Understanding a gap flag

Why some recipes arrive with a "Needs your input" box, what each kind of gap means, and why we never fill one in for you.

Sometimes a recipe arrives in your library with a box near the top labeled "Needs your input". That box is a list of gaps: places where the original recipe was missing something, or said it too vaguely to cook from with confidence.

We do not fill gaps in for you

It would be easy to quietly supply a plausible number: 350 F for the oven, "serves 4", two cloves of garlic for "some garlic". The recipe would look complete. It would also be wrong some of the time, and you would have no way of knowing which parts were the author's and which were a guess. So we never invent or default missing information. If the source did not say it, the recipe does not pretend it did; it tells you what is missing instead.

The kinds of gaps you will see

A missing yield. The recipe never says how many it serves or how much it makes.
Missing times. No prep time, no cook time, or no total.
A missing oven temperature. Common in older and handwritten recipes that assume you know.
A vague measurement where the amount matters: "a handful of flour", "a splash of vinegar", "season to taste" in a brine or a cure, where a starting amount changes the result.
A word we cannot read with confidence in a photographed recipe: faded ink, a smudge, or handwriting that could be one of two things.

Not every vague phrase is a gap. "Salt to taste" at the end of a soup is a fine instruction; you taste and adjust. It is flagged only when the missing amount would change how the dish turns out.

The one exception: total time

If a recipe gives prep and cook times but no total, we flag it rather than adding the two together, because they often overlap: you chop the vegetables while the water comes to a boil. Today the total is always flagged, never calculated. Prep plus cook is often close enough, so we plan to let you ask for it, clearly labeled as calculated rather than taken from the source.

What to do with a gap

Check the source. Every imported recipe links back to the original page; the answer is sometimes in a comment, a note, or a photo caption there.
Use what you know. If you have made the dish before, you probably already know the answer.
Cook and note it. Make your best judgment the first time and remember what worked.

Tools for filling in a gap right on the recipe, so the box goes away once you have answered it, are on the way.

Why this matters