sdamoolp/optimal-recipes-halal

Optimal Recipes — Halal-Friendly Home Cooking Dataset

A curated dataset of 2,300+ halal-friendly home recipes scraped from optimalrecipes.com, with structured ingredients, step-by-step instructions, timing, servings, and image URLs.

All recipes have been filtered to exclude pork, alcohol, and other haram ingredients (with word-boundary matching against a curated token list), making this dataset particularly useful for:

• Building halal-friendly recipe assistants and chatbots
• Training meal-planning models for Muslim audiences
• General-purpose recipe NLP tasks (parsing, summarization, ingredient extraction)
• Image-recipe alignment tasks (each row includes a featured image URL)

Dataset structure

Each row in data/recipes.jsonl is a JSON object:

{
  "id": "cheesy-chicken-casserole-easy-dinner-idea",
  "url": "https://optimalrecipes.com/cheesy-chicken-casserole-easy-dinner-idea/",
  "title": "Cheesy Chicken Casserole — Easy Dinner Idea",
  "category": "Chicken",
  "description": "A cozy one-dish dinner...",
  "ingredients": [
    "2 cups cooked and shredded rotisserie chicken",
    "1 ½ cups long-grain white rice, uncooked",
    "..."
  ],
  "instructions": [
    "Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).",
    "In a large bowl, whisk together...",
    "..."
  ],
  "servings": "6",
  "prep_time": "10 minutes",
  "cook_time": "1 hour",
  "total_time": "1 hour 10 minutes",
  "image_url": "https://optimalrecipes.com/wp-content/uploads/...",
  "lastmod": "2026-04-25T15:18:36+00:00",
  "source": "optimalrecipes.com",
  "license": "CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0",
  "halal_friendly": true
}

Categories

The dataset spans 25+ categories. Largest:

Category	Count
Chicken	~480
Dessert	~470
Seafood	~160
Beef	~70
Pasta	~70
Breakfast	~70
Soup	~50
Salad	~55
Side	~65
Other	~540

(Exact counts: see data/recipes_stats.json.)

Halal filter methodology

Each recipe was scanned for haram tokens with word-boundary regex to avoid false positives (e.g., "shamrock" was not flagged for "ham"). Tokens excluded:

pork, bacon, ham, chorizo, prosciutto, salami, pancetta, lard,
wine, beer, rum, bourbon, whiskey, whisky, vodka, sherry, marsala,
sake, mirin, kahlua, amaretto, champagne, brandy, tequila, cognac, liqueur

Filtering was applied to both slugs and full ingredient/instruction text. A small number of recipes were rejected even though their slug looked clean (e.g., a tomato soup recipe that called for sherry).

Important caveat: "Halal-friendly" here means no pork or alcohol ingredients. It does not mean every animal product is from a certified halal source. Strict observers should verify individual ingredients (e.g., gelatin, vanilla extract) themselves.

Usage

Loading with datasets

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("YOUR_HF_USERNAME/optimal-recipes-halal", split="train")
print(ds[0])
print(f"Total recipes: {len(ds)}")

Filtering by category

chicken = ds.filter(lambda x: x["category"] == "Chicken")

Building a recipe assistant

The combination of title + description + ingredients + instructions makes excellent training data for instruction-tuned recipe models. The image_url field can be used to fetch images for multimodal tasks.

License

This dataset is released under CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0: free for non-commercial use with attribution. Each recipe links back to optimalrecipes.com via the url field — please preserve attribution when redistributing.

For commercial use (e.g., training a commercial product), please contact the maintainers via optimalrecipes.com.

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite:

@dataset{optimal_recipes_halal,
  author    = {Maria and Patricia Jannet},
  title     = {Optimal Recipes — Halal-Friendly Home Cooking Dataset},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/YOUR_HF_USERNAME/optimal-recipes-halal},
  note      = {Sourced from optimalrecipes.com, CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0}
}

Maintainers

• Maria — Co-founder, recipe testing
• Patricia Jannet — Head chef
• Site: optimalrecipes.com

Changelog

• v1.0 (2026-04-29) — Initial release: 2,300+ halal-filtered recipes from optimalrecipes.com.