Hi everyone,
I am currently using a wild mix of browser bookmarks, actual printouts, saved PDFs and screenshots to save recipes I liked and might want to cook again. Obviously this has become unsustainable over the years so now I thought I could put that into a service specialized for that and maybe also stop using Bring! as my shopping list while I’m at it, just to reduce my dependence on cloud services.
I am basically looking for something I can use to catalogue my recipes that allows me to import my various sources and turn them into a searchable uniform format, preferably with some sort of OCR.
I looked at Mealie and Kitchenowl but don’t quite like how they present the recipes and their recipe parsing works only so so…
Have you guys any recommendation?
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Not sure whether helpful or not, but I simply use Joplin with a cookbook as one of the notebooks. In the rare case that I share a recipe with my wife, I simply export a recipe as PDF.
Mealie has been great for me, but there’s still a few things missing. I’ve seen some people vibe code some cool little things that would make great additions to something like that (create a meal plan for x amount of people and it’ll create a grocery list; select what you have and it’ll find the recipes you can make; import PDF’s (things like EveryPlate, etc.)).
But, outside of those few minor things I’d like to see, it’s been pretty good. But, the way they present the recipes, I can get that. There’s some work to be done, but overall I really like it.
Been using RecipeSage recently, highly recommend.
You don’t have to self host if you want to try it out. You can also just create an account for free on their site with no strings attached.
Anything that can host markdown files.
Just vibe code it to your specs. That’s what i did…
Unpopular on Lemmy maybe but you can just do that now. I had an idea that i could just paste any url into it and it would parse it for my format. I made it self hostable. And my family use it
That literally already exists, https://mealie.io/
And that’s probably good :)
but if something slightly annoya me i can just fix it. And i can make it as dumb as i want it. No buttons or features i dont use.
if only there was a software concept that anticipated this and gave you the ability to own and modify your software…
Essier to add to a small base than remove from a big one :)
Easier to get features you didn’t even consider, shared testing and bug finding, and shared maintenance burden.
You even shared your code like you where inviting all of those things…
I have been very happy with RecipeSage.
Heavy duty ring binder and an a3 laminator that can fit the A4 sheets with reinforced pre cut holes for ringbinding, and a short trip to go support your local library by using their printer.
It’ll require no batteries, no network connection, no troubleshooting and it’s waterproof.
I mean, likely OP does not want to do that and I hate to sound like a damn boomer, but sometimes the offline solutions are the best. I admit I got a recipe book too and still transfer recipes in handwriting to it.
I only really need it at home and its easy to put in front of me when cooking.
Mealie has been great for my partner and myself.
Username checks out.
I just use Wallabag and have it automatically add a “Recipe” tag when the URL is a Recipe site.
I haven’t used it but there’s CookTrace
I haven’t personally tried them yet, but I came upon these 2 self-hosted recipe managers. Both look pretty interesting. One has apps associated with them, the other just web based.
and
We also did use bring for a long time and the only one coming near to it’s UX was KitchenOwl for me.
I have used Tandoor for years and its been really nice, its evolved a lot.
Saw that too, from their page I assumed it was a paid product and not self hosted
I really liked tandoor but I moved to mealie cuz tandoor doesn’t have any method of backing up your instance and I lost all my recipes when switching to a new machine (a good part of that was user error too but the lack of a backup option to save my dumb ass meant I needed to look elsewhere)
Honestly. Valid, I like my stuff to be portable as well.
I don’t know if I’d recommend it to anyone else, but I like the Cook “programming language”. They’re a little AI-happy, but that does mean that they run a service that converts online recipes; no OCR that I’ve found. It works nicely for me, because I can dump the recipes in a git repository to move them around, and since it exports Markdown, I can drop recipes into my blog when the situation calls for it.
I do cooking on living history events for dozens of people. And creating the shopping list for them (where a recipe is based on another recipe) is always a painpoint. This sounds versy interesting (never heard of it).
I will give it a try. Thanks for sharing!
That looks very cool and maybe worth porting what I currently do — I just run a super simple template and each recipe is its own include file, with an auto generating index.
Even if the hosting dies the recipes are easy to read on github, and the network availability makes shopping easy if I decide I want to get ingredients for it at a store, or to share.
Oh wow that’s neat
Does the ecosystem have something like Mealie and Tandoor, where a nontechnical user can drop in a link to add a recipe?
It looks like they have something at https://cook.md/, but I have to admit that the marketing-speak gives me a headache with their paid tiers and AI-bot thing.
However, because it’s all text, it’s still pretty flexible. For example, if we find a recipe, say Bánh Mì (gotta love Wikibooks having random things like this…), if you stuff
https://cook.md/in front of the URL, their (LLM-driven) service parses it out, like so, with a download file. That’s a bit fussier/uglier than handing it a link (or clicking a browser add-on), but probably still in-bounds for casual users, if only barely…
