Supercook: Recipes From What's Already in Your Fridge

Supercook is a free recipe site that flips the usual order of operations. You do not pick a dish and go shopping. You tick off what is actually in your kitchen, and Supercook shows you every recipe you can cook right now, with nothing extra.

Two eggs, half an onion and some rice you forgot about? That is dinner, and Supercook knows several versions of it.

What is Supercook?

The standard recipe site assumes you are planning. You browse something beautiful, write down eleven ingredients, and go to a store. Real weeknights do not work like that. Real weeknights are you, a fridge door, and a slowly rising panic.

Supercook was built for that moment. It calls itself a zero-waste recipe generator, and the name is honest. The interface is a big checklist of ingredients organized by where they live in your kitchen, produce, dairy, meat, grains, canned goods, condiments, spices. You click what you have. As you click, the results panel fills with recipes drawn from across the web, and it keeps updating in real time.

Crucially, it also shows near-misses: dishes you could make if you picked up one more thing. That is often the more useful list, because “buy one lemon” is a plan and “buy fourteen items” is a chore.

What can you do on Supercook?

• Build a virtual pantry once. Tick everything you keep around: salt, oil, flour, the usual suspects, and it stays saved. From then on you only toggle the fresh stuff.
• Watch results update live. Add garlic and the recipe count jumps. It turns pantry entry into a slightly addictive game.
• See what you are missing. Filter for recipes that need only one or two ingredients you do not have, and let that shape your shopping list.
• Narrow by dish type. Breakfast, dinner, dessert, soup, snack: useful when you have plenty of options and no decision-making capacity left.
• Filter by cuisine and diet. Keep results within vegetarian, vegan or whatever else you need.
• Cook the awkward leftovers. That is the real magic. Search “what do I do with half a cabbage” on Google and you get listicles. Tick cabbage on Supercook and you get instructions.

Tips to get the most out of it

1. Spend ten minutes on your staples the first time. Add every spice, oil, vinegar and condiment you own, even the boring ones. The quality of every future result depends on this one session.
2. Do it standing at the fridge. Open Supercook on your phone and go shelf by shelf. Guessing from memory is how you end up with a recipe that needs the yogurt you finished on Tuesday.
3. Live in the one-ingredient-away list. This is where the good dinners hide. It converts “nothing to eat” into “one stop on the way home.”
4. Prune your pantry after cooking. Untick what you just used. A pantry that lies to you produces recipes you cannot make, and then you stop trusting it.
5. Use it before the shop, not after. Clear out what is already dying in the crisper drawer, then buy for the gaps. Your grocery bill will notice.
6. Filter by dish type when you are indecisive. Sixty results is not helpful. Six soup results at 7pm on a cold day is.

If you like Supercook, also try…

• Omni Calculator: thousands of calculators including plenty of cooking and nutrition ones, all clearly explained.
• JustWatch: solve the other half of the evening: what to eat, then what to watch.
• Ninite: the same brand of quiet, practical usefulness, aimed at your computer instead of your fridge.
• Worldometers: live global counters, including some genuinely sobering ones on food.

Browse more in Tools & Utilities.

Go tick off your fridge on Supercook and find out that you could have made dinner this whole time.