Sambar Styles

My wife’s sambar tastes different from my mother’s. And mine, too. When I cooked as a bachelor, my neighbour would pop by, taste the sambar, and exclaim, “Rasam super!” Surbhi’s Day 5 of the 30-day challenge was about Sambar which inspired me to take her dataset and create a decision tree for which state a sambar recipe is from based on its ingredients. ChatGPT started with 68 recipes and built a tree at 41% accuracy. As we added more recipes: Recipes Accuracy 68 41% 293 42% 361 55% 406 54% … the accuracy wasn’t improving all that much. Here is the classifier script: sambar_fftree.py. You can run it via: uv run https://files.s-anand.net/blog/2026-04-26-sambar-styles/sambar_fftree.py But a ingredients are snipers: rare, precise, devastating. Kokum or goda masala -> Maharashtra. 32 for 32 in one run. Perfect. Sesame/gingelly oil -> Tamil Nadu. 28 for 32. Strong. Coconut oil + shallots -> Kerala. 22 for 29. Moong dal + no mustard seeds -> Andhra. 31 for 36. Better than garlic. Byadagi…