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?

  • NihilsineNefas@slrpnk.net
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    3 hours ago

    Heavy duty ring binder and an a3 laminator that can fit the A4 sheets with reinforced pre cut holes for ringbinding, and a short trip to go support your local library by using their printer.

    It’ll require no batteries, no network connection, no troubleshooting and it’s waterproof.

  • Evotech@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    Just vibe code it to your specs. That’s what i did…

    Unpopular on Lemmy maybe but you can just do that now. I had an idea that i could just paste any url into it and it would parse it for my format. I made it self hostable. And my family use it

    https://github.com/evolite/reci

  • burning_beard@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    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!

    • melfie@lemmy.zip
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      9 hours ago

      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.

    • illusionist@lemmy.zip
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      14 hours ago

      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.

        • Teppichbrand@feddit.org
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          4 hours ago

          I used Broccoli for years and really like it’s simplicity. There is Brassica, which should turn Broccoli into a self host experience, but I couldn’t get it to work. I switched to Mealie very recently and imported all my recipes with a skript. Took me some time, I hope it’s worth it. :)

    • sicarius@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      Same, mealie has been fine.
      So I have to amend ingredients during the parsing, doesn’t take long.
      Does everything I need.

  • John Colagioia@lemmy.sdf.org
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    12 hours ago

    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.

    • Otter@lemmy.ca
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      5 hours ago

      Oh wow that’s neat

      Does the ecosystem have something like Mealie and Tandoor, where a nontechnical user can drop in a link to add a recipe?

    • maso@lemmus.org
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      7 hours ago

      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)

  • NinjaTurtle@feddit.online
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    9 hours ago

    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.

    FlavorMate

    and

    Recipya

  • Boba@lemmy.ca
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    14 hours ago

    I’ve been using tandoor after using mealie for awhile. I find it works very well.

    • r0ertel@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      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.

    • BruisedMoose@piefed.social
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      14 hours ago

      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.

      • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        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.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      9 hours ago

      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.

  • EarMaster@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    We also did use bring for a long time and the only one coming near to it’s UX was KitchenOwl for me.