Punchfork uses social networks to aggregate the most popular recipes

Punchfork is a web app that puts the spotlight on the recipes that are getting the most attention on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

While Punchfork does a number of things, its most prominent feature is sorting recipes from major sites like Epicurious, Serious Eats, The Kitchn and Food Network by the number of shares they are receiving on the social web.

The recipe is assigned a popularity rating between 1 and 100 that indicates how much that recipe has been discussed and shared online.

But that’s not all. You can search the site by ingredient, simply plugging in the contents of your fridge if you’re having trouble thinking up a dish that could use them all. The ingredient-based search is great, although it tries to find recipes that incorporate all ingredients listed — it doesn’t include recipes that use just a subset.

For example, entering asparagus and eggs returned a number of results such as asparagus frittatas, the search for asparagus, egg and duck recipes came up empty. While that’s probably a good thing — that’d be an unusual combination — it would be nice if it fell back on recipes including only two of those ingredients. If this were the case you could throw all of your on-hand ingredients at it knowing something would come up.

Once you create an account, you can save recipes for easy access, solving the problem posed by having your favorites scattered among many different food sites. Punchfork also categorizes ingredient lists for easy shopping; where most sites simply use one undivided list, the same recipe on Punchfork is divided into sections such as produce, meat, canned goods, and dairy.

Punchfork seems to possess the potential for internal social features, though there’s not much there yet. You can see who has favorited a recipe, and click through to their avatar and name — but that’s all there is to a profile at this stage, and there are as yet no messaging or friending functions.