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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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
I have used Tandoor for years and its been really nice, its evolved a lot.
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)
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!
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.
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!
Same, mealie has been fine.
So I have to amend ingredients during the parsing, doesn’t take long.
Does everything I need.
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’ve been using tandoor after using mealie for awhile. I find it works very well.
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.
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.
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.
I use the cookbook plugin for Nextcloud but I’m here for suggestions too.
My girlfriend writes them in a word processor, prints them and keeps them organized alphabetically in a binder.
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’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.
