Thanks for the response, unfortunately this did not work. Can you think of any other possible work arounds? The ingredients are assigned to the recipe custom post type and I am able to use them elsewhere on the site such as in blog roll templates.
One way I was able to work around this as an experiment was to concatenate the values of custom fields into a string of text that gets input into another custom field, assigned to the search description. That is to say, the field “recipe author” and “year published” are combined into a string, then when the post is published/updated, that the script runs and inputs the text into a summary field which is referenced in the search dropdown.
Unfortunately, I am not a PHP programmer and was only able to achieve this through a lot of good luck and searching. I have attempted to modify the code to work for the repeater field but I have not had any luck. It seems like this would work but I don’t know enough about it to say for sure.
I appreciate any insight you may be able to provide. Here is the code that is currently working as described above.