Ingredient Food Game: Seven Questions on One Dish

The Ingredient food game picks one dish and asks you seven questions about it, from easy to hard, with four options each. Every question is played, a right answer scores a thousand points and a wrong one scores nothing. It is one of three daily puzzles in the Mosey app, and the last question is always about allergens.

How does the Ingredient food game work?

You see the dish of the day and climb a ladder of seven rungs. The early rungs are the sort of thing a home cook might know, such as the base of the dish or how it is usually served. The later ones are expert questions. Each rung has four options, and you pick one.

The answer to each rung is checked on the server and never sent to your phone before you finish, so there is nothing to peek at. A wrong answer does not end the game. The right answer is shown and you go on to the next question, so you always finish with a full set of seven.

Ingredient scoring and the ladder

A right answer scores one thousand points and a wrong answer scores nothing, so your result is out of seven thousand. The screen shows how many you got right, and a perfect day is named the top of the ladder.

Your streak counts any finished game, so a day of seven wrong answers still keeps it going. The stats screen for Ingredient shows games played, your average score, your best score and your streak, but not a win rate, because there is no winning or losing, only how high you climbed.

The allergen question in Ingredient

The seventh rung is always the same question: which allergen does this dish contain? It is a small reminder that what is in a dish matters. The options come from the allergen list for your market. In the United States the list is the nine major allergens the FDA names, with sesame added by the FASTER Act: milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soy and sesame.

Every rung seven has a None of these option. A dish with no allergen on the list answers None of these, and on roughly one dish in three, None of these also appears as a trick option and is then wrong. In the game, pine nuts count as tree nuts in the United States, so a dish such as pesto can carry that answer. The game never offers a wrong allergen that a common variation of the dish would contain.

This is a puzzle, not advice. On a real menu, allergen and dietary information comes from the place, so ask the kitchen directly before you eat.

Where do the questions come from?

Each question is written from a named source, such as a recipe book or a food-history reference, and facts that are uncertain are marked as such. The questions never ask you to choose between politically charged foods, and some dishes with disputed origins are left out of the puzzle entirely. The questions also avoid the easy tell: the right answer is not always the longest one, and a wrong option is never a common variation of the traditional dish.

A strategy for the seven rungs

Take the early rungs fast and trust your kitchen instinct. Slow down at rungs four to six, where a plausible wrong answer is designed to tempt you. If you are guessing, look for the option that matches how the dish is traditionally made, not how a modern version might be.

On rung seven, think about the standard recipe. A dish with cheese, butter or cream probably contains milk. A dish with bread, noodles or breading probably contains wheat. If nothing on the list fits, None of these may be the answer, but remember the trick option.

What does a typical rung look like?

The in-app example describes the shape: four options, one correct answer, taken from a named source recipe. An early rung might ask what a dish is built on or how it is traditionally served. A middle rung might ask about a technique, such as how long something is cured or what is added to a sauce. A late rung asks something only a cook who has made the dish would know.

Read all four options before you answer. The wrong options are chosen to be plausible, and none of them is a common variation of the traditional dish, so if an answer would be a reasonable twist on the recipe, it is probably not the intended one.

What does Ingredient teach you about eating out?

It teaches you to look at a dish as a set of parts. After a few weeks you notice which dishes share a base, which share a sauce, and which allergens show up in unexpected places. That makes you a more confident orderer, and a better rater, because you can say what you tasted.

Mosey is a food app for finding, rating and sharing places to eat. Rate the dishes you eat by name, add tags, keep a list of what to try with a friend, and follow friends whose taste you trust.

The daily food games overview covers all three puzzles, and the Ladle guide explains the dish puzzle. The daily food games page sums them up, and the US food guides list where to eat.

Streaks and the weekly league are covered in the streaks and league guide.

Get the Mosey app, climb today's seven rungs and rate the next dish you eat by name, so what you learn on the ladder turns into better ratings.