How much time have you wasted standing before your fridge, racking your brain for what to cook with the random assortment of groceries you accumulated throughout the week? Too many. Luckily we have a hack for making those nights a lot less desperate – and it starts, as many great hacks often do, with the internet. Specifically with the tons of websites and apps that generate recipes around specific ingredients – meaning, they’ll tell you exactly what you can make with the ingredients that are in your pantry.
While a kitchen-sink salad with a drool-worthy dressing or an easy comforting soup are certainly always options, recipe finders that let you search by ingredients can help you put veggies and other pantry items to good use in creative ways to not only minimize your kitchen waste but give you an excuse to flex your cheffing skills a bit, too.
Most of these recipe generators are also free and super easy to use. Just enter a list of what’s in your fridge (or at least the ingredients you want to cook with) into one of these recipe-generator sites or apps and it will produce recipe options with those ingredients. Fair warning: the resulting list may include recipes that require a few additional ingredients – often staples most people have on hand, like spices, butter, or olive oil. But that’s not always the case, so if your pantry is really bare, these sites and apps might still work for you.
Enter ingredients, get recipes. It’s that simple. So what are you making for dinner tonight?
1. SuperCook
SuperCook is probably the most well-known app for finding recipes based on your ingredients. It’s incredibly easy to use and has ultra specific filters to make your recipe search more personalized. You can narrow it down by choosing your main star ingredient or even what type of cuisine you’d like to try. If you don’t want to download another app, you can also access SuperCook via a web browser.
2. Magic Fridge
Magic Fridge (also known as Frigo Magic) is a French app with more than 4,800 recipes. It allows you to specify the number of people you’ll be cooking for and even has a “memo” feature that lets you know what ingredients are in-season, and provides nutritional information for each recipe, too.
3. BigOven
The BigOven app lives up to its name, by being home to more than one million recipes. It comes with a few handy features like the “Use Up Leftovers” option, where you type in what leftovers you want to finish off without, you know, feeling like you’re eating leftovers again.
4. Yummly
The Yummly site provides AI-driven personalized recommendations by asking you for your favorite cuisines, food allergies and diets, personal tastes, and even cooking expertise level. Like all of these apps, Yummly helps reduce food waste by allowing you to search recipes by ingredients in their search bar.
5. Gumbo
Gumbo is a UK-based website with an AI-powered recipe finder that helps you find meals to make with what you have at home. Head to the homepage, then start adding ingredients; Gumbo will scan the internet for recipes that fit your criteria and present tons of options that use what you have. To sort through your options, you can also filter by the amount of time taken, dietary preferences (vegetarian or vegan), and meal type (breakfast, desserts, drinks, mains, and sides).
6. ChefGPT
You’ve heard about ChatGPT – now, meet ChefGPT. This AI-powered website offers several helpful features for cooking and meal planning, including one called PantryChef, which allows you to input the ingredients you have at home then generates recipes for you. The basic version is free (which comes with access to PantryChef), but you’ll need to create an account to access it. If you want to upgrade to Pro for $3 per month, you’ll get access to even more features, including meal planning and wine pairing.
– Additional reporting by Clara Amelia, Mirel Zaman, and Lauren Mazzo
Kathryn Mayer is a former PS contributor.
Clara Amelia was an operations support associate at PS. With a BA in journalism and screen studies, Clara gravitates towards Latine stories, film and TV, pop culture, fashion, and lifestyle.
Mirel Zaman is the former health and fitness director at PS. She has over 15 years of experience working in the health and wellness space, covering fitness, general health, mental health, relationships and sex, food and nutrition, spirituality, family and parenting, culture, and news.
Lauren Mazzo was the senior fitness editor at PS. She is a certified personal trainer and fitness nutrition specialist through the American Council on Exercise. Prior to joining PS, she worked for six years as a writer and editor for Shape Magazine covering health, fitness, nutrition, mental health, sex and relationships, beauty, and astrology.
