Pantry matcher
What can I cook tonight?
Tick what is in your fridge, freezer, and cupboards. The matcher checks against 208 recipes in the RecipeCrave catalog and ranks everything you can make. Salt, pepper, oil, sugar, and water are assumed present by default — toggle off if you really do not have them.
Your pantry
6 items
Add custom items
Anything not in the list above. Plain English — "leftover roast chicken", "sourdough starter", etc.
You can make
0 recipes
60% match or better — at most a few items short
Add a few more ingredients to surface recipes
The matcher checks 208 recipes in the RecipeCrave catalog against what you have at home.
How the match score works
Every recipe is broken into its ingredient list. Each ingredient string is parsed against the 145-item pantry catalog using longest-needle-first word-boundary matching— a recipe line that says "tomato paste" resolves to the canned-tomato pantry item, not the fresh-tomato one. Aliases like "courgette" → zucchini and "passata" → canned-tomato are baked in.
Score = (ingredients you have) ÷ (total ingredients) × 100. A 100% match means you have everything you need; 80% means you are 1-2 items short; below 60% the matcher hides the recipe entirely because you would essentially be shopping a fresh recipe.
Custom items you type at the bottom of the pantry panel are bonus matches — if a recipe ingredient line contains the text of your custom item, it counts. "Leftover roast chicken" matches any recipe calling for cooked chicken.
Pair with the Photo Scan
Hate clicking checkboxes? Use the camera button at the top of the pantry panel to jump to the Pantry Photo Scan. Open your fridge, take a photo, and the Gemini Vision model lists everything it sees. Tick the matches into the calculator. Five seconds of photo, twenty checkboxes filled.
Use cases that justify keeping the pantry live
- Tonight's dinner. Flip on strict mode (100% match) and the matcher only shows recipes you can cook without leaving the house.
- Tomorrow's shop. The most-frequent missing ingredients across the recipes you want to cook this week become your shopping list. Cross-check with the Recipe Cost Calculator to budget the shop.
- Use-it-up week. Refresh the pantry when you actually inventory the fridge. Hidden gems (half-jar of harissa, frozen shrimp, three forgotten lemons) often unlock recipes you would never have thought of from a cookbook browse.
- Travel + holiday cooking. Renting a poorly-stocked Airbnb? Spend two minutes scanning the cupboard, get a shortlist of practical meals you can actually pull off in a stranger's kitchen.
Food waste — the real value here
UK households throw away about £730 of edible food per year. Most of that loss happens because nobody plans a meal around the half-bag of spinach quietly wilting in the crisper. A pantry-first cooking discipline reverses the question: instead of "what shall we have?" you ask "what do we have, and what can we make from it?"
The matcher is built to make that question fast to answer. Five seconds of toggling, twenty matched recipes, three things saved from the bin.
Privacy
Your pantry is stored in your browser's local storage. Nothing is uploaded. Clear your browser data and the inventory resets. Optional Supabase sync for logged-in users is on the roadmap so you can carry your pantry across devices.