SuperCook - enter a few ingredients, it will tell you what recipes you can make | Hacker News Reader

SuperCook - enter a few ingredients, it will tell you what recipes you can make

supercook.com

27 pointsjkush22 comments

Only have a can of chickpeas and an old lemon? Supercook will tell you to make hummus.

EDIT: After playing with this for a few minutes I decided I don't like how entering ingredients works. Why can't I enter more than one at a time? If I enter "garbanzo lemon", supercook thinks there's some kind of ingredient called "garbanzo lemon".

Also, what would make this really shine is if supercook had the ability to differentiate between a main ingredient and an accent ingredient. If I say all I have is bacon, supercook shouldn't suggest that I make bacon-wrapped scallops...

EDIT again: (I'm getting carried away): supercook should differentiate between main ingredients, accent ingredients and things that most people have. So, if I say that I all I have is bacon, supercook should suggest carbonara as a strong possiblity. Most people have some form of spaghetti/linguini and milk or cream. Anyone up for launching a competitor?

This is, strangely enough, one of the most common ideas people propose to YC. We get several every cycle.

You haven't funded any of them because the idea sucks or because none of the teams were the right fit?

It doesn't seem like a great idea, but that wouldn't disqualify a group if they were open to changing their plan and seemed strong in other respects.

My wife loves the idea and is telling her friends. Hard to say how sticky it is, but anecdotally the first impressions are a good start.

It is also one of the most common ideas proposed at Startup Weekend.

Anyone yet propose an inventory management system that means I don't have to manually enter every trip to Albertson's / HyVee / Piggly Wiggly?

For me, this concept seems sort of at odds with the way I cook and grocery shop. I don't often find myself with a wide array of ingredients that I don't know what to do with, but I do find myself spending too much at the grocery store because I can't easily plan a week's worth of meals using some base set of ingredients. I would love a site that gave me 5 meals based around approximately the same ingredients, told me how much of each to buy, and provided information about how to store leftover ingredients and how long they will last. Of course, I know very little about cooking, so maybe I'm the one who's backwards... just my 2 cents.

I can see this idea applied to drink recipes, though. I often have 3 or 4 half-empty bottles of different types of liquor- it would be great to get a list of 10 different drinks I could make with friends. On second thought, $10 says there's already a Facebook App that does exactly that...

Wow, this sounds awesome... my problem is exactly the same, so I usually just buy frozen food...

www.RecipeMatcher.com has gotten lots of press (techcrunch, lifehacker, bbc, local media) from the same idea.

I've seen one of these websites in the media. It must be a PR hit because there is nothing new about storing recipes on a computer. It was a common vision of the future since the 1970s to have a computer in the kitchen which would retreive recipes. The Commodore VIC20 manual, circa 1982, had an example recipe program.

Also, this something that search engines could do for 10 years. I worked in a Internet cafe and I explained to a old woman that a search engine allowed you to search by content. She reponded "Does that mean if I search for a list of ingredients, I get a recipe?"

This was an absolutely geniusly insightful response. Indeed, I distinctly remember trying this technique with AltaVista at least 10 years ago. Of course, then, the number of webpages was sparse compared to nowadays. So, AltaVista allowed partial matches. Nowadays, you'd only get an exact match.

I see lemons, Supercook sees lemonade...

Pretty cool app.

Passes my test of usefulness: Camel ~ http://www.supercook.com/show_dish.asp?l=http://www.recipeza...

Your Kitchen:

> Tortillas, yogurt

You can make:

> Dog Food

You will also need:

> Dog Food

...? Excellent.

Nice, this is pretty cool! I think this is a pretty unique idea, although I haven't seen much else in this domain. Seems to me like it's genuinely useful also.

Now we just need Internet access standard on all refrigerators and editable microscopic RF ID in all our food.

the your kitchen box can use some text to explain what it's for, especially to new users. better utility of your screen real estate is always good. the pinstripes can stand be toned down just a pinch in opacity, those kind of patterns might be hip but they're an eye sore and an eye strain.

reminds me of http://snacksby.com - which I think is better since it's been around longer and it has more data/recipes -though someone can prove me wrong

being around longer makes it better? you crazy? I tried snacksby and it didnt tell me what extra ingredients i needed to complete a recipe, a deal breaker for me.

RecipeMatcher works the same way as Super Cook, but additionally tells you what you need and you can add these to a grocery list to take to the grocery store.

when you're talking about recipe sites where content is a very important part - yes it does make it better

It's Webtender for food... :)

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