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Food & Recipes
Recipe engines that start from your ingredients rather than your ambitions, plus the food writing worth reading for its own sake.
14 sites
Vast crowd-sourced recipe database where the comments are the actual feature — thousands of people telling you what to change.
- 2 min
Thousands of recipes in metric with honest timings and star ratings left by people who genuinely cooked the thing.
- 2 min
Every recipe costed per serving and per batch, with step photos throughout. Built for people cooking against an actual number.
- 10 min
Recipes laid out as a table of operations instead of prose, so you can see at a glance what combines with what and when.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Matches ingredients by shared aroma compounds, which is roughly how chocolate and blue cheese ended up on the same plate.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Japanese home cooking explained for people without a Japanese pantry, with substitutions that do not quietly ruin the dish.
- 10 min
Baking recipes given by weight, with a hotline-grade troubleshooting blog attached. Where to go when a loaf has gone wrong.
- 10 min
Korean home cooking taught with video for everything, including how to make the kimchi rather than quietly buy a jar of it.
- 10 min
Scan a barcode and get ingredients, additives and a nutrition score from a database anyone can edit. Wikipedia for groceries.
- 2 min
Recipes that explain the science first and then tell you what to do. The food-lab pieces are why it has the reputation it has.
- 1 hr+
Deb Perelman cooking from a famously tiny New York kitchen since 2006, testing everything obsessively and writing about it well.
- 10 min
Tick off what is genuinely in your cupboards and it ranks the recipes you can make right now, with nothing missing.
- 2 min
World atlas of traditional dishes and the specific places that still make them properly. Endless, and reliably makes you hungry.
- 1 hr+
One family documenting Chinese home cooking across two generations, with real detail on ingredients and what you can substitute.
- 10 min
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Food & Recipes: questions
How many sites are in Food & Recipes?
14 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
14 of the 14 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
12 of 14 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 14 are safe for work and 14 work with the sound off.