Yeah, we wish we could have added more instruction. Recipes on easy have 3 ingredients, recipes on medium 5, hard 7 and hardcore a full 9 ingredients per recipe. So it may be that you weren't putting the right number of ingredients. The book gives you a certain percentage of ingredients, easy gives like 75%, medium like 60% on hard, and etc. Using the book and the name you can often glean a good portion of the ingredients, but other times you need to learn the recipe by reacting to user feedback. Originally we were going to have a menu that showed the flavor profile of the ingredient you're looking at, which would have helped with the "too sweet" or "not savory enough" type responses. Glad you enjoyed it anyways.
Viewing post in Holey Unprepared jam comments
Well no, I don't mean 3 of each ingredient, for example lets say your choices are beets, beef, onion, and potatoes, on easy you may have a recipe that requires 1xBeef, 1xPotatoe, and 1xOnion, or a recipe requiring 2x Potatoe and 1xBeet, summing up to 3 total, not 3 of each ingredient. The ingredients are always in increments of 1x, so if a recipe required more than one of something it'll appear on the recipe page more than once. But even on easy there's 9 slots for ingredients, just the last 6 are always holes on easy for example because there's no ingredient there., because of this it might be tricky to know how many ingredients are needed for the recipe, you may have had the last two items on a hard recipe with holes and only put 3 ingredients in instead of the 5 the recipe wanted. Or you may have put more in that was needed. Either way it needs more clarity, which will be something we'll work on when we continue working on this when the judging ends.