How a page is made

The short version: work out what the dish actually is, find the one thing that decides whether it succeeds, and say plainly what is known versus inferred.

Where the dishes come from

Search demand, measured rather than guessed. A dish gets a page when people are demonstrably looking for it and no existing page answers the question properly — which on this subject is often, because the top results are frequently forum threads and video links rather than an answer.

What is known and what is inferred

Where a company publishes an ingredient list, a menu description, or a real recipe, that is the starting point and the page says so. Everything past that is inference from how the technique behaves — and the page shows the reasoning so you can judge it, rather than asserting a result.

Some pages exist for dishes that cannot be checked at all: the Souplantation soups, the Hough Bakery cake. Those chains are closed. The pages say that outright instead of implying a recovered formula.

Calorie estimates

Ingredients summed against standard per-100 g energy values, divided by the stated yield. Checked against published figures for the real products, the method lands within about 5–20%. A batch of cookies came out at 390 against a published 370. Fried food is least reliable, because oil absorption varies more than any table captures.

If a single ingredient cannot be resolved to a weight, no figure is shown at all rather than a partial total that looks complete. Sauces are given per tablespoon, since per-serving is meaningless for a sauce.

The estimates are deliberately kept out of the structured data, because search engines present that as fact and this method is not precise enough to be presented that way.

Difficulty

A fixed rule, not an opinion — nobody here has cooked these, so a judgement would be worth nothing. Points for ten or more steps, ten or more ingredients, over two hours, and for 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 Moderate, four or more Involved.

You can recompute it. Count the steps and 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 library it lands at 55 easy, 34 moderate, 11 involved.

Photographs

Licensed stock, captioned as illustrative of the dish type rather than of the recipe on the page. Nobody photographed these dishes because nobody cooked them, and a photograph implying otherwise would breach the first rule of the editorial policy.