Last month I wrote about building a 1,800-page calculator site solo. Since then the recipe hub on that site grew to 501 dishes from 127 countries — and today I'm releasing all of it as an open dataset.
Download
- JSON (full dataset, ~2.6 MB): https://theunitools.com/data/unitools-recipes-v1.json
- CSV (one dish per row): https://theunitools.com/data/unitools-recipes-v1.csv
- Docs + sample record: https://github.com/farcrak/unitools-recipes
- Dataset page: https://theunitools.com/en/data
What's inside
- 501 home-cooking recipes, 127 countries, bilingual (English + Russian, both written by hand — no machine translation)
- Per-serving nutrition (calories, protein, fat, carbs) on every single dish
- 3,200+ steps, each annotated with minutes
- Ingredients with stable ids and scaling rules: meat scales linearly with servings, salt and spices are damped — the way an actual kitchen scales a recipe, not naive multiplication
- Human-reviewed Wikimedia Commons photos with author + licence per photo
Why the scaling rules matter
Most recipe datasets store "2 tbsp salt for 4 servings" and leave scaling to you. Multiply salt linearly to 16 servings and the dish is inedible. Each ingredient in this dataset carries a scaling field (linear | damped | fixed), so a portion calculator can be built directly on top of the data. That's exactly how the recipe pages on the site work.
Licence
CC BY-SA 4.0 — free for commercial use. Credit "UniTools — theunitools.com" and share derivatives under the same licence. Photos carry their own Commons licences (in the data).
Honest caveats
Nutrition is computed from ingredients, not lab-measured — a planning reference, not medical data. The dataset is maintained by one person; if you spot an error, open an issue on the repo and the fix lands in the next version.
If you build something with it — a meal planner, a viz, a model fine-tune — I'd genuinely love to hear about it in the comments.
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