Filter recipes by ingredient (or scan your fridge)

How it works

1. On the Recipes tab, find the row of filter chips below the screen title.
2. Tap Ingredients. The Choose ingredients sheet opens.
3. Add ingredients three ways — pick any combination:
4. • Type — autocomplete suggests names already in your recipe library.
5. • Free-form — anything you type can be added as a chip, even if no recipe uses it (it just won't match anything).
6. • Scan — tap the camera button next to the search field. Snap photos of your fridge, pantry, or single items. 3–6 photos is plenty. Tap Identify; what we recognize drops straight into your chip set.
7. Remove any wrong chips by tapping the × on them.
8. Tap Apply. The recipe grid now shows only recipes that use every ingredient you selected, ranked by how completely your selection covers them.

How matching works

We match in layers, so vocabulary differences don't block useful results:

• Direct — pantry chicken matches recipe chicken thighs.
• Categories — pantry pasta matches recipe spaghetti (or penne, fettuccine, …). Same for cheese ↔ parmesan, fish ↔ salmon, noodle ↔ udon.
• Synonyms — courgette ↔ zucchini, coriander ↔ cilantro, scallion ↔ spring onion, mince ↔ ground beef, icing sugar ↔ powdered sugar, and more dialect pairs.
• Typos — small misspellings (1 character off) match on names ≥ 6 letters: *spagetti* ↔ spaghetti, *mozarella* ↔ mozzarella.

We also skip universal items (salt, oil, water, black pepper, butter) when scoring, so a recipe doesn't lose ranking just because it asks for salt you obviously have.

When nothing matches: Find recipes

If your selection doesn't match any saved recipe yet, the empty state shows a Find recipes button. Tap it to open a sheet of options that take your ingredient list outside the app to discover something new.

• Send to AI — opens the iOS share sheet with a prefilled prompt asking for 3–5 recipe ideas using your ingredients. Pick ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any AI app you have installed.
• Search YouTube — opens the YouTube app (or its mobile site) with a prefilled search for your ingredients.
• Copy & open Instagram / TikTok — copies your ingredient query to the clipboard and opens the app. Tap the search bar inside and paste. (Instagram and TikTok don't accept prefilled deeplinks reliably, so we use the clipboard handoff instead.)
• Search Google / Pinterest — opens a normal web search for recipe ideas. Google's recipe rich-results carousel is good for skimmable options.
• Ask Perplexity — opens Perplexity's AI search with the same query.

Once you've found something you like, copy the URL and share it back into Recipes.im (Safari share sheet → Recipes) to import it into your library.

Privacy: we don't keep the photos

Camera photos go to Google Gemini for ingredient identification only. They're deleted from our storage the moment Gemini responds — nothing about the photos or the items is retained.

Staples credit ranking

Your Staples (salt, oil, soy sauce, etc.) are credited to recipe coverage so the most cookable recipes float to the top of the filtered list. They don't gate the filter — selected ingredients still need to appear in the recipe — but they help break ties and surface dinner-tonight options.

Manage staples from Groceries → ⋯ → Staples.

Tips for better scans

• Mix angles — a wide shot of a shelf plus a close-up of that bunch of herbs both work. Combine them in one scan.
• Open the door fully — back shelves matter.
• Pull crisper / freezer drawers out if you want what's inside identified.
• Use the flash button (top-right of the camera) for dim shelves.
• Tap a thumbnail to remove a blurry photo before identifying.
• The camera is just one input — typing is faster for things you already know you have. Mix and match freely.

Why scan instead of maintaining a pantry list?

Most cooks open the fridge when they're planning a meal — they don't track inventory mentally between sessions. Scan when you're ready to cook, get the matches, done. If you want a typed list of always-available items, that's what Staples is for.