic is in 47% of them. We counted every ingredient line in the 1,763 recipes in the Anychef library — 804 distinct ingredients once quantities are stripped and plurals merged — and one ingredient sits far out ahead of the rest. Onion is second at 32%, eggs third at 21%, and after that nothing appears in more than one recipe in six.
The headline numbers: garlic in 831 of 1,763 recipes (47%) · median recipe: 9 ingredients, or 7 once you set aside salt, pepper, oil, butter, flour and sugar · 804 distinct ingredients across the catalog, but only 219 appear in six or more recipes · stocking the 30 most common ingredients fully covers 6 recipes — and puts 334 of them within two items.
The 20 ingredients that show up most
Kitchen constants are excluded from this table — salt, pepper, cooking oil, butter, flour, sugar and water are in almost everything and tell you nothing. What's left is the real shopping list.
| # | Ingredient | Recipes | Share of catalog |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Garlic | 831 | 47.1% |
| 2 | Onion | 567 | 32.2% |
| 3 | Egg | 361 | 20.5% |
| 4 | Cheddar cheese | 267 | 15.1% |
| 5 | Cumin | 223 | 12.6% |
| 6 | Bell pepper | 206 | 11.7% |
| 7 | Chicken breast | 193 | 10.9% |
| 8 | Soy sauce | 185 | 10.5% |
| 9 | Parmesan | 171 | 9.7% |
| 10 | Lemon | 166 | 9.4% |
| 11 | Milk | 162 | 9.2% |
| 12 | Scallion | 158 | 9.0% |
| 13 | Thyme | 156 | 8.8% |
| 14 | Chicken stock | 153 | 8.7% |
| 15 | Garlic powder | 141 | 8.0% |
| 16 | Heavy cream | 136 | 7.7% |
| 17 | Ground beef | 135 | 7.7% |
| 18 | Carrot | 131 | 7.4% |
| 19 | Canned tomatoes | 131 | 7.4% |
| 20 | Vanilla extract | 130 | 7.4% |
Two things stand out. The first is how fast the curve falls: garlic is in nearly half the catalog, and by tenth place you're down to one recipe in ten. The second is that 733 recipes — 42% of the library — contain neither garlic nor onion, which is a useful corrective to the idea that everything starts with the two of them in a pan. Only 368 recipes use both.
A recipe needs nine ingredients, and seven of them are shopping
The median recipe in the catalog lists 9 ingredients; the mean is 9.1 and the whole library fits between 4 and 14. Almost half of everything lands on 9 or 10.
| Ingredients listed | Recipes | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 4 – 6 | 177 | 10.0% |
| 7 – 8 | 379 | 21.5% |
| 9 – 10 | 853 | 48.4% |
| 11 – 12 | 340 | 19.3% |
| 13 – 14 | 14 | 0.8% |
Take out the six things most kitchens already have — salt, pepper, cooking oil, butter, flour, sugar — and the median drops to 7 ingredients you have to actually acquire. Only 46 recipes in the entire library need three or fewer; 399 need five or fewer. The "5-ingredient dinner" genre is real, but it describes about a fifth of home cooking, not the bulk of it.
If you have this, buy that
The more useful number isn't how often an ingredient appears — it's what it appears with. For each anchor ingredient below, this is the companion that shows up most often in the same recipe, as a share of recipes containing the anchor. Garlic, onion and the seasoning shelf are excluded; these are food-with-food pairings.
| If you have… | Recipes | It's usually cooked with |
|---|---|---|
| Zucchini | 53 | Bell pepper (53%), parmesan (26%), egg (26%) |
| Ground beef | 135 | Cheddar (47%), egg (24%), sour cream (21%) |
| Black beans | 76 | Lime (41%), corn (39%), cheddar (37%) |
| Shrimp | 58 | Lemon (38%), scallion (22%), egg (16%) |
| Spinach | 69 | Parmesan (36%), egg (28%), mozzarella (22%) |
| Broccoli | 64 | Bell pepper (28%), chicken breast (25%), ginger (25%) |
| Rice | 95 | Cheddar (28%), scallion (24%), ground beef (22%) |
| Potato | 106 | Carrot (26%), cheddar (22%), egg (22%) |
| Egg | 361 | Milk (25%), cheddar (16%), parmesan (13%) |
| Chickpeas | 56 | Tahini (23%), red onion (21%), cucumber (16%) |
| Chicken breast | 193 | Cheddar (20%), bell pepper (15%), heavy cream (14%) |
| Canned tomatoes | 131 | Bell pepper (20%), ground beef (17%), carrot (15%) |
Read that as a shopping instruction: the zucchini in the drawer is asking for a bell pepper, and the can of black beans wants a lime. Across the whole catalog, 977 ingredient pairs appear together in four or more recipes — enough of a pattern that we build a page for each one — black beans and corn, bell pepper and zucchini, and 975 more.
