When selecting an ingredient in the experimentation tab the lowest quality available is always selected first.
If prompted by Windows, you should "Wait for the program to respond". We apologize for the necessity of this, and ask you to be patient with the system while it sorts our your saves.
The game "shouldn't" be frozen in this state, and you'll just need to be patient, waiting for it to complete (when it'll load the main menu). This may take a few minutes, depending on just how many save games you currently have, and the speed of your computer. Currently this occurs immediately after the splash screens, and it can seem like the game is hanging (just a white screen).
IMPORTANT: You WILL experience a delay on startup.the game will need to parse all of your save games to regenerate the meta data (which optimizes startup/loading save games, limiting the amount in info we need to parse). These files are not modified, or deleted, by this process and can be restored in a future version, once the converter issue is fixed. If there's an bug in the save conversion, then the game saves a flag for that file, and you won't be able to load it, though it allows you to resume playing with any other valid save files. What caused the issue: There was a bug in a previous save converter.