“So for any multiple fields such as steps of instructions, photos, etc, they all need their own pods.”
I don’t think I would go that route with the instructions. Probably best to just have a paragraph field for instructions in the recipe pod and enter your images and content into that field the same way you would in a regular post or page. I don’t immediately see much of a need to break that out into a separate Pod since 1) you’re unlikely to be able to reuse most single instructions elsewhere, and 2) the list is likely to grow quite large.
Ingredients could be implemented the same way if you want. Instead of creating an ingredient Pod you could just make the ingredient list a regular paragraph field and list all the ingredients for the recipe there and keep it simple. The usefulness of having them in their own Pod would show up if you wanted to link individual ingredients on a recipe page to find more recipes that use that ingredient. If you don’t think you’ll bother doing anything that fancy then you could bypass breaking them out separately.
Including Pods results in your WP search would mean writing extra code to search your Pods, so it doesn’t matter much which way you implemented ingredients. You can search through an ingredient Pod or search through an ingredient list field in a recipe Pod with roughly the same about of work, you’d just go about it differently.
Search engines don’t care one bit about your data structures, all they do is index the resulting page output. So, ingredients appear on a page and they’ll be seen by the index bot… regardless of the method used to display them behind the scenes.
“How will the pick work on a public form page?”
I’m afraid I don’t understand this last question.