Why a small pantry doesn't cook a big library
The obvious next question is how much of the catalog a well-stocked kitchen unlocks. The answer is humbling. Assuming salt, pepper, oil, butter, flour and sugar are free, here's what stocking the N most common ingredients gets you:
| Pantry size | Cook tonight, nothing missing | One item short | Two items short |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top 10 ingredients | 0 | 15 | 80 |
| Top 20 | 2 | 42 | 193 |
| Top 30 | 6 | 80 | 334 |
| Top 40 | 30 | 195 | 526 |
| Top 50 | 52 | 288 | 726 |
Fifty ingredients — a genuinely serious pantry — cooks 52 recipes outright and puts 726 of 1,763 within two items. That's the structural fact behind every "what can I make with what I have" search: the bottleneck is almost never the pantry, it's the last two things. Which is also why matching recipes against what's actually in your kitchen beats browsing a list of them.
Ingredient count by cuisine
Cuisines differ by about two ingredients from top to bottom, and the gap is almost entirely spice count.
| Cuisine | Recipes | Mean ingredients |
|---|---|---|
| Indian | 28 | 10.8 |
| Chinese | 59 | 10.3 |
| Mediterranean | 71 | 10.1 |
| Thai | 28 | 10.0 |
| Korean | 25 | 9.9 |
| Mexican | 143 | 9.9 |
| Japanese | 26 | 9.6 |
| French | 31 | 9.2 |
| Italian | 92 | 9.1 |
| American | 1,255 | 8.8 |
How we counted
Every ingredient line in all 1,763 recipes was normalized before counting: quantities and unit words stripped ("1.5 lbs chicken breast" → "chicken breast"), parenthetical notes and trailing preparations dropped ("onion, finely diced" → "onion"), accents folded, and trivial plurals merged so "garlic cloves" and "garlic clove" both land on "garlic". An ingredient is counted once per recipe no matter how many times it appears in the list. Kitchen constants — salt, pepper, water, cooking oils, butter, flour, sugar — are excluded from the frequency and pairing tables and treated as free in the pantry table; they are noted where that matters. The companion table additionally excludes vinegars, sauces, dried herbs and spices, so the pairings are food with food.
Everything above is a count, not an estimate. These figures come from the literal text of the catalog and can be recomputed exactly. That is worth stating plainly because it is not true of every number on this site: the cost-per-serving, calorie and protein figures attached to each recipe are per-recipe estimates, and we describe them that way. Nothing in this study depends on them.
Common questions
What is the most common ingredient in recipes? Garlic, in 831 of 1,763 recipes (47%), ahead of onion (32%) and eggs (21%).
How many ingredients does the average recipe have? Nine — median 9, mean 9.1, range 4 to 14. Seven once salt, pepper, oil, butter, flour and sugar are set aside.
What ingredients should I always have? By frequency: garlic, onion, eggs, cheddar, cumin, bell pepper, chicken breast, soy sauce, parmesan, lemon. But a 30-item pantry still fully covers only 6 recipes.
What goes with black beans? Lime (41% of black bean recipes), corn (39%), cheddar (37%), rice (26%).
Which cuisine uses the most ingredients? Indian, at 10.8 on average; American is lowest at 8.8.
Keep going
The whole point of counting this was to make the library searchable by what you already own rather than by what it's called. Start from an ingredient you have — garlic, black beans, chicken breast — or from the method for cooking out of a bare fridge. In the Anychef app, scanning the shelf does this matching for you: it reads what's there and returns the recipes that are zero or one items away.
