What’s in my fridge

How this tool works

Every recipe on the site carries its ingredient list, the one you read before cooking. This tool looks through those lists for 60 everyday items — the vegetables in the drawer, the staples in the cupboard, eggs, cheese, basic spices — and keeps the ones it actually finds. A recipe carries 6.1 of them on average.

When you tick what you have, each dish is ranked on two numbers: how many of your ingredients it uses, and how many it asks for that you do not have. A dish that lands squarely on your fridge comes before one that needs three more trips to the shop. Nothing is sent anywhere: the sorting happens in your browser, and the page does not remember what you ticked.

Why start from the fridge rather than from a craving

A recipe chosen from a photograph usually ends in a shopping list. A recipe chosen from what you already have gets cooked the same evening, and it is also the simplest way to throw nothing away: one lonely courgette, the last of a tin of chickpeas and three cloves of garlic are a real dish somewhere in the world.

Vegetarian cooking lends itself to this better than any other. 366 dishes here are built on things that keep — pulses, grains, root vegetables, spices — and recompose around whatever is left. That is how they came about in the first place, long before cookbooks.

What the tool will not tell you

It does not count salt, oil, water or pepper: it assumes you have them. It does not count items too rare to sit in an ordinary fridge either — they stay in the recipe, the tool simply does not look for them.

And it does not judge quantities. If you have half a tomato where the dish asks for six, it will still offer you the dish: the full list is on the recipe page, and that is the one that counts.

FAQ

Do I need every ingredient of a recipe to cook it?

No, and that is the point of this page: it also shows dishes you are one or two things short of, and names them. A dish missing only the lemon usually gets cooked anyway; one missing its base does not.

Are my ingredients stored anywhere?

No. The sorting happens entirely in your browser, nothing is sent to the server, and the page keeps nothing once it is closed.

Why are salt, oil and water not on the list?

Because they are in almost every recipe on the site: ticking them would change no ranking. The list keeps only what really tells one fridge from another.

Recipes by ingredient