Make dinner with what you happen to have in your fridge and save on your health!

Using the products that are in your fridge is in line with the zero waste philosophy and saves you money. All you have to do is enter the names of the products from your own fridge into the appropriate search engine and you can get a recipe for a delicious dish.

An American idea in line with the idea of zero waste

The SuperCook website was created by an American start-up and is used to search for dishes by the ingredients that are in the fridge. On the website, there is a menu where you select the names of the products you have after expanding the categories. You can modify them as you like, just click the “type” tab.

The main element of the page are recipes that contain previously selected products, the number of products is also given. On the right side of the page there are product suggestions, which can be used to increase the number of recipes. In the middle section at the top of the page there is a menu where you can select the category of the dish:

• dietary: vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, lactose-free, pescatarian;
• possibility to choose the main ingredient of the dish;
• type of dish;
• type of cuisine.

When you search for recipes on the site, you are prompted for additional ingredients. If you have any of the suggested ingredients, you should click “+” then this ingredient will be automatically added to the list and the recipe proposal will be updated with new products.

You can log in to the site through your Facebook account, so you can create your own cookbook and have easy access to it. The only downside of this search engine is that it is in English.

Polish equivalents of the American food search engine

Several Polish start-ups have created domestic versions of the American recipe search engine by product, these are: Puszka, What We Eat, Smaker and Tanie Gotowanie. On these sites, there is no option to select a dish category. Very often, recipes searched for include other ingredients in addition to the products specified earlier.

Cooklet – food search engine created by Wrocław start-up

A few years ago a Wrocław start-up created a search engine which makes implementing the idea of zero waste easier. Just download the Cooklet application (available only for Android), enter the names of the products that are in your fridge and click “search”. After a while recipes containing the selected products will appear.

Taste Advisor – application which searches for dishes by ingredients

The application Doradca smaku was created by one of Polish start-ups. It works similarly to the American website. In the application you can search for recipes by ingredients, difficulty level or preparation time. After logging in, you can maintain your own cookbook. The application is available for Android and iOS smartphones.

Are you interested in the idea of zero waste and sensible spending planning? Read why it is worth to buy something sometimes at the local market.