Recipe Puppy, a new Recipe Search Engine

April 21, 2009 8:16 AM

Recipe Puppy, a new Recipe Search Engine
I have been working on this project since December. It is a recipe search engine that lets you search for recipes by ingredients. Simply put in the ingredients you have and the type of food you want, and the search engine will return the recipes you are closest to being able to make. You can also specify ingredients you don't have, and ingredients that absolutely must be included in the recipe.

For example, when doing a search for salsa, I can specify that I have cilantro, tomatillos, lime juice, and jalapeños, but I am out of garlic. It returns the recipes that I am closest to making with those ingredients. I then can specify that I must use the tomatillos, because I want a Salsa Verde. Here is this search

posted by kbrower3 (8 comments total)

This project was posted to MetaFilter by yuletide on April 21, 2009: Recipe Puppy, a new Recipe Search Engine

This is making me all nostalgic. My recipes were all user-submitted, and every day I've breathed since then I've wished that there was one that searched the internet like this. Awesome work.
posted by soma lkzx at 8:30 AM on April 21, 2009

I think this is great. I'd love to know how you are pulling in the info from the other sites-- especially how you are able to list each ingredient individually. I had been pondering how to do this sort of thing in a different context. Do you have some sort of screen scraper?
posted by scottatdrake at 9:14 AM on April 21, 2009

This is really awesome! Though it doesn't always seem to recognize all the ingredients. Searching for "rice, lentils" the first link it gave me was this and it said that I'd only need to add broccoli, but the recipe doesn't actually include any broccoli but instead campbell's cream broccoli cheese soup (also roasted garlic & pepper seasoning).

That said, it did give me a lot of simple rice and lentils based recipes, especially once I started adding in "suggested ingredients."
posted by Kattullus at 12:03 PM on April 21, 2009

Mefi'd :)

Awesome!
posted by yuletide at 4:17 PM on April 21, 2009

Nice! Although it would be great to have a way to index food blogs, as some commenters in the blue have suggested. I am sure you are working on it. Keep up the great work! :)
posted by sararah at 8:13 PM on April 21, 2009

This is really awesome and I have already used it! (Although it turned out I was too lazy to make applesauce cake.)

My only complaint is that I expected "exclude" to create a Boolean NOT (cocoa powder NOT chocolate), rather than simply to remove the AND (still including chocolate, but not requiring it). Calling those buttons "add" and "remove" might clarify.

The Boolean NOT might be a great addition, as well. Anyway, awesome!
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 2:39 PM on April 25, 2009

Nice. I've been looking for something just like this. I hate letting my food rot in the fridge just because I can't think of a recipe. We get a veggie/fruit box from a CSA group every week and there is inevitably something left over I don't cook with very often... usually leeks!
posted by Metachel at 10:07 AM on April 30, 2009

This is awesome! This is exactly what I've been wishing someone would invent... THANK YOU.
posted by indienial at 2:20 AM on April 22, 2011