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?

I've been using tandoor after using mealie for awhile. I find it works very well.

I've been happy with Mealie for the last year or so. The parsing does often require manual adjustments for ingredients not yet in my db, and while that's a bit annoying hasn't been a blocker for me.

Curious to hear other recommendations here too!

What drew you to Tandoori from Mealie? It's been a while since I compared them and I can't quite recall why I chose Mealie. Which I'm happy enough with. Just curious.

Same, mealie has been fine.
So I have to amend ingredients during the parsing, doesn't take long.
Does everything I need.

I love it. There is no android app that I like. I use the web version. Same experience as yours. That's not a big issue because I don't add recipes on a daily basis.

Not self hosted, but I'm a huge fan of Broccoli!

I've been using Grocy, since my main use case is grocery list sharing with my wife. It has recipes as well, and since the DB knows your kitchen, it can display if you're good to go or need to go shopping for your meal.

I use the cookbook plugin for Nextcloud but I'm here for suggestions too.

I'll second Tandoor. I use a tablet in the kitchen for recipes and like the mobile client for that. I also like that I can have two separate users who share recipes and meals.

Not the person you're asking, but I went the other way around like you, the main reason for me was that mealie can extract and import from plaintext, so it's easier to migrate away if I ever want to. I rather have things closer to plaintext whenever possible.

My girlfriend writes them in a word processor, prints them and keeps them organized alphabetically in a binder.

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.

We also did use bring for a long time and the only one coming near to it's UX was KitchenOwl for me.

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.

FlavorMate

and

Recipya

I haven't used it but there's CookTrace

https://lemmy.world/post/51530390

Mealie isn’t bad, but the UI makes it a huge pain to enter recipes. Luckily, the web import often works well, but some websites don’t support the JSON recipe format it requires. I recently setup llama.cpp on my server for the “AI import” feature that closes the gap well enough.

Yeah, I was gonna say, just a bunch of Markdown files would probably be fine. Use e.g. mdBook if you want a static webpage with search.

A dedicated service might have some advantages, but personally, I'd care much more about having my recipe collection in a format that I can access without specific software.

I just use Wallabag and have it automatically add a "Recipe" tag when the URL is a Recipe site.

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?

Username checks out.

I used Broccoli for years and really like it's simplicity. There is Brassica, which should turn Broccoli into a self host experience, but I couldn't get it to work. I switched to Mealie very recently and imported all my recipes with a skript. Took me some time, I hope it's worth it. :)

Mealie has been great for my partner and myself.

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 have been very happy with RecipeSage.

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

https://github.com/evolite/reci

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.

I found it was better at extracting recipes, and had a better meal planning function.

That literally already exists, https://mealie.io/

I liked what I saw so far as well, just wish they would have a better UI for the actual recipe steps. I like to have the relevant ingredients listed with the steps instruction so you're not constantly scrolling

Anything that can host markdown files.

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.

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!

if only there was a software concept that anticipated this and gave you the ability to own and modify your software...

i did this for a good while. Obsidian did great.

i only migrated to mealie because I wanted a better way to share recipes in my household and quickly share them with a shared tablet in the kitchen. Needed to get it out of my personal docs.

I also kinda liked the ability import from url which saves a good 10min transcribing and cleaning up in markdown. Not that i still dont have to cleanup recipes, just it starts in a better place so its quicker.

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 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.

There's a lot of reasons why you might want to develop your own program to solve a need. Usability, privacy concerns, not wanting to vet someone else's code, or just practice are all valid.

I did not invite any such thing. It’s just on my GitHub

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.

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.

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.

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...